Urban Studies Commons^™

Track Time And Monetary Costs Of Transportation As A Comprehensive Performance Measure: Development And Application Of Transportation Cost Index, Liming Wang

PSU Transportation Seminars

As federal and state policies place increasing emphasis on using comprehensive transportation performance measures to guide transportation decision making, there is a gap in such measures of transportation and land use systems. This seminar reports the results from a research project aiming to fill the gap in the type of applications and policy areas covered by existing measures. Modeled after the popular Consumer Price Index, the project refines and develops a transportation cost index (TCI) measure for transportation and land use systems by tracking the time and monetary costs of transportation for households as they travel to satisfy their daily …

Webinar: Evaluation Of An Electric Bike Pilot Project In Portland, Oregon, John Macarthur

TREC Webinar Series

Oregon, and Portland in particular, is internationally known for its love for bikes. Not only does the region have some of the highest bike ridership in the nation but the Oregon bike manufacturing industry is quickly growing as well. Oregon’s electric bike (e-bike) market is also growing, but little data are available on the potential market and e-bike user behavior and interest.

Only a limited amount of research has explored the potential new market segments for e-bikes and the economic, operational, safety, and transportation issues surrounding e-bikes in the United States. This webinar will present findings from a research project …

Understanding Transportation In Urban China - Local Residents Vs Migrant Workers, Jenny H. Liu

PSU Transportation Seminars

With rapid urbanization in China and other developing economies around the world, it has become imperative to understand household transportation behavior and expenditures in these urban areas. The objective of this study is to examine the differences in the determinants of household transportation expenditures within two very distinct populations in Chinese cities: local residents and migrant workers.

In order to craft policies or strategies promoting sustainable transportation or livability, it is essential to understand whether the drivers that push the migrant population towards spending more on transportation or owning bikes or motorbikes are similar to drivers for the rest of …

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 …

“La Guerra De Los Centavos” Y Contratos Sociales: Los Impactos Del Desarrollo Del Sistema Intermodal De Transporte Urbano En Loja, Ecuador / "The War Of The Cents" And Social Contracts: The Impacts Of The Development Of The Intermodal Urban Transportation System In Loja, Ecuador, Will Yetvin

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

El propósito de este estudio fue investigar el Sistema Intermodal de Transporte Urbano (SITU) en la ciudad de Loja, Ecuador. El contenido del estudio se basa en mis observaciones y entrevistas durante mi tiempo trabajando con la Unidad de Transporte del Municipio de Loja, y en fuentes bibliográficas relacionadas con los temas de transporte urbano, transporte sostenible, bus de rápido tránsito y gobiernos descentralizados. Además, utilicé un tesoro de documentos internos del Municipio y el Consorcio. Mi análisis es influenciado por el marco conceptual de desarrollo sostenible.

Este informe es organizado alrededor de tres temas vinculados pero distintos; 1) Un …

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 …

Measuring And Modeling Cyclists’ Comfort And Stress Levels, Miguel Figliozzi

PSU Transportation Seminars

Some researchers have tried to categorize cyclists’ levels of traffic stress utilizing facility or traffic data that can be readily measured in the field, such as motorized travel lanes, travel speeds, and type of bicycle infrastructure.

This seminar will present data and modeling results utilizing two novel data sources:

(a) real-world, on-road measurements of physiological stress as cyclists travel across different types of facilities and

(b) data collected utilizing a smartphone app called ORcycle (http://www.pdx.edu/transportation-lab/orcycle).

This presentation will discuss key findings and potential policy implications.

Edged Out: Location Efficient Housing And Low Income Households In The Portland Region, Andrée Tremoulet, Ryan Dann

PSU Transportation Seminars

Transportation costs are typically a household’s second largest expense after housing. Low income households are especially burdened by transportation costs, with low income households spending up to two times as much of their income on transportation than higher income households (Litman, 2013).

Thus, access to location efficient housing is especially important to low income households, including those who use a housing voucher to help pay for housing costs.

