Urban Studies and Planning Commons^™

Bicycle Planning Gis Tool, Joseph Broach

TREC Final Reports

Although currently only about one percent of US trips are done by bicycle, there is significant geographic variation. Differences across communities, along with much higher cycling rates observed in other places around the world, indicates large potential bicycling demand for daily travel in the US. In response, many communities are developing and implementing bicycle master plans that include a range of bikeway infrastructure aimed at making riding more appealing, including separated paths, protected (or separated) bike lanes, striped bike lanes, bicycle boulevards, sharrows, route signage, and intersection crossing aids. Given limited resources, planners and engineers need tools to estimate the …

V2x: Bringing Bikes Into The Mix, Stephen Fickas

TREC Final Reports

This project demonstrates how an inexpensive system (hardware and software) can add new functionality to existing signal controllers, giving bicyclists an efficient way to cross a controlled intersection. The system integrates three components: (1) a Bike Connect box that resides near the signal-controller and is connected to it, (2) an application that runs on a Bike Connect device (currently an iPhone) and requests a green light at the correct approach-distance, and (3) a cloud-based publish/subscribe (pub/sub) component that handles cellular-communication between phone app and box. One stumbling block for the project was a means to obtain reliable GPS data to …

New Probe Data Sources To Measure Cycling Behavior And Safety, Christopher Cherry

PSU Transportation Seminars

Emerging probe data sources from smartphones on on-board devices are able to measure behavior of cyclists with very high resolution. From this, for the first time, we are able to measure relatively precise behavior that allows new insights into exposure, route choice, safety behavior, or technology choice. Probe data, merged with other data sources, can begin to develop a more complete picture of cyclists on-road behavior.

This presentation will offer examples of analyses done to investigate cyclists behavior using app-based and on-board GPS data in the context of individual cyclists behavior (i.e., app users) and behavior of bikeshare users (i.e., …

Revisiting Critical Gis, Jim Thatcher, Luke Bergmann, Britta Ricker, Reuben Rose-Redwood, Daniel O'Sullivan, Trevor J. Barnes, Luke R. Barnesmoore, Laura Beltz Imaoka, Ryan Burns, Jonathan Cinnamon, Craig M. Dalton, Clinton Davis, Stuart Dunn, Francis Harvey, Jin-Kyu Jung, Elen Kersten, Ladona Knigge, Nick Lally, Wen Lin, Dillon Mahmoudi, Michael Martin, Will Payne, Amir Sheikh, Taylor Shelton, Eric Sheppard, Chris W. Strother, Alexander Tarr, Matthew W. Wilson, Jason C. Young

Urban Studies and Planning Faculty Publications and Presentations

The article looks into the critical geographic information science (GIS) in approaching questions both emerging and enduring around the intersection of the spatial and the digital. It offers trading zones for discussion of issues, for building alliances and interrogating tensions, and for a constant dialectical process of critique and renewal. One tension running through critical GIS is the contradictory role it has played in addressing questions of social justice.

Spatial Thinking In Planning Practice: An Introduction To Gis, Yiping Fang, Vivek Shandas, Eugenio Arriaga Cordero

PDXOpen: Open Educational Resources

The goals of this textbook are to help students acquire the technical skills of using software and managing a database, and develop research skills of collecting data, analyzing information and presenting results. We emphasize that the need to investigate the potential and practicality of GIS technologies in a typical planning setting and evaluate its possible applications. GIS may not be necessary (or useful) for every planning application, and we anticipate these readings to provide the necessary foundation for discerning its appropriate use. Therefore, this textbook attempts to facilitate spatial thinking focusing more on open-ended planning questions, which require judgment and …

Assessing Transit Fare Equity In Utah Using A Geographic Information System, Steven Farber, Keith Batholomew, Xiao Li, Antonio Paez, Khandker M. Nurul Habib

