Digital Commons Network^™

Evaluating The Planning And Implementation Of Major Transit Capital Projects In The Portland Region, Joseph Recker

PSU Transportation Seminars

The Federal Transit Administration's (FTA) discretionary New Starts program is the federal government's largest discretionary funding program. From heavy to light rail, from commuter rail to bus rapid transit systems, the FTA's New Starts program has helped to make possible hundreds of new or extended transit fixed guideway systems across the country, including most of TriMet’s light rail extensions and WES commuter rail. Beginning in 2001, FTA has required project sponsors to prepare a Before and After Study report on the effectiveness of planning and implementation of New Starts and Small Starts projects. The studies focus on five transit characteristics …

Evaluating The Level-Of-Service Of Protected Bike Lanes, Nick Foster

PSU Transportation Seminars

Summary: The most recent edition of the Highway Capacity Manual (HCM) contains analysis procedures for measuring the level-of-service (LOS), also referred to as quality of service, provided by an urban roadway to bicyclists. The method uses different design and operating features of the roadway segment (e.g. width, motor vehicle volumes and speeds) to assess an LOS grade of A (best) to F (worst). These procedures are used by planners and engineers to recommend how existing streets could be retrofitted or new streets designed to better serve people on bicycles (and other modes). However, the current HCM does not include methods …

Accessory Dwelling Units In Portland, Oregon: Evaluation And Interpretation Of A Survey Of Adu Owners, Jordan Palmeri

PSU Transportation Seminars

Accessory Dwelling Units (ADUs) are booming in Portland, Oregon. ADUs are small separate living units on single family lots that are often called granny flats or mother-in-law units. Over the last few years, fee waivers from the City of Portland have increased ADU development from 30 units per year to over 200 units. These discreet forms of density can offer a variety of environmental, social, and economic benefits to ADU owners and their communities. Many of these benefits, however, have always been speculated rather than substantiated by data.

In an effort to better understand the real impact or benefit of …

Links Between Public Transportation And Physical Activity, Brian Saelens

PSU Transportation Seminars

This seminar will explore the empirical evidence regarding the links between the use of public transportation and physical activity, with a specific focus on using integrated device and self-report methods to identify travel modes and physical activity.

Trick Or Treat(Ment)? : Impact Of Route-Level Features On Walk And Bike Decisions, Joseph Broach

PSU Transportation Seminars

Trick or Treatment? Impact of Route-Level Features on Decisions to Walk or Bike Summary: Some travel routes attract people walking and cycling, while others may scare them away. What features of street environments are most important, and how do available routes affect decisions to bike or walk on a specific trip?

Research to date has focused on either large-scale areal measures like "miles of bike lane nearby" or else has considered only shortest path routes. Neither method is suited to capturing the impact of targeted route-level policies like neighborhood greenways. This session will present a new technique for measuring bike …

Development Of The Idaho Statewide Travel Demand Model Trip Matrices Using Cell Phone Od Data And Origin Destination Matrix Estimation, Ben Stabler

PSU Transportation Seminars

As part of the initial phase of development for the Idaho Statewide Travel Demand Model, Parsons Brinckerhoff developed a base year auto and truck trip matrix using AirSage cell phone OD data, a statewide network in Cube, traffic counts, and origin-destination matrix estimation (ODME) procedures. To begin, the 4000+ statewide zone system was aggregated into a 700 super zone system for collecting the cell phone OD data. Next, the cell phone data was collected for the month of September 2013 for the following market segments: Average weekday resident HBW, HBO, NHB, and visitor NHB trips. The cell phone trips were …

Examining The Role Of Internal Planning Decisions In Improving Transit Performance And Economic Outcomes, Michal Jaroszynski

PSU Transportation Seminars

Scholars and practitioners continuously seek best practices to increase transit ridership, efficiency, and modal share. The ongoing suburbanization and decentralization of U.S. metropolitan regions brings new challenges for accomplishing these goals. Investigating possible strategies for improving transit outcomes in the existing socioeconomic setting, scholars from the Florida State University have pointed to the role of internal performance factors. In a series of research studies, they have found that improving transit service characteristics, such as frequency, connectivity, regional coverage, intermodal integration, as well as decentralization of network structures, could result in increased transit ridership and productivity. These positive effects could be …

Using "Big Data" For Transportation Analysis: A Case Study Of The La Metro Expo Line, Mohja L. Rhoads