This seminar presents the results of a two-year project supported by the Portland region's four public housing authorities to design and test tools to help people with housing vouchers find location efficient …

Parking Infrastructure: A Constraint On Or Opportunity For Urban Redevelopment?, Mikhail Chester

PSU Transportation Seminars

Many cities have adopted minimum parking requirements, but we have relatively poor information about how parking infrastructure has grown.

In this research, using building and roadway growth models, we estimate how parking has grown in Los Angeles County from 1900 to 2010, and how parking infrastructure evolves, affects urban form, and relates to changes in automobile travel.

We find that since 1975, the ratio of residential offstreet parking spaces to automobiles in Los Angeles County is close to 1.0 and the greatest density of parking spaces is in the urban core. Most new growth in parking occurs outside of the …

Consistent Estimation Of Route Choice Models For Dynamic Transit Assignment, Jeff Hood

PSU Transportation Seminars

Dynamic transit assignment models have the potential to improve local transportation agencies’ capability to forecast the demand for public transit facilities under conditions of limited capacity or varying reliability. In order to be useful in practice, the simulated route choices of passengers in these models need to reflect the behavior of actual residents observed in local travel surveys. Most analysis methods of revealed route choice preferences developed to date have either (1) not been proven to provide consistent estimates or (2) required an untenable computation time for practical applications. Furthermore, no model of transit route choice has accounted for variability …

Webinar: Development Of A Pedestrian Demand Estimation Tool, Kelly Clifton

TREC Webinar Series

Why model pedestrians?

A new predictive tool for estimating pedestrian demand has potential applications for improving walkability. By forecasting the number, location and characteristics of walking trips, this tool allows for policy-sensitive mode shifts away from automobile travel.

There is growing support to improve the quality of the walking environment and make investments to promote pedestrian travel. Despite this interest and need, current forecasting tools, particularly regional travel demand models, often fall short. To address this gap, Oregon Metro and NITC researcher Kelly Clifton worked together to develop this pedestrian demand estimation tool which can allow planners to allocate infrastructure …

Towards Effective Design Treatment For Right Turns At Intersections With Bicycle Traffic, David Hurwitz, Christopher Monsere

PSU Transportation Seminars

The overall goal of this research was to quantify the safety performance of alternative traffic control strategies to mitigate right-turning-vehicle/bicycle collisions, often called "right-hook" crashes, at signalized intersections in Oregon.

A two stage experiment was developed in the OSU high-fidelity driving simulator to investigate the causal factors of right-hook crashes at signalized intersections with a striped bike lane and no right-turn lane, and to then identify and evaluate alternative design treatments that could mitigate the occurrence of right-hook crashes.

Experiment 1 investigated motorist and environmental related causal factors of right-hook crashes, using three different motorist performance measures: (1) visual attention, …

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 …

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 …

Transportation Cost Index As A Performance Measure For Transportation And Land Use Systems: New Approaches And Applications, Liming Wang, Huajie Yang, Jenny H. Liu

Urban Studies and Planning Faculty Publications and Presentations

This research aims to fill gaps in existing multi-modal performance measures for transportation and land use systems:

1. As a supplement/replacement of traffic-centric measures such as LOS, travel delay;
2. Recent federal and state legislations put more emphases on using of performance measures in transportation planning & operation: MAP-21, Oregon Job and Transportation Act (OJTA);
3. Existing performance measures for transportation and land use systems, although now numerous, have their own limitation (Table 1), and leave important aspects and policy areas uncovered, for example, the balance of transportation investment between different modes and across geographical areas as mandated by OJTA

The Effects Of Commuter Rail On Population Deconcentration And Commuting: A Salt Lake City Case Study, Joanna Ganning, Mercedes Beaudoin, Simon Brewer, Keuntae Kim, Keunhyun Park

TREC Final Reports

All transportation systems have the ability to transform human settlement patterns, which can affect a range of social, economic and environmental issues. Considering investments in rail infrastructure have increased in recent decades (Bureau of Transportation Statistics, 2007; Israel & Cohen-Blankshtain, 2010), it is important for planners and researchers to understand how these rail systems influence land use, metropolitan development patterns, and population migration. The following paragraphs summarize the studies and their findings.

