Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

The Safe System Approach: Considerations For Developing A Multi-Layered System, Offer Grembek

PSU Transportation Seminars

While the overarching objective of the transportation system is to provide mobility, it should be developed and operated under the framework of a safe system with the aspirational goal to establish a system on which no road user can be severely or fatally injured. To accomplish such a safe system, it is necessary to effectively harness all the core protective opportunities provided by the system. This includes the street design and operations, user behavior, vehicle design, protection systems, and EMS. The common thread across these layers is speed. This is directly driven by the quadratic relationship between velocity and kinetic …

A Pathway Linking Smart Growth Neighborhoods To Home-Based Pedestrian Travel, Steven R. Gehrke, Kelly J. Clifton

PSU Transportation Seminars

Land development patterns, urban design, and transportation system features are inextricably linked to pedestrian travel. Accordingly, planners and decision-makers have turned to integrated transportation-land use policies and investments to address the pressing need for improvements in physical activity levels via the creation of walkable communities. However, policy questions regarding the identification of smart growth indicators and their connection to walking remain unanswered, because most studies of the built environment determinants of pedestrian travel: (a) represent the built environment with isolated metrics instead of as a multidimensional construct and (b) model this transportation-land use relationship outside of a multidirectional analytic framework. …

Impact Of Last Mile Parking Availability On Commercial Vehicle Costs And Operations, Miguel Figliozzi, Chawalit Tipagornwong

Civil and Environmental Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

This research analyses how parking availability levels affect commercial vehicle parking costs and operations in congested urban areas. Unlike passenger vehicles, parking availability has an impact on route characteristics and commercial vehicle fleet sizes. Hence, commercial vehicles parking costs cannot be captured solely by estimating delays and/or the cost of parking fines. This research combines logistics, queuing, and optimization models to study the impact of last mile parking availability on commercial vehicle costs and operations. Scenarios are built to study the impact of parking availability on typical less-than-truckload (LTL) and courier service costs. Results indicate that parking availability levels do …

Peak Pedaling: Has Portland Bicycling Reached The Top Of The Logistic Curve?, Robert Mccullough

PSU Transportation Seminars

The recent City Club report on bicycling provided an opportunity to collect and analyze a number of data sets including the new Hawthorne Bridge data. One question is where Portland bicycling on the logistic curve -- a common tool for judging the maturity of a developing product or activity. Logistic curves are used for marketing, for epidemiology, and even for visits to Indian owned casinos. The preliminary evidence is that we are reaching the horizontal area of the curve. Additional evidence Our further research into future policies indicates a shift to bicycle boulevards in order to attract more risk averse …

The Myth Of Oregon's "Freight Dependent" Economy, Joe Cortright

PSU Transportation Seminars

Although it is widely claimed that Oregon's economy is dependent on freight movement, economic activity in Oregon has decoupled from physical goods movement. Truck traffic per unit of gross state product has fallen, and even the loss of regular container service to Portland has had no measurable effect on the region's economy.

Oregon's economy has shifted away from freight intensive industries and now depends on knowledge driven sectors (e.g. electronics, software, athletic apparel and footwear professional services) that move very small amounts of freight. In addition freight costs for most output is so small—and declining—that it is a negligible factor …

Rerouting Mode Choice Models: ​H​Ow Including Realistic Route Options Can Help Us Understand Decisions To Walk Or Bike, Joseph Broach

PSU Transportation Seminars

For a number of reasons—congestion, public health, greenhouse gas emissions, energy use, demographic shifts, and community livability to name a few—the importance of walking and bicycling as transportation options will only continue to increase. Currently, policy interest and infrastructure funding for nonmotorized modes far outstrip our ability to successfully model bike and walk travel. In the past five years, we have learned a lot about where people prefer to bike and walk, but what can that tell us about whether people will bike or walk in the first place? The research presented here is designed to start bridging the gap …

Disseminating The Sustainable City Year Program (Scyp) Education Model, Nico Larco, Marc Schlossberg

TREC Final Reports

The University of Oregon has developed a catalytic learning model that simultaneously meets the needs of both the next generation’s transportation workforce and cities looking for innovative and catalytic ways to advance a new era of transportation goals. Named the Sustainable City Year Program (SCYP), the model links local community priorities (as expressed through local plans and city council goals) with courses from a range of disciplines at a nearby university. The UO program engages 500+ multidisciplinary students annually in providing 60,000+ hours of work to city-identified projects using the existing administrative systems of both universities and local communities.