PSU Transportation Seminars

Access to a comprehensive historical archive of real-time, multi-modal multi-agency transportation system data has provided a unique opportunity to demonstrate how “big data” can be used for policy analysis, and to offer new insights for planning scholarship and practice. We illustrate with a case study of a new rail transit line. We use transit, freeway, and arterial data of high spatial and temporal resolution to examine transportation system performance impacts of the Exposition (Expo) light rail line (Phase 1) in Los Angeles. Using a quasi-experimental research design, we explore whether the Expo Line has had a significant impact on transit …

Seminar #294: Transforming Transportation Through Connectivity, Robert L. Bertini

PSU Transportation Seminars

The transportation system is the backbone of the United States' economy, and transportation is an essential part of everyday life for American citizens. It is essential that the transportation system continue to provide accessibility and connectivity to an ever-evolving global economy. A key way to do so is to embrace, develop and implement new technologies. One of the newest and most promising facets of transportation-related technology is in the field of connected mobility. The vision behind connected mobility is of a transportation system where vehicles, travelers, and infrastructure are all wirelessly connected with one another and able to transmit real-time …

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.

Capturing The Ride: Exploring Low-Density Flexible Transit Alternatives In Salem-Keizer, Darwin Moosavi

PSU Transportation Seminars

Current fixed-route transit service provided by Salem-Keizer Transit is inefficient in the low-density neighborhoods of West Salem, South Salem, and Keizer. The lack of sidewalks, non-gridded circuitous streets, and large single-family residential lots all contribute to a lack of ridership. As a result, traditional fixed-route transit service is not cost-effective in these areas. Through a five month planning process, a group of Portland State University graduate students, better known as Paradigm Planning, tackled the task of addressing this problem in each of the three study areas. Paradigm’s planning process explored mode and route options in order to produce a plan …

Pedestrian Safety And Culture Change, Ron Van Houten

PSU Transportation Seminars

This session will describe the process and results of a NHTSA study that showed a change in driver culture of yielding to pedestrians in crosswalks on a citywide basis. The research won the Pat Waller award from the National Academy of Sciences, Transportation Research Board in January of this year. The approach to changing road user behavior focused on an integrated approach that include Enforcement, Engineering, and Educational efforts that were designed to be dovetailed together and that included a social norming component. Additional information will be provided on engineering solutions that can facilitate changes in pedestrian level of service …

Analytical Efficiencies Through The Integration Of Modeling And Simulation Tools, Steve Perone

PSU Transportation Seminars

Linking planning and operations is vital to improving transportation decision making and the overall effectiveness of transportation systems. In this seminar Steve will discuss data and modeling methods supported by the PTV Vision software suite to facilitate integrated planning for operations.

Highlights From The Green Lane: A Comprehensive Evaluation Of Protected Cycling Facilities, Christopher Monsere, Jennifer Dill

PSU Transportation Seminars

Cycling is on the rise across the U.S. and its popularity has grown beyond the usual leaders - Portland, OR, Seattle, WA, Davis, CA, Minneapolis, MN and Boulder, CO. New York City, NY Chicago, IL and Washington, DC are among those cities making significant investments in bike infrastructure in recent years and have realized substantial growth in people taking to the streets on two wheels. This presentation will summarize some results from our comprehensive assessment of the safety, operations, economic impacts, user experience, and perceptions of new protected bikeways in 5 cities U.S. cities (Austin, TX; Chicago, IL; Portland, OR; …

Assessing Impacts Of Time Use On Children's Physical Fitness In Relation To Risk For Obesity And Diabetes, Jessica Guo

PSU Transportation Seminars

Researchers from the transportation, planning and health fields share the common goal of promoting physically active lifestyle. One challenge that researchers often face is the measurement of physical activity, particularly among children. This is because the sporadic nature of children’s physical activity patterns makes it difficult to recall and quantify such activities. Additionally, children’s lower cognitive functioning compared to adults prevents them from accurately recalling their activities. This presentation will describe the design and application of a novel self-report instrument - the Graphs for Recalling Activity Time (GReAT) - for measuring children’s activity time use patterns. The instrument was applied …

Transportation And Road Weather, Rhonda Young

PSU Transportation Seminars

Weather has a tremendous impact on the transportation system and is one of the largest contributors to non-recurring delay and increased crashes. Road weather is the a multidisciplinary area involving transportation engineers and meteorologists who are working to mitigate the negative effects of weather on the operation and maintenance practices of transportation systems. The talk covers the broad types of issues being studied in this field and looks at ways in which technology is playing a large part in the proposed solutions. The issue of weather as a complicating factor in the use of connected and autonomous vehicle technologies is …

