Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Traffic Safety Data: Expanding The Archive, Christopher Monsere, Myenwoo Lim, Chengxin Dai, Xiaowei Wu

TREC Project Briefs

A project expands the capabilities of the Oregon Traffic Safety Data Archive, a tool for helping traffic safety engineers and planners reduce the occurrence of traffic accidents.

Tracking Trucks To Improve Performance, Mecit Cetin, Christopher M. Monsere

TREC Project Briefs

Freight transportation is an important part of Oregon’s economy, and the Oregon Department of Transportation, or ODOT, continually observes the highway system to make sure it is running as smoothly as possible. By monitoring the progress of individual trucks, ODOT can obtain performance metrics such as travel time, travel delays, and origin-destination flows. This information can help identify slow passages or bottlenecks in the highway system. Typical ways of obtaining these metrics, however, may involve purchasing expensive equipment, and may also raise privacy concerns if each truck is required to carry a tracking unit. To avoid these difficulties, Portland State …

Closing The Gap: Developing A Transportation Curriculum For The Oregon Young Scholars Program: Project Summary Report, Carla Gary, Bethany Steiner, Chuck Kalnbach

TREC Project Briefs

This OTREC educational proposal links experiential and transportation education from the University of Oregon with minority youth during the Summer ‘08 two-week session of the Oregon Young Scholar’s Program (OYSP). The grant provides OYSP an opportunity to create a transportation based curriculum during the Summer ‘08 program with the ultimate purpose of increasing minority interest and hopefully eventual employment in transportation related fields. OYSP was developed in 2005 to nurture the potential of marginalized minority students, to prepare these students for higher education, and to increase the awareness of their parents or caregivers about what it will take for these …

Making Choice That Change Lives, Yizhao Yang

TREC Project Briefs

Children’s ability to walk or bike to school depends largely on where they live. Surprisingly, we know very little about how families make choices about where to live in relation to school travel. Existing school travel research has generally focused on the effects of environmental characteristics on the likelihood of children walking or biking to school. This project took a more comprehensive approach by examining the relationships between transportation to school, neighborhood walkability and where families choose to live.

Tracking Missing Drivers, James G. Strathman

TREC Project Briefs

By understanding driver absenteeism, transit providers can learn to manage it, Portland State University research suggests.

Connecting Students And The Community, Lynn Weigand

TREC Project Briefs

Nationwide, few university courses focus specifically on planning and design for pedestrian and bicycle facilities. Before this project, Portland State University had only one three-credit course on the subject, which did not provide adequate time to cover all aspects of bicycle and pedestrian transportation planning, policy, design and practice. Although the course provided a useful introduction to the topic and received excellent student reviews, faculty members saw a need to expand the curriculum to provide an opportunity for practical application of the theory and practice and increase the course’s academic rigor.

This project broadened the course offerings on bicycle and …

Pushing Pedalers: What Drives Bicycling?, Jennifer Dill, John Gliebe

TREC Project Briefs

Using a bicycle instead of a motor vehicle for a portion of regular travel could increase people’s physical activity and help improve the nation’s health. Over 60% of personal trips are five miles or less – a reasonable distance to ride a bike – and nearly 40% are two miles or less. Yet current rates of bicycling for transportation are very low, despite the popularity of recreational cycling. Given the potential of bicycling as a means of everyday travel, why aren’t more people cycling? Very little information has been available on the relationship between different types of infrastructure, such as …

Understanding Delivery Routes In Urban Areas, Miguel Figliozzi

TREC Project Briefs

Supply chains and urban areas cannot thrive without the efficient movement of goods. A recent study indicates that commercial vehicles carrying goods or providing services account for, on average, almost 10 percent of the total vehicle miles traveled (VMT) in medium to large urban areas. A predominant share of these trips takes place within a multi-stop tour. In order to develop a well-organized system for moving freight through urban areas, it is crucial to understand and quantify how routes and distribution decisions affect commercial vehicle flows and VMTs.

In the past, transportation planning models have focused on passenger movements but …

Transporting The Economy, Miguel Figliozzi

TREC Project Briefs

The efficient, timely and reliable movement of freight is a critical responsibility of the transportation system and strategically important to the U.S. economy. Today, Americans purchase billions of dollars worth of goods over the Internet for home delivery, routinely sent using nextday- express packages. They also expect globally produced fresh fruits, flowers and vegetables to be available year-round. These shipments move over an extensive freight transportation system comprising millions of vehicles and thousands of miles of road, track and pipeline infrastructure, all supported by sophisticated information technology and operated, managed and maintained by a large, specialized labor force.

These are …

How Can We Best Manage Freeway Congestion?, Robert Bertini, Christopher Monsere

TREC Project Briefs

Researchers from Portland State University evaluate Oregon’s Implementation of System-Wide Adaptive Ramp Metering (SWARM).