Transportation Commons^™

Webinar: Building Capacity In Gateway Communities Through The Gnar Academy, Jordan Katcher, Elizabeth Sodja

TREC Webinar Series

Small towns and cities near national parks, public lands, and other natural amenities across the West are experiencing rapid growth and increased tourism. As we have documented via our prior NITC-funded research, this has created a range of big city challenges for these “gateway communities,” particularly in the form of interconnected transportation, land use, and housing issues. Seeking to help gateway communities better prepare for and respond to their transportation and planning challenges, the Gateway and Natural Amenity Region (GNAR) Initiative team translated the findings from our research on planning and development challenges in gateway communities into an online learning …

Webinar: Marginalized Populations’ Access To Transit, Marisa Zapata

TREC Webinar Series

How do people with intersecting marginal identities experience social exclusion as they travel via mass transit? To answer this question, PSU researchers employed a qualitative method less common in transportation studies: photovoice. Researchers asked participants to describe the factors that shape their travel behavior and provide photographic data of their experiences. Then, they conducted in-depth video interviews to gain further depth and clarity regarding the visual data. The findings from this study can help transit system designers better understand how experiences of harassment and discrimination across the entire users’ journey affects the riders’ decisions about whether and when to take …

Webinar: Assessing Cool Corridor Heat Resilience Strategies For Human-Scale Transportation, Ladd Keith, Kristina Currans

TREC Webinar Series

Heat is the number one weather-related killer in the United States, and the implications of heat impacts range from individual transportation users, to emergency management services, and entire transportation networks and systems. In this presentation, we'll cover key concepts for urban planning and heat resilience, including heat mitigation and management strategies. Additionally, we will discuss the original NITC-sponsored data collection evaluating one such cool corridor strategy--PlusTI cool pavement rejuvenator--and the associated challenges of researching impacts of strategies on human-comfort in natural and built environments.

Webinar: Understanding Connections Between Mobility, Transportation, And Quality Of Life In Refugee Communities In Tucson, Arizona, Orhon Myadar

TREC Webinar Series

While resettlement typically allows millions of forcibly displaced persons to escape from unpredictable and often dangerous conditions of displacement, most refugees experience an array of challenges after resettlement as they integrate into new communities. Many of these challenges are related to their ability to get to and from places that are important to their sense of autonomy and well-being, including sites of education, employment, worship and medical care. In this talk, Dr. Myadar will present some of the key findings of her collaborative research project on mobility-related challenges faced by refugees in Tucson, Arizona after their resettlement. This webinar is …

Webinar: Transportation Resources And Behaviors Among Older Immigrants And Migrants, Rebecca Mauldin, Stephen Mattingly, Rupal Parekh

TREC Webinar Series

This presentation reports findings from a cross-sectional survey of older Vietnamese immigrants in the Dallas-Fort Worth, TX metroplex and members of a Hispanic senior center in Hartford, CT. In addition to providing a description of transportation resources and behavior, we present a method for assessing the geospatial "regular activity spaces" of older adults based on the frequency and locations of routine activities. We also present options for assessing the geospatial burden of providing rides to older adults using "ride-provision activity spaces," which entails the frequency and locations of activities for which rides are given. Finally, we discuss the association of …

Webinar: Collecting And Analyzing Pedestrian Behaviors At Intersections Using Lidar Tracking Technologies, Taylor Li, Sirisha Kothuri

TREC Webinar Series

The aim of this research is to investigate pedestrian behavior at signalized intersections using state-of-the-art LIDAR sensing technologies and to use this data, along with vehicular data, to develop a more effective multimodal signal control system. In the presentation, the presenters will describe a novel method of collecting pedestrian crossing behaviors at signalized intersection, discuss the findings and implications of data analytics, and introduce a novel approach to dynamic flashing yellow arrow mechanisms to reduce the conflict between left turn vehicles and crossing pedestrians.

Webinar: Planning And Development In Gateway Communities, Post Covid, Philip Stoker

TREC Webinar Series

Gateway communities are the small towns outside of national parks, forests, scenic rivers, and ski resorts. This presentation will highlight the housing, transportation, and development challenges that these communities faced in the aftermath of the COVID 19 pandemic. Our study captured the perspectives of over 200 communities using a questionnaire and case study approach. We present these results and highlight the innovative strategies that these communities are using to address their housing and transportation challenges.