The Effects of Commuter Rail Establishment on the Relationships between the Built Environment, Travel Behavior, and Residential Self- Selection (RSS): To help regional and transportation planners better understand …

Do We Choose What We Desire? – Persuading Citizens To Make Consistent And Sustainable Mobility Decisions, Christopher Lisson, Margeret A. Hall

Interdisciplinary Informatics Faculty Proceedings & Presentations

A dilemma in urban mobility with tremendous effects on citizens’ wellbeing is the unconscious antipode between their short- and long-term goals. People do not anticipate all consequences of their modal choices and thus make decisions that might be incoherent with their desires, e.g. taking their own car due to convenience but causing a congested city. Omnipresent Information Systems on smartphones provide the necessary information and coordination capabilities to support people for sustainable and individually coherent mobility decisions on a mass scale. Building upon extant work in travel behavior and social psychology, a framework is proposed to coordinate research efforts in …

A Survey Of Viva Callesj Participants: San Jose, California 2015, Asha W. Agrawal, Hilary Nixon

Mineta Transportation Institute

This report presents the findings from a survey of participants at the Viva CalleSJ open streets event held on October 11, 2015. The survey was designed to provide information that would help the City of San Jose assess the success of the event, guide the planning for future Viva CalleSJ events, and inform potential funders and community partners about the benefits of Viva CalleSJ. A total of 618 people completed the one-page paper survey while at the event. Survey findings provide detail on how people learned about the event, how they traveled to the event, what they did at the …

Night Access Plan, Lea Anderson, David Backes, Abe Moland, Taylor Phillips, Rae-Leigh Stark, Shane Valle

Master of Urban and Regional Planning Workshop Projects

Oregon Health and Science University is a microcosm of the 24-hour city, and it’s essential that patients, employees, students and others have safe and convenient 24-hour access to its medical campuses. Access to and from the main campus is always complicated, but even more so at night. The Night Access Plan lays out a strategy to make getting to and from OHSU at night and early in the morning safer, more convenient, and affordable.

A video about this project may be viewed here.

This project was conducted under the supervision of Matthew Gebhardt, Susan Gibson-Hartnett, Ethan Seltzer and Marisa …

How Can We Have A Better Public Transportation System? –An Exploratory Agent Based Model, Boyu Liu

Pomona Senior Theses

Public transportation plays an integral part in a city's development, but transportation professionals disagree about whether it is feasible to increase the capacity of public transportation systems at a reasonable cost; and if it is, how. This study develops an agent based model that aims to answer this question and provide a framework to compare the effects of improvements in different aspects of the public transportation service. The results of this study show that it is possible to increase ridership enough to compensate for the increased operational cost, but only in certain circumstances. Interesting phenomenon that might have showed up …

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 …

The End Of The Road: The State Of Urban Elevated Expressways In The United States, Daniel Waqar

Brookings Mountain West Publications

In a January 2016 meeting, the Clark County Commission heard a proposal from the County Public Works Department about a $200 million plan to build two urban elevated expressways constructed above existing roadways, potentially linking McCarran International Airport with the Las Vegas Strip’s resort corridor. Commissioners lauded the project with a “high degree of confidence” for funding sources and praised the “magnificent way of moving traffic” and “out of the box thinking” of these urban elevated expressways. Yet the positive feedback that County Commissioners showered on this proposal flies in the face of decades of history on urban elevated expressways. …

Accuracy Of Bicycle Counting With Pneumatic Tubes In Oregon, Krista Nordback, Sirisha Murthy Kothuri, Taylor Phillips, Carson Gorecki, Miguel Figliozzi

Civil and Environmental Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

Interest in counting bicycles and establishing nonmotorized counting programs is increasing, but jurisdictions still struggle with how to integrate bicycle counting into standard practice. In this paper, the authors share findings and recommendations for how to minimize error for bicycle counting from tests conducted in conjunction with the Oregon Department of Transportation. This research studied three types of off-the-shelf pneumatic tube counters for counting bicycles, including equipment from five manufacturers: two bicycle-specific counters, three varieties of motor vehicle classification counters, and one volume-only motor vehicle counter. Tests were conducted both in a controlled environment and in on-road mixed traffic to …