TREC Final Reports

The goal of this study is to develop and apply a new method for assessing social equity impacts of distance-based public transit fares. Shifting to a distance-based fare structure can disproportionately favor or penalize different subgroups of a population based on variations in settlement patterns, travel needs, and most importantly, transit use. According to federal law, such disparities must be evaluated by the transit agency, but the area-based techniques identified by the Federal Transit Authority for assessing discrimination fail to account for disparities in distances travelled by transit users. This means that transit agencies currently lack guidelines for assessing the …

Gis Tools For Bicycle Network Analysis And Planning, Mike Lowry

PSU Transportation Seminars

This presentation is a showcase of various GIS tools developed for bicycle network analysis and planning. The showcase includes a tool for assessing community-wide bikeability, a tool for forecasting bicycle volumes based on street topology, and a tool for evaluating different bicycle improvement plans in terms of exposure to danger situations for bicyclists. The tools will be demonstrated with case study data. The presentation will include a review of the Highway Capacity Manual Bicycle Level of Service and a discussion about using bicycle and pedestrian data collected through citizen-volunteer count programs.

Development Of Mobile Mapping Technology To Facilitate Dialogue Between Transportation Agencies And The Public, Ken Kato, Marc Schlossberg, James Meacham

TREC Final Reports

The goal of this grant was to take the technological innovations for deploying survey instruments to mobile phones, developed under a previous OTREC grant, and publish them as globally accessible mobile applications (apps) for use in a variety of transportation planning settings. Under this grant, three applications have been developed for three distinctly different user groups. The first, JLA Involve, was developed and deployed for JLA, a Portland, OR.-based public involvement firm, to support their work with the City of Tualatin, OR., in updating their Transportation System Plan (TSP). The second was developed and deployed for the City of Eugene, …

Transferring Community-Based, Active Transportation Gis Assessment Tools Nationwide, Marc Schlossberg, Nico Larco

TREC Final Reports

“Livability” has recently been declared one of four top priorities by the Secretary of the U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT), and the USDOT, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) have entered into an historic partnership to address the issue. Ultimately, this term refers to the quality of life within one’s community and the ease, comfort, and joy with which one can access places he or she want to go. For most Americans, their neighborhoods have been designed to predominantly accommodate the automobile, and more active forms of transportation such as walking and …

Active Transportation, Neighborhood Planning And Participatory Gis (Geographic Information System), Marc Schlossberg, Nico Larco

TREC Final Reports

Research on walking, the built environment, and healthy communities is a fairly recent area of inquiry, accelerated over the last ten years by an increased interest in the relationship between urban form and public health. A series of macro-oriented logic models and micro-focused data collection tools have been developed over this time in order to understand this healthy communities issue, as well as operationalize the hypotheses around the connection between the built environment and physical activity. None of these efforts, however, attempt to connect their assessment frameworks and tools with a public involvement process. The last ten years has also …

Reflections On Ppgis: A View From The Trenches, Meg Merrick

Institute of Portland Metropolitan Studies Publications

The Community Geography Project is a Ford Foundation-funded program that provides training in Geographic Information System (GIS) technology and asset mapping methods to community-based nonprofit organizations in partnership with K-12 schools. The primary goal of the Project is to empower citizens, and it is hoped that the partnership between community- based groups and schools will be able to sustain technical and analytical expertise at the grassroots level. Although an overview of the lessons we have learned regarding access to hardware, software, and data are provided, this article focuses on questions regarding GIS training as related to citizen empowerment and provides …

Building And Maintaining A Statewide Transportation Framework, Kenneth Dueker, Paul Bender

Center for Urban Studies Publications and Reports

Creating and maintaining up-to-date sharable Geographic Information SystemsTransportation (GIS-T) data is challenging. Many states are working on Transportation Framework efforts to build a complete, consistent, and current transportation data layer in conjunction with the NSDI and Geospatial One-Stop efforts. This paper summarizes an effort that systematically re-examined transportation data sharing issues as part of the development of a Transportation Framework for the State of Washington. Business needs were assessed in terms of spatial and temporal accuracy needs of stakeholders and users of a state-wide Transportation Framework. A conceptual model was developed for a Transportation Framework with emphasis on data flows …