This …

Cycling By Choice Or Necessity? Exploring The Gender Gap In Bicycling In Oregon, Patrick Allen Singleton

PSU Transportation Seminars

In Oregon, as elsewhere in the US, a greater percentage of men bicycle than women. This study illuminates the gender gap in bicycling by exploring differences in bicycling among women and men in Oregon. A one-day statewide travel survey of over 30,000 adults was examined. Comparisons between individual, household, and trip and activity characteristics for people grouped by gender (women vs. men) and bicycling (made a bicycle trip or normally commuted by bicycle vs. did not bicycle) were assessed using chi-squared tests of independence. Many significant differences were found. In particular, women living alone, not working, without a high-school degree, …

An Activity-Related Land Use Mix Construct And Its Connection To Pedestrian Travel, Steven R. Gehrke

PSU Transportation Seminars

Land use mix is a central smart growth principle connected to active transportation. This presentation describes the indicators of local land use mixing and their association with pedestrian travel in Oregon’s Willamette River Valley. It argues that land use mix is a multidimensional construct reflected by the complementarity, composition, and configuration of land use types, which is positively linked to walk mode choice and home-based trip frequency. Findings from this study underline the conceptual and empirical benefit of analyzing this transportation-land use interaction with a landscape pattern measure of activity-related composition and spatial configuration.

The presentation for this seminar was …

The Importance Of Housing, Accessibility, And Transport Characteristic Ratings On Stated Neighborhood Preference, Kristina Marie Currans

PSU Transportation Seminars

Travel demand models commonly lack the ability to understand how changing residential preferences influence future housing, land use, and transportation policies. As communities struggle to address social challenges related to increased economic uncertainty, transportation and land use planning have become increasingly centered on assumptions concerning the market for residential environments and travel choices. In response, an added importance has been placed on the development of toolkits capable of providing robust and flexible models to aid in understanding how differing assumptions contribute to a set of planning scenarios and how future residential location decisions may be made.

In this study, we …

Utilizing High Resolution Bus Gps Data To Visualize And Identify Congestion Hot-Spots In Urban, Nicholas B. Stoll, Travis B. Glick, Miguel Figliozzi

Civil and Environmental Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

Congestion and travel delay on urban roadways can influence the roadways’ operating costs and service attractiveness. This research used high-resolution bus data to examine sources of delay on urban arterials. A set of tools was created to help visualize trends in bus behavior and movement; these tools allowed larger traffic trends to be visualized along urban corridors and streets. With buses as probes and examining aggregated bus behavior, contoured speed plots were used to understand the behavior of roadways outside the zone of influence of bus stops. Speed plots were used to discover trends and travel patterns with only a …

Crowdsourcing The Collection Of Transportation Behavior Data, Christopher Bone, Seth Kenbeek, Ken Kato, Jacob Bartruff

TREC Final Reports

Understanding the travel behaviors of individuals who use public transit is essential for enhancing the performance, sustainability and efficiency of public transportation. Contemporary methods for collecting data on transportation behavior are focused on manual or automated procedures for counting the number of individual passengers entering or exiting transit vehicles. While such methods provide useful data for understanding transit demand throughout a network, they ignore the important details of how passengers travel to and within a network as well as their personal experiences during their commute, all of which can enrich the ability of transit agencies to provide sustainable transportation. To …

Dash: The Portland Region's Next-Generation Activity-Based Model, Richard Walker

PSU Transportation Seminars

DASH is the next generation activity based model being developed by the Metro Research Center. Upon completion, it will be one of the most advanced in the nation. This model will be used extensively in estimating the activity and travel response of individuals to policies and infrastructure investments. Compared to past models, it will include enhanced consideration of the socio-economic roles of individuals, discrete temporal dynamics, and intra-household dependencies.