Investigations In Transportation, William G. Becker, Carol Biskupic Knight

TREC Final Reports

The Investigations in Transportation program is an elementary school partnership and curriculum development project that will engage science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) professionals in school-based activities and projects that will bring real-world applications to elementary classrooms for grades 3-5. The Portland Metro STEM Partnership (PMSP) is providing leadership and facilitation to a team of educators from Portland State University, Beaverton School District and Hillsboro School District who will work with volunteers from the Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT) to design, develop, implement and assess the impact of an in-class unit entitled "Investigations in Transportation". This report presents a study …

Do Tods Make A Difference?, Arthur C. Nelson, Matt Miller, Dejan Eskic, Keuntae Kim, Reid Ewing, Jenny H. Liu, Matt Berggren, Zakari Mumuni

TREC Final Reports

In this report, we present research that measures the outcomes of TOD areas in relation to their metropolitan area controls with respect to (1) jobs by sector; (2) housing choice for household types based on key demographic characteristics; (3) housing affordability based on transportation costs; and (4) job-worker balance as a measure of accessibility. Prior literature has not systematically evaluated TOD outcomes in these respects with respect to light rail transit (LRT), commuter rail transit (CRT), bus rapid transit (BRT), and streetcar transit (SCT) systems. Our analysis helps close some of these gaps. We apply our analysis to 23 fixed-guideway …

Three Bridges, Robert Liberty

PSU Transportation Seminars

In the last decade, three important new bridges in the Portland area were the subject of intense discussion and analysis: the Tilikum Crossing, the Sellwood Bridge and the Columbia River Crossing. One of those bridges is completed, the second is under construction and the third one was canceled.

As a Metro Councilor, Robert Liberty was involved in the decision making process for all three projects. The way in which those projects were analyzed and presented to the public revealed to him a great deal about the many weaknesses in the way we make major transportation investment decisions. Those insights are …

Webinar: Transportation Academy: Lessons From The Portland Traffic And Transportation Course, Nathan Mcneil

TREC Webinar Series

Community involvement and outreach is an important part of any planning effort, but as planners often find, many times the conversation is a difficult one to carry on. Residents may lack the technical knowledge to understand the intricacies of the system, or they may show skepticism toward the planning process in general. “Transportation Leadership Education,” a NITC education project, offers a guide for communities to stimulate the development of a more involved, educated citizenry.

The Portland Traffic and Transportation course is taught each year to 30-40 Portland residents who want to learn more about how the local transportation system developed …

Model-Based Analytics And Processes For Transportation Investment Alternatives Analyses: From Least Cost Planning To Multi Criterion Evaluation, Jeff Frkonja

PSU Transportation Seminars

Many public and private organizations that make decisions regarding whether and how to invest in transportation assets or programs do so via a structured decision-support process. This talk will address the technical aspects of the family of such processes that use travel demand model outputs—and other sources of quantified performance data—as inputs to analytic tools including benefit cost analysis (BCA) and multi criterion evaluation. Example applications of this framework have included tolling and pricing studies, capital investment alternatives analyses, and programmatic evaluations. Example processes include "Least Cost Planning" frameworks borrowed originally from the power generation industry.

The talk will also …

Webinar: Transport Cost Index: A New Comprehensive Performance Measure For Transportation And Land Use, Liming Wang

TREC Webinar Series

Recent federal and state policies are placing increasing emphasis on using comprehensive transportation performance measures to guide transportation decision making processes covering policy areas ranging from mobility, safety, economy and livability, to issues of equity and environment. While it is relatively easy to build consensus on mobility measures that center on the transportation system alone, it is much harder for performance measures to incorporate both transportation and land use, loosely defined as accessibility measures, even with continuous efforts to catalog and design such measures.

Two projects at PSU sponsored by Oregon DOT and National Institute of Transportation Communities (NITC) aim …