White Paper On Issues And Strategies For Building A State Transportation Framework, Kenneth Dueker, Paul Bender

Center for Urban Studies Publications and Reports

The purpose of this white paper is to systematically re-examine transportation data sharing issues that have been discussed at length, but in a manner to foster final decisions and closure. In some cases, choices among alternatives may require more detailed analysis or pilot studies. The development of this document has benefited from discussion at the Interorganizational Resource Information Coordinating Council (IRICC) Roads Committee, which has led to this consensus document. This sixth and final version serves to draw the process to a close and recommends a twofold approach to the development of a Transportation Framework. It also recommends six pilot …

A Clearinghouse Approach To Sharing Transportation Gis Data, Kenneth Dueker, J. Allison Butler, Paul Bender, Jihong Zhang

Center for Urban Studies Publications and Reports

Updating and maintaining Geographic Information Systems-Transportation data (GIS-T data) is proving difficult. Different database formats needed to support diverse applications leads to inconsistencies and inaccuracies, and duplication in updating. A clearinghouse approach is recommended for the collection and dissemination of new transportation features that can be segmented in different ways to meet the needs of various applications and inserted to update existing GIS-T databases. The clearinghouse approach is advantageous in that it is based on collecting data about new or changed transportation features once and uses the data many times to update existing databases.

A Framework For Gis-T Data Sharing, Kenneth Dueker, J. Allison Butler

Center for Urban Studies Publications and Reports

This paper develops a framework and principles for sharing of transportation data. The framework is intended to clarify roles among participants, data producers, data integrators, and data users. The principles are intended to provide guidance for the participants. Both the framework and the principles are based on an enterprise GIS-T data model that defines relations among transportation data elements. The data model guards against ambiguities and provides a basis for the development of the framework and principles for sharing of transportation data. There are two central principles. First is the uncoupling of graphics, topology, position, and characteristics. Second is the …

Sharing Transportation Gis Data, Kenneth Dueker, Paul Bender, Jihong Zhang

Center for Urban Studies Publications and Reports

Updating and maintaining Geographic Information Systems-Transportation data (GIS-T data) is proving difficult. Different database formats needed to support diverse applications leads to inconsistencies and inaccuracies, and duplication in updating. Dueker and Butler (1998) have proposed an Enterprise GIS-T data model that unbundles the various components of transportation data (network links, cartography, and attributes) to facilitate generating application-specific networks, and which eases updating and maintenance. However, developers of existing application-specific databases that employ integrated data models that bundle the network link with cartography and attributes are reluctant to step back to an intermediate form for managing their data. Consequently, attention is …

A Primer On Gis-T Databases, J. Allison Butler, Kenneth Dueker

Center for Urban Studies Publications and Reports

This paper describes the primary database design approaches that have been and are being used in geographic information system applications for transportation (GIS-T). While not intending to be exhaustive, the paper covers the primary approaches used in federal, state, and local transportation agencies.

Orbit: The Oregon Road Base Information Team Draft Summary Report Ii, Paul Bender, Mark Bosworth, Kenneth Dueker

Center for Urban Studies Publications and Reports

Data sharing among organizations has the potential to 1) decrease long-term costs of obtaining and maintaining data and 2) to facilitate data consistency and accuracy. Consistency includes both completeness and currency, while accuracy includes positional and relative accuracy of transportation features and their attributes, i.e. any data element related to roads or other transportation infrastructure.