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 …

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.

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.

Transportation Analysis Informing Transportation Planning And Policy At Odot, Alexander Bettinardi

PSU Transportation Seminars

The Transportation Planning Analysis Unit (TPAU) at ODOT helps to provide information to a large variety of transportation plans, projects, and policy questions. This allows customers to make better informed decisions and to maximize limited resources. In order to fill this role TPAU and the Oregon modeling community have a fairly large "toolbox" of models and analysis tools and procedures. This transportation seminar will give an overview of the role and services that TPAU provides and the different tools and processes used to fulfill that role.

Developing An Oregon Access Management Best Practices Manual, Karen Dixon, Xiang Yi, Lacy Brown, Robert Layton

TREC Final Reports

This report reviews an Oregon research effort to develop an Oregon Access Management Best Practices Manual. In particular, this research effort develops a resource to help transportation professionals quantify safety and operational effects of various access management strategies, provide measurable criteria to evaluate these access management techniques, and identify data collection practices necessary to successfully perform these assessments. It is the expectation that this manual can be used by engineers, decision makers, and educators to help the transportation community better understand the appropriate application of access management strategies and how to quantify benefits of the various access management options. This …

Calibrating The Hsm Predictive Methods For Oregon Highways, Karen Dixon, Christopher M. Monsere, Fei Xie, Kristie Gladhill

TREC Final Reports

The Highway Safety Manual (HSM) was published by the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO) in the spring of 2010. Volume 2 (Part C) of the HSM includes safety predictive methods which can be used to quantitatively estimate the safety of a transportation facility. The resulting information can then be used to provide guidelines to identify opportunities to improve transportation safety. The safety performance functions (SPFs) included with this content, however, were developed for several states other than Oregon. Because there are differences in crash reporting procedures, driver population, animal populations, and weather conditions (to name a …

Overlooked Density: Re-Thinking Transportation Options In Suburbia, Phase Ii, Nico Larco

TREC Final Reports

Comprising over 9 million units in this country, suburban multifamily housing is a widespread and overlooked example of density located within walking distance to commercial development in suburbia. This report focuses on resident demographics, attitudes, and perceptions as they relate to mode choice in 14 suburban multifamily sites in Eugene, Oregon. Through site analysis and resident surveys, our study shows that site design and connectivity is a significant predictor of resident mode choice. Residents of more-connected developments walk and bike to their local commercial area for more than 40% of their trips, nearly twice the rate of residents of less-connected …

Exploratory Methods For Truck Re-Identification In A Statewide Network Based On Axle Weight And Axle Spacing Data To Enhance Freight Metrics, Christopher M. Monsere, Mecit Cetin, Andrew Nichols

TREC Final Reports

The main objective of this project is to evaluate the feasibility of re-identifying commercial trucks based on vehicle-attribute data automatically collected by sensors installed at traffic data collection stations. To support this work, archived data from weigh-in-motion (WIM) stations in Oregon are used for developing, calibrating, and testing vehicle re-identification algorithms. The vehicle re-identification methods developed in this research consist of two main stages. In the first stage, each vehicle from the downstream station is matched to the most “similar” upstream vehicle by using a Bayesian model. In the second stage, several methods are introduced to screen out those vehicles …