Webinar: Improving Recreational Trail Accessibility With A Volcanic Ash Treatment, Charles Riley, Ashton Greer

TREC Webinar Series

Recreational trails serve as valuable transportation corridors and support the health of users. Wheelchair accessibility of recreational trails depends on a variety of conditions, including slope, cross-slope, and surface characteristics. This project focused on improving the firmness and stability of a 0.2-mile section of trail that was otherwise accessible. The existing trail surface consisted of loose ¼” off-specification aggregate on native soil. A volcanic ash-Portland cement binder, studied in prior research, was batched, distributed, mixed, wetted, and compacted on site to improve the firmness and stability of the surface resulting in a smoother surface with less rolling resistance. The webinar …

Webinar: Individual Wayfinding In The Context Of Visual Impairment, Blindness, And Deafblindness, Amy Parker, Martin Swobodzinski

TREC Webinar Series

In this presentation we will highlight our past research on human indoor-outdoor wayfinding on an urban college campus. Our work is aimed at facilitating independent travel for people with blindness and low vision. Our research was funded by two successive grants from the National Institute for Transportation and Communities/US Department of Transportation. One of the central research questions sought to capture wayfinding preferences, information needs, and lived experiences of blind and low-vision pedestrian travelers. The projects afforded close collaboration with external partners, and foremost the American Printing House for the Blind. Our focus in the presentation will be on the …

Webinar: Community Transportation Academies: Rethinking Effective Community Engagement Around Transportation Decision-Making, Nathan Mcneil, Keith Bartholomew, Andrea Olson, Laura Hanson, Thuy Tu

TREC Webinar Series

This webinar will introduce you to the concept of the Community Transportation Academy (CTA), a model which has been operating in Portland for over 30 years in the form of the Portland Traffic and Transportation (PTT) class. Now catching on in other cities, the project team recently implemented the Wasatch Transportation Academy (WTA) in Salt Lake City. The presenters also include key stakeholders (and guest lecturers) in the WTA, and the PTT instructor. The presentation will include discussions about why CTAs can be good for both community members and transportation agencies/practitioners, and how you can bring a CTA to your …

Webinar: Scooting To Healthy And Safe Mode Choices, Kristina M. Currans, Nicole Iroz-Elardo, John Macarthur

TREC Webinar Series

Shared electric scooters (e-scooters) are fast becoming a mobility option in cities across the United States. This new micromobility mode has the potential to replace car usage for certain trips, which stands to have a positive impact on public health and sustainability goals. However, many aspects of this emerging mode are not well understood.This webinar explores the findings of three NITC studies examining transportation mode choices, safety, and public health outcomes of electric scooters.

Webinar: The Impact Of Decentralizing Homeless Services On Transportation And Mobility, Sarah Canham, Ivis Garcia, Shannon Jones, Jeff Rose

TREC Webinar Series

With findings from a mixed methods research study, this interdisciplinary webinar will present results from a historical public document analysis, a GIS spatial analyses, client surveys and interviews, and interviews with professionals and service providers. In 2019, the delivery of homeless sheltering services in Salt Lake County transitioned from a centralized emergency shelter to a scattered site model with multiple resource center locations, operated by multiple service providers. To understand the degree to which “proximity” to public transportation and other needed services was achieved, this study examined: how the decentralization of homeless services influenced transportation demand and mobility patterns for …

Webinar: Exploring Data Fusion Techniques To Derive Bicycle Volumes On A Network, Sirisha Kothuri, Joe Broach, Kate Hyun

TREC Webinar Series

Planners and decision makers have increasingly voiced a need for network-wide estimates of bicycling activity. Such volume estimates have for decades informed motorized planning and analysis but have only recently become feasible for non-motorized travel modes. Recently, new sources of bicycling activity data have emerged such as Strava, Streetlight, and GPS-enabled bike share systems. These emerging data sources have potential advantages as a complement to traditional count data, and have even been proposed as replacements for such data, since they are collected continuously and for larger portions of local bicycle networks. However, the representativeness of these new data sources has …

Webinar: Is Transit-Oriented Development Affordable For Low And Moderate Income Households?, Reid Ewing, Justyna Kaniewska

TREC Webinar Series

Transportation and land use planning, as a field, is shifting away from segregated uses connected by highways and streets to more compact, mixed-use developments connected by high-quality transit. This new paradigm has brought special attention to transit-oriented developments (TOD), which are sometimes touted as being among the most affordable, efficient places to live. But how affordable are they, and who has the power to effect change? This study examines housing costs for households living in TODs.

Webinar: Mobility, Accessibility, And Resiliency Of Community-Dwelling Older Adults, Kate Hyun, Kathy Lee, Caroline Krejci

TREC Webinar Series

Mobility disparities among older adults affect their ability to travel and access services. This project seeks to understand challenges, barriers, and gaps that older adults experience and to develop forms of assistance or educational strategies to fill the varying mobility gaps and meet the mobility needs. This study characterizes older adults’ use of existing and potential transportation options, including conventional transit, paratransit, and ride-hailing systems, based on surveys and interviews collected from community-dwelling older adults in Dallas, Texas. Through the interview during the pandemic, the research team found that perceptual and knowledge barriers appear to be reduced among older adults …