ORBIT, the Oregon Road Base Information Team, is an ongoing effort to create an accessible and comprehensive GIS transportation base for use by public and private agencies with shared stewardship through stakeholder partnerships and standards. ORBIT is occurring concurrently with an effort at the national …

Gis-T Data Sharing Issues, Kenneth Dueker, J. Allison Butler

Center for Urban Studies Publications and Reports

The purpose of this paper is to develop a framework and principles for sharing of transportation data. The framework is intended to clarify roles of the various participants and the principles are intended to provide guidance for the participants. Both the framework and the principles are based on a GIS-T data model that defines relations among transportation data elements. (See Dueker and Butler (1998) for a detailed description of the data model. A simplified version is provided in the next section.) The data model guards against ambiguities and provides a basis for the development of the framework and principles for …

Vanport Interpretive Signage Project, Portland State University

Asset Mapping: Community Geography Project

Students participating in two senior capstone courses (spring and summer, 1999) did historical research, the conceptualization, and graphic design of four Vanport interpretive signs that were to be located at the historic site of Vanport at today’s Heron Lakes Golf Course.

A Gis Methodology For Assessing The Growth Impacts Of Highway Improvements, Thomas W. Sanchez, Kenneth Dueker

Center for Urban Studies Publications and Reports

This paper presents a methodology to assess the induced land use effects of state highway improvements on urban development patterns. The methodology is applied to the case study City of Hillsboro, Oregon and illustrates a framework for data management and analysis. A set of temporal land use characteristics and spatial measures are used as predictors of urban development activities resulting from highway accessibility improvements. A multiple regression analysis tests the significance of these variables in predicting rates and locations of urban development. The primary objective of this research is to identify the relationship between capacity increasing highway improvements and changes …

Orbit: The Oregon Road Base Information Team, A Draft Summary Report, Mark Bosworth, Kenneth Dueker, Philip J. Wuest

Center for Urban Studies Publications and Reports

It is clear that transportation organizations across the nation are integrating GIS into operations at many different levels—from day to day use for data display, to full-scale enterprise level integration for operations, inventory management, research and a variety of other purposes. The cost of building and maintaining a current and accurate GIS database can be substantial within any given organization. For some smaller level organizations—small counties, cities or special districts, the cost of gathering data, organizing it and implementing systems within expensive software on an expensive operating platform can be downright discouraging. Also, as more complex data structures are accumulated …

A Proposed Method Of Transportation Feature Identification, J. Allison Butler, Kenneth Dueker

Center for Urban Studies Publications and Reports

Geographic information systems (GIS) are being increasingly deployed by transportation agencies to help them display, review, and utilize data. The primary items of interest are transportation facilities and services, which may take the form of highways, airports, bus routes, and seaports, among others. Using GIS software, transportation facilities are represented as geometric shapes; i.e., points, lines, and areas. However, it is increasingly apparent to GIS users in the field of transportation that a geometry-based approach is not sufficient.

The offered solution is to develop a feature-based GIS approach for transportation. The central requirement of such an approach is to have …

Measuring The Impact Of Light Rail Systems On Single Family Home Values: A Hedonic Approach With Gis Application, Hong Chen, Anthony M. Rufolo, Kenneth Dueker

Center for Urban Studies Publications and Reports

In theory, proximity to a light rail (LRT) may have two different effects on residential property values. On the one hand, accessibility (proximity to the LRT stations) may increase property values. On the other hand, nuisance effects (proximity to the LRT line and stations) may decrease property values. Existing empirical studies are inconclusive, and failure to separate the effects of accessibility from the nuisance effects may explain some of the ambiguity. This paper examines the impact of the light-rail system (MAX) in Portland, Oregon, on single-family home values using distance to rail stations as a proxy for accessibility and distance …

An Analysis Of Bus Ridership Potential To Oregon Health Sciences University Using A Geographic Information System Approach, Richard Lycan, James D. Orrell, Transportation Northwest (Transnow)

Center for Urban Studies Publications and Reports

GIS address-matching and overlay techniques can be used in the analysis of specialized transportation problems. These techniques enhance the spatial resolution of transportation services relative to the locations of potential users of the service. This allows planners to evaluate accessibility issues for identifiable user groups and thus make decisions about the feasibility of adjusting routes or schedules, or providing new services for these users. A case study focused on the commuter base of Oregon Health Sciences University is presented as an example of such an application.