Transit Planning Practice In The Age Of Transit-Oriented Development, Ian Carlton

PSU Transportation Seminars

Transit serves as backbone infrastructure for many regional and local visions for sustainable urban development. Also, many modern policies predicate transit funding on the potential for transit-oriented development (TOD) near proposed infrastructure investments. However, little research has examined how TOD considerations have informed transit planning. This presentation discusses the results of recent dissertation research that fills this gap. Through multiple transit project case studies and interviews with nearly 100 transit planning professionals, this research categorized how transit projects across 19 U.S. regions were designed to foster TOD and how transit planning professionals identified TOD opportunities as projects were planned. During …

An Introduction To The Nacto Urban Street Design: Changing The Dna Of City Streets, Peter Koonce

PSU Transportation Seminars

In this seminar Peter will summarize his contributions to the NACTO Urban Street Design Guide, a guidebook focused on a paradigm shift in transportation, pulling away from the traditional bias toward highway designs that do not always meet the complex needs of streets in cities.

Federal Transit Administration's Impact On Public Transportation In The United States, Amy Changchien

PSU Transportation Seminars

The Federal Transit Administration invests in building the capacity and improving the quality of public transportation throughout the United States of America. Under FTA's leadership, public rail, bus, trolley, ferry, and other transit services have reached greater levels of safety, reliability, availability, and accessibility. Come hear the highlights of FTA's impacts and participate in an interactive question/answer session and discussion on career options in public transportation.

10 Tips To Tell Your Story In A Thought-Provoking And Technically Truthful Way, Dave Johnson

PSU Transportation Seminars

How do you explain complex ideas? What do you say when reporters ask you to guess about the future? ODOT spokesperson and public affairs manager Dave Thompson will share tips on how to explain a complex topic to reporters and concerned citizens.

Thompson worked as a broadcast news reporter, producer and anchor for 20 years, including anchoring the weekend news at KPTV from 1992 to 2000. He’s been in public relations another 14 years, leading pre-IPO angel-invested startup branding efforts and providing company and government agency perspective to reporters and citizens. And of course, apologizing for Portland’s congestion and warning …

Measuring Urban Bicyclists' Uptake Of Traffic-Related Pollution, Alexander Y. Bigazzi

PSU Transportation Seminars

Urban bicyclists’ uptake of traffic-related air pollution is still not well quantified, due to a lack of direct measurements of uptake and a lack of analysis of the variation in uptake. This paper describes and establishes the feasibility of a novel method for measuring bicyclists’ uptake of volatile organic compounds (VOC) by sampling breath concentrations. Early results from the data set demonstrate the ability of the proposed method to generate findings for transportation analysis, with statistically significant exposure and uptake differences from bicycling on arterial versus bikeway facilities for several traffic-related VOC. These results provide the first empirical evidence that …

Bike Planning Methods In Oregon Communities, Tara Weidner

PSU Transportation Seminars

In this seminar, Tara Weidner will discuss changes in the works to the State Analysis Procedures Manual (APM) to include three graduated levels of bike planning methods for use in Oregon communities, based on community size, data needs, and planning stage. These include the Bike Level of Traffic Stress (BLTS), a sketch tool used to assess bike network connectivity, the data-heavy Highway Capacity Manual Multi-modal Level of Service (MMLOS) procedures, and a simplified MMLOS developed by the same researchers.

A Recipe For An Online, Geospatial Transit Performance Archive, Jon Makler

PSU Transportation Seminars

Where and when does overcrowding happen on TriMet's bus network? Which routes have the best on-time performance? Portland State University and TriMet have collaborated to make this kind of data available to anybody through Portal, PSU's transportation data archive for the Portland/Vancouver region. This presentation will cover the use of General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS) data for mapping TriMet’s performance data and the development of Portal’s innovative transit application. In the MAP-21 era of performance management, see how tools like Portal can support enhanced agency decision-making as well as community engagement.