Webinar: Radar Point Cloud Segmentation Using Gmm In Traffic Monitoring, Siyang Cao

TREC Webinar Series

Intelligent transportation systems (ITS) change our communities by improving the safety and convenience of people’s daily mobility. The system relies on multimodal traffic monitoring, that needs to provide reliable, efficient and detailed traffic information for traffic safety and planning. How to reliably and intelligently monitor intersection traffic with multimodal information is one of the most critical topics in intelligent transportation research. In multimodal traffic monitoring, we gather traffic statistics for distinct transportation modes, such as pedestrians, cars and bicycles, in order to analyze and improve people’s daily mobility in terms of safety and convenience. In this study, we use a …

Webinar: The Impact Of Transportation-Related Barriers On Self-Perceived Physical Health Among Adults In The Us, Philip Baiden, Godfred Boateng

TREC Webinar Series

Drawing from the framework of social determinants of health, the objective of this study is to investigate the cross-sectional association between transportation-related factors and self-perceived physical health among adults in the U.S.

Data for this study were derived from the 2017 National Household Travel Survey. An analytic sample of 71,235 respondents aged 18 and 64 years was analyzed using binary logistic regression. Of the 71,235 respondents examined, 8.9% perceived their physical health to be poor. About 36% of the respondents had fewer vehicles per individuals in the household.

Controlling for the effects of other factors, respondents who had fewer vehicles …

Webinar: Data-Driven Mobility Strategies For Multimodal Transportation, Yao-Jan Wu, Abolfazl Karimpour, Xianfeng Terry Yang

TREC Webinar Series

Multimodal transportation systems (e.g., walking, cycling, automobile, public transit, etc.) are effective in increasing people’s travel flexibility, reducing congestion, and improving safety. Therefore, it is critical to understand what factors would affect people’s mode choices. With advanced technology, such as connected and automated vehicles, cities are now facing a transition from traditional urban planning to developing smart cities. To support multimodal transportation management, this study serves as a bridge to connect speed management strategies of conventional corridors to connected vehicle corridors.

The study consists of three main components. In the first component, the impact of speed management strategies along traditional …

Webinar: The Impact Of Ride Hail Services On The Accessibility Of Nonprofit Services, Dyana Mason

TREC Webinar Series

Nonprofit organizations are responsible for providing human services across the United States, often in partnership with government agencies. In this work, they address some of the most pressing social issues – including homelessness, poverty, health care and education. While many of these organizations consider location and accessibility crucial to supporting their clients – often locating services near bus or train stops, for example – little is known about the impact of new technologies, including ride hail services (also called Transportation Network Companies, or TNCs) like Lyft and Uber, on nonprofit accessibility. Do these services help fill gaps in client needs? …

Webinar: Electric Bus Deployment: Cost And Environmental Equity, Cathy Liu

TREC Webinar Series

This presentation introduces an innovative spatiotemporal analytical framework and web-based visualization platform developed by researchers at the University of Utah to assist transit agencies in identifying optimal deployment strategies for a battery-electric bus (BEB) system by using a combination of mathematical programming methods, GIS-based analysis, and multi-objective optimization techniques. The framework allows transit agencies to optimally phase in BEB infrastructure and deploy the BEB system in a way that can minimize the capital and operational cost of the BEB system while maximizing its environmental benefits (i.e., emission reduction).

Webinar: Eliminating Cash Options For Public Transit Fares: Costs, Benefits And Equity Impacts, Aaron Golub

TREC Webinar Series

Many transit agencies plan to automate their fare collection and limit the use of cash, with the goals of improving boarding and data collection while lowering operating costs. Yet about 10% of adults in the United States lack a bank account or credit card, and many either rely on restrictive cell-phone data plans or don’t have access to internet or a smartphone. This webinar will present part of a larger research project exploring these issues in the cities of Denver, Colorado, and Eugene and Portland–Gresham, Oregon. In this part, we explore the tradeoffs between reducing cash acceptance, ridership and the …

Webinar: Rethinking Streets During Covid, Clare Haley, John Larson-Friend, Marc Schlossberg, Aliza Whalen

TREC Webinar Series

Re-allocating space on streets to accommodate new uses – particularly for walking, biking, and being – is not new. However, COVID-era needs have accelerated the process that many communities use to make such street transitions. Many communities quickly understood that the street is actually a public place and a public good that serves broader public needs more urgent than the free flow or the storage of private vehicles. This seminar describes a new case study book that captures some of these quick changes to city streets in response to societal needs during COVID, with two open questions: 1. What changes …

Webinar: Transit Impacts On Jobs, People And Real Estate, Arthur C. Nelson, Kristina Currans, Robert Hibberd