Oregon Freight Data Mart, Miguel A. Figliozzi, Robert Bertini

TREC Final Reports

Increasing freight volumes are adding pressure to the Oregon transportation system. Monitoring the performance of the transportation system and freight movements is essential to guarantee the economic development of the region, the efficient allocation of resources, and the quality of life of all Oregonians. Freight data is expensive to collect and maintain. Confidentiality issues, the size of the datasets, and the complexity of freight movements are barriers that preclude the easy access and analysis of freight data. Data accessibility and integration is essential to ensure successful freight planning and consistency across regional partner agencies and planning organizations. In relation to …

Financing Mechanisms For Capacity Improvements At Interchanges, James G. Strathman, Elizabeth Simmons

TREC Final Reports

This report examines the use of alternative local financing mechanisms for interchange and interchange area infrastructure improvements. The financing mechanisms covered include transportation impact fees, tax increment financing, value capture financing, local improvement districts, transportation corporations, state infrastructure banks, local option transportation taxes, fair share mitigation, and transportation concurrency. The financing alternatives are assessed in the context of Interchange Area Management Plans, which are required by the Oregon Transportation Commission, as well as in the context of the Oregon Department of Transportation’s responsibilities under the state’s Transportation Planning Rule.

Overlooked Density: Re-Thinking Transportation Options In Suburbia, Nico Larco

TREC Final Reports

Suburban multifamily housing is an often overlooked housing typology that is the fasted growing housing market in the country and holds strong potential for achieving smart growth goals in suburbia. This housing type is ubiquitous throughout all regions in the nation, is a widespread example of density in suburbia, and is typically located next to commercial uses. The proximity between suburban multifamily housing and commercial uses creates the potential for nodes of concentrated activity, mixed use, and the possibility of substantial non-auto transport in suburbia. While this potential exists, the design of this housing type often follows an enclaved pattern …

A Brief Portrait Of Multimodal Transportation Planning In Oregon And The Path To Achieving It, 1890-1974, Carl Abbott, Sam Lowry

Urban Studies and Planning Faculty Publications and Presentations

This project was designed to outline transportation chapters of a planned written history of Oregon land use planning, written in ways that would make the transportation planning profession relevant to a popular audience. The writing would focus on stories from the profession, and on historical facts and events in Oregon transportation planning history that would surprise or enlighten popular reading audiences. Technology transfer would occur through publication of one or more written pieces of work.

The result is a topical and historical tale entitled "A Brief Portrait of Multimodal Transportation Planning in Oregon and the Path to Achieving It, 1890-1974." …

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 …

Distribution Logistics Course, Miguel A. Figliozzi

TREC Final Reports

Commercial vehicle movements associated with the delivery of goods and services are currently experiencing a number of challenging problems. Carriers and fleet operations face congestion, a growing number of tolls, increasing service level demands, and in some cases opposition due to the externalities caused by freight traffic in urban areas. This course provided a greater understanding of the complex issues surrounding urban freight and logistics and it was relevant to graduate students in civil engineering, urban planning, and business programs.

Least-Cost Transportation Planning In Odot: Feasability Report, Anthony M. Rufolo, Lois M. Bronfman, James G. Strathman

Center for Urban Studies Publications and Reports

Least Cost Planning or Integrated Resource Planning is used in the electric utility industry to broaden the scope of choices to meet service requirements. This typically includes methods to reduce the demand for electricity as well as the more traditional electric generation options. Techniques have been developed to compare the cost of electricity generation with the cost of meeting service requirements by reducing electricity usage. In addition to cost considerations, utilities typically take account of uncertainty associated with forecasts and a variety of other considerations in specifying their least cost plan.

The Motivations Of Exurban Commuters Within A Region, Judy Seppanen Davis

Center for Urban Studies Publications and Reports

This case study of the Portland, Oregon, region analyzes and compares the emerging commuting patterns of exurban, small town, and suburban households. The analysis is based on a mail survey of 1408 households who purchased homes in 1987. By examining the types of households moving to exurbia, their reasons for moving, and the impacts of their moves on journey-to-work a picture is drawn of the forces shaping exurban development and the implications of this type of development for transportation planning and policy.