Regional Planning, Greenhouse Gases, And Urbanfootprint Open Source Software, Garlynn Woodsong

PSU Transportation Seminars

Since about 2008, the planning world has been experiencing a paradigm shift that began in places like California and Oregon that have adopted legislation requiring the linking of land use and transportation plans to outcomes, specifically to the reduction of greenhouse gases (GHGs). In response to this need, Calthorpe Associates has developed a new planning tool, called UrbanFootprint, on a fully Open Source platform (i.e. Ubuntu Linux, PostGIS, PostGreSQL, etc.). As a powerful and dynamic web and mobile-enabled geo-spatial scenario creation and modeling tool with full co-benefits analysis capacity, UrbanFootprint has great utility for urban planning and research at multiple …

Modeling Injury Outcomes Of Crashes Involving Heavy Vehicles On Texas Highways, Salvador Hernandez

PSU Transportation Seminars

A growing concern related to large-truck crashes has increased in the State of Texas in recent years due to the potential economic impacts and level of injury severity that can be sustained. Yet, studies on large truck involved crashes highlighting the contributing factors leading to injury severity have not been conducted in detail in the State of Texas especially for its interstate system. In this study, we analyze the contributing factors related to injury severity by utilizing Texas crash data based on a discrete outcome based model which accounts for possible unobserved heterogeneity related to human, vehicle and road-environment. We …

Effects Of The Objective And Perceived Built Environment On Bicycling For Transportation, Liang Ma, Jennifer Dill

PSU Transportation Seminars

Effects of the Objective and Perceived Built Environment on Bicycling for Transportation:
This paper investigates the relative effects of the objectively-measured built environment versus stated perceptions of the built-environment on bicycling. Data are from a random phone survey conducted in the Portland, Oregon region. Binary logit and linear regression models, using objective measures, perceived measures, and both sets of measures, were estimated to predict odds of bicycling and frequency of bicycling separately. Results showed that the perceived environment and objective environment had independent effects on bicycling. This suggests that future bicycling research should include both perceived and objective measures of …

Modeling The Impact Of Traffic Conditions On The Variability Of Mid-Block Roadside Pm2.5 On An Urban Arterial, Adam Moore

PSU Transportation Seminars

Modeling Impact of Traffic Conditions on Variability of Midblock Roadside Fine Particulate Matter Concentrations on an Urban Arterial: This paper presents an innovative modeling of fine particulate matter (PM2.5) concentrations as a function of very high resolution meteorological and traffic data. Peak period measurements were taken at a mid-block roadside location on an urban arterial commuter roadway. To capture the impact of dynamic traffic conditions, data were analyzed at 10-second intervals, with substantially higher resolution than typical roadside air quality study designs. Particular attention was paid to changes in traffic conditions, including fleet mix, queuing and vehicle platooning over the …

Identficaton And Characterization Of Pollutant Hot Spots Integratng Probe Vehicle, Traffic And Land Use Data, Katherine Eleanor Bell, Miguel Figliozzi

PSU Transportation Seminars

Identification and Characterization of PM2.5 and VOC Hot Spots on Arterial Corridor by Integrating Probe Vehicle, Traffic, and Land Use Data: The purpose of this study is to explore the use of integrated probe vehicle, traffic and land use data to identify and characterize fine particulate matter (PM2.5) and volatile organic compound (VOC) hot spot locations on urban arterial corridors. An emission hot spot is defined as a fixed location along a corridor in which the mean pollutant concentrations are consistently above the 85th percentile of pollutant concentrations when considering all other locations along the corridor during the same time …

Evaluating Driver And Pedestrian Behaviors At Enhanced Multilane Midblock Pedestrian Crossings, Nick Foster

PSU Transportation Seminars

Case Study in Portland, Oregon This study examines driver and pedestrian behaviors at two enhanced midblock pedestrian crossings in Portland, Oregon. One crossing is on a five-lane arterial with a posted speed of 35/45 miles-per-hour (MPH) and features six rectangular rapid flash beacon (RRFB) assemblies and a narrow median refuge. The other crossing is on a suburban arterial with four travel lanes and a two-way left-turn lane. The crossing is enhanced with four RRFB assemblies and a median island with a “Z” crossing, or Danish offset, designed to encourage pedestrians to face oncoming traffic before completing the second stage of …

Bicycling Is Different: Built Environment Relationships To Nonwork Travel, Christopher D. Muhs

PSU Transportation Seminars

There is growing investment in infrastructure to support non-motorized travel modes in the United States, in particular for bicycling. However, there remains a dearth of knowledge on the relationships between built environments and bicycling for non-work transportation. This issue is exacerbated by researchers and practitioners continuing to combine walking and bicycling into the category “non-motorized modes,” despite the two having many differences. This paper addresses these shortcomings through a segmented analysis of mode choice and mode share for walking, bicycling, and automobile travel. The data used are from a 2011 establishment intercept survey in the Portland, Oregon region and are …