TREC Webinar Series

This webinar has six elements: Introducing themes related to how transit should affect the location of jobs and people, and how real estate should respond; Creating a research typology of different landscapes served by transit that is also useful in transit planning; Analyzing how transit stations influence shifts in the regional share of jobs, people and housing; Investigating how transit station proximity influences mode choice and household transportation budgets; Estimating the effect of transit station proximity on real estate rents by type of transit system and type of real estate, and the extent to which outcomes are consistent with theory; …

Webinar: Land Use And Transportation Policies For A Sustainable Future, Liming Wang

TREC Webinar Series

Even though there are tremendous uncertainties in the timing and evolution path of the Autonomous Vehicles (AV) technology, it may become a likely reality within most MPOs' long-range regional transportation plan horizon of twenty years. Yet a recent survey of the largest MPOs in the US indicates only one of them "even mentions driverless, automated, or autonomous vehicles in its most recent RTP". One of the uncertainties in assessing the impacts of AV is their direction: on one hand, self-driving cars could increase VMT by increasing roadway capacity, lowering costs of travel; on the other, they may reduce VMT by …

Webinar: Transportation Benefits Of Polycentric Urban Form, Reid Ewing, Sadegh Sabouri

TREC Webinar Series

A “polycentric” region consists of a network of compact developments connected with each other through high-quality transportation options. Rather than continuing the expanse of low-density development radiating from an urban core, investments can be concentrated on central nodes and transit connections. This development pattern is very popular in Europe and is linked to significant benefits. This presentation is aimed at exploring the academic literature and empirical evidence surrounding polycentric development, analyzing more than 120 regional transportation plans to see how they promote polycentric development, defining types of centers in a hierarchy of centers, quantifying the transportation benefits of polycentric development, …

Webinar: Bus Stops: Access And Equity, Keith Bartholomew

TREC Webinar Series

Improving bus stops by providing shelters, seating, signage, and sidewalks is relatively inexpensive and popular among riders and local officials. Making such improvements, however, is not often a priority for U.S. transit providers because of competing demands for capital funds and a perception that amenities are not tied to measurable increases in system effectiveness or efficiency. This webinar focuses on the role that bus stops play as the point of first contact between transit agencies and their potential riders, and how the quality of that contact can influence both ridership and accessibility for riders with mobility-related disabilities. The webinar will …

Webinar: Economic And Business Outcomes Of Bicycle And Pedestrian Improvements, Jenny H. Liu

TREC Webinar Series

The National Street Improvements Study, conducted by PSU in conjunction with PeopleForBikes and consulting firm Bennett Midland, researched the economic effects of bicycle infrastructure on 14 corridors across six cities — Portland, Seattle, San Francisco, Memphis, Minneapolis and Indianapolis. The study found that improvements such as bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure had either positive or non-significant impacts on the local economy as measured through sales and employment. In this webinar, lead researcher Jenny Liu will share the results of the investigation and the unique methodology for investigating these economic outcomes.

This webinar is based on a study funded by the …

Webinar: A National Scan Of Bike Share Equity Programs: Best Practices And Lessons Learned, Nathan Mcneil, John Macarthur, Adriel Thornton

TREC Webinar Series

Connecting with cities and bike share operators from across the United States, Portland State University conducted a nationwide scan on what programs and initiatives were running to address equity in bike share. The report “National Scan of Bike Share Equity Programs” documents responses from over 70 bike share systems. This resource will help cities and operators navigate the range of actions that have been implemented to make bike share systems more equitable, examine successful strategies employed across the U.S., and understand how those successes (and challenges) are being measured and articulated. In doing so, we hope the report helps bike …

Webinar: Findings From 15 Years Of Travel Surveys At Portland Area Transit-Oriented Developments (Tods), Jennifer Dill, Nathan Mcneil

TREC Webinar Series

Since 2005, Portland State University has periodically surveyed occupants of recently developed higher-density and mixed-use projects near transit, often referred to as Transit-Oriented Developments (TODs). The general objectives of the surveys were to better understand actual transit use, among other factors, of residents in these buildings. Between 2005 and 2018, the research team surveyed residents of nearly 50 TODs. With funding from Metro and the National Institute for Transportation and Communities, the research team carried out a two-pronged study drawing on this wealth of data. First, we explore geographic differences within the Portland region in terms of travel behavior and …

Webinar: Natural Pozzolans In The Pacific Northwest And Their Beneficial Uses, Matthew D. Sleep

TREC Webinar Series

The eruption of Mt. Mazama approximately 7,700 years ago created what is now known as Crater Lake. This eruption blanketed the Pacific Northwest with volcanic ash. This volcanic ash has been collected from several locations in Southern Oregon near the Oregon Institute of Technology campus. This volcanic ash has been tested and shown to have properties beneficial of a natural pozzolan. This seminar will present the results of a significant laboratory program to determine the natural pozzolanic capabilities of Mt. Mazama volcanic ash. In addition, information will be presented on a field application using the material to create ADA accessible …