Engineering Commons^™

Advisory Bike Lanes In North America, Michael Williams

PSU Transportation Seminars

Despite being used successfully for decades in Europe, Advisory Bike Lanes are an emerging facility type in North America and can be an effective tool for communities wishing to provide bicycle lanes on streets that are otherwise too narrow to accommodate them. This talk will introduce the concept and operation of advisory bike lanes and look at some lessons learned from the early installations of this facility in the U.S. and Canada.

Getting To Know The Data: Understanding Assumptions, Sensitivities, Uncertainty, And Being "Conservative" While Using Ite's Trip Generation Data In The Land Development Process, Kristina Marie Currans

PSU Transportation Seminars

Many agencies rely on trip generation estimates to evaluate the transportation impacts of land development in urban and suburban areas alike. Over the past decade, substantial attention has been paid to one national set of guidelines—the Institute of Transportation Engineers (ITE) Trip Generation Handbook (2014) and corresponding Manual (2012)—focusing in particular to improve the use of these data and supplementary methods for urban contexts.

The purpose of this study is to explore the typical data provided in the Handbook, within the context of these new improved state-of-the-art methods. As ITE’s describes, “an example of poor professional judgment is to rely …

Addressing Data Challenges For Bicycle Crash Analysis, Eleni Christofa

PSU Transportation Seminars

Although an increasing number of separated bicycle facilities have been appearing across the US over the last few years, the majority of bicyclists are still traveling on roadways shared with motorized vehicles.

As a result, bicycles are essentially double exposed to safety risk, due to their interactions with both motorized vehicles and other bicycles. In addition to this double exposure, data challenges–such as a lack of continuous counts and bicycle crash data—complicate the assessment of bicycle safety further.

This research presents a bicycle crash analysis framework for estimating bicycle crash rates accounting for both bicycle and motorized vehicle exposure as …

Land Use Mix And Pedestrian Travel Behavior: Advancements In Conceptualization And Measurement, Steven Robert Gehrke

Dissertations and Theses

Smart growth policies have often emphasized the importance of land use mix as an intervention beholding of lasting urban planning and public health benefits. Past transportation-land use research has identified potential efficiency gains achieved by mixed-use neighborhoods and the subsequent shortening of trip lengths; whereas, public health research has accredited increased land use mixing as an effective policy for facilitating greater physical activity. However, despite the celebrated transportation, land use, and health benefits of improved land use mixing and the extent of topical attention, no consensus has been reached regarding the conceptualization and measurement of this key smart growth principle …

Webinar: Integrating Explicit And Implicit Methods In Travel Behavior Research: A Study Of Driver Attitudes And Bias, Tara Goddard

TREC Webinar Series

Car crashes are still a leading cause of death in the United States, with vulnerable road users like bicyclists and pedestrians being injured or killed at rates that outpace their mode share.

Planners, engineers, and advocates are increasingly adopting Vision Zero and Tactical Urbanism approaches and trying to better understand the underlying causes of dangerous roadway interactions. However, existing research into crash causation has focused on instrumental factors (e.g. intersection type, vehicle speed) while little research has probed the role of attitudes or socio-cognitive mechanisms in interactions between roadway users.

Social psychology suggests that attitudes and social cognitions can play …