Urban Studies Commons^™

Data Colonialism Through Accumulation By Dispossession: New Metaphors For Daily Data, Jim Thatcher, David O'Sullivan, Dillon Mahmoudi

Urban Studies and Planning Faculty Publications and Presentations

In recent years, much has been written on ‘big data’ in both the popular and academic press. After the hubristic declaration of the “end of theory” more nuanced arguments have emerged, suggesting that increasingly pervasive data collection and quantification may have significant implications for the social sciences, even if the social, scientific, political and economic agendas behind big data are less new than they are often portrayed. Compared to the boosterish tone of much of its press, academic critiques of big data have been relatively muted, often focusing on the continued importance of more traditional forms of domain knowledge and …

Delivering Green Streets: An Exploration Of Changing Perceptions And Behaviours Over Time Around Bioswales In Portland, Oregon, Glyn Everett, Jessica Lamond, Anita T. Morzillo, Annie Marissa Matsler, Faith Ka Shun Chan

Urban Studies and Planning Faculty Publications and Presentations

Green Infrastructure (GI) is an increasingly popular means of dealing with flooding and water quality issues worldwide. This study examines public perceptions of, and behaviour around, bioswales, which are a popular GI facility in the United States. Bioswales are highly visible interventions requiring support from residents and policy-makers to be implemented and maintained appropriately. To understand how the residents’ perceptions and attitudes might develop over time, we interviewed residents of Portland, Oregon, living near bioswales installed 1–2, 4–5 and 8–9 years ago, to determine awareness, understanding, and opinions about the devices. We found no consistent patterns across time periods, but …

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 …

The Neoliberal Politics Of “Smart”: Electricity Consumption, Household Monitoring, And The Enterprise Form, Anthony M. Levenda, Dillon Mahmoudi, Gerald Sussman

Urban Studies and Planning Faculty Publications and Presentations

This article investigates how digital technologies in the energy sector are enabling increased value extraction in the cycle of capital accumulation through surveillant proceesses of everyday energy consumption. We offer critical theory (Gramsci, Foucault) and critical political economy (Marx) as a guide for critical understanding of value creation in ICT through quotidian processes and practices of social reproduction. In this regard, the concept of the "prosumer" is extended beyond notions of voluntary participation in Web 2.0 to the political economy of energy use. Within this broad framework we investigate national and local level "smart grid" campaigns and projects. The "smartening" …

National Study Of Brt Development Outcomes, Arthur C. Nelson, Joanna Ganning

TREC Final Reports

Bus rapid transit (BRT) is poised to become the “next big thing” in public transit. From virtually no systems a generation ago, there are now 19 lines operating with at least seven under construction and more than 20 in the planning stages. BRT is gaining popularity because of its combination of low capital cost and potential for high levels of benefits. But are BRT systems effective in attracting development?

To answer this and many more trending BRT questions, the Metropolitan Research Center (MRC) reviewed multiple studies using data from the United States Census Bureau, Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics, and CoStar data …

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 …

The Trade-Offs Between Population Density And Households' Transportation-Housing Costs, Haizhong Wang

PSU Transportation Seminars

As metropolitan area governments and others promote density-promoting “smart growth” policies, finer analysis is needed to quantify the impact of such policies on households' transportation and housing costs. Existing research suggests that households in urban areas trade-off between housing costs and transportation costs, but does not explore how policies to increase urban densities might explicitly impact this balance. Furthermore, the research does not adequately distinguish between the effect of urban area density and the effects of other factors associated with urban area density (e.g metropolitan area size and household incomes) on housing costs. This research uses the 2000 Census Public …

Affordable Housing As A Prerequisite For A Safe, Healthy, Equitable Transportation System: Evidence From A Nationwide Evaluation Of Location Efficiency Within The Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (Lihtc) Program, Arlie Steven Adkins

PSU Transportation Seminars

Mountains of research over the last several decades show that how we get around and how much physical activity we get are closely linked with the built environment of the neighborhoods where we live. This means that the health, economic, and environmental benefits associated with active travel and transit are place-based and that affordable housing in walkable, location efficient places needs to be thought of as a critical component of planners’ efforts to provide safe, healthy, and equitable transportation systems. This talk will provide an overview of the links between affordable housing and transportation planning and present research findings from …

Transportation Leadership Education: Portland Traffic And Transportation Course A Case Study And Curriculum, Nathan Mcneil

Urban Studies and Planning Faculty Publications and Presentations

The Portland Traffic and Transportation course serves a number of different purposes. On one hand, it is designed to develop citizens who are informed about the transportation system, including how it got where it is today, what agencies and actors play a role in its operation and development, and how they, as citizens, play a role in its future. In this sense, there is a goal of broadening and deepening the existing knowledge about the system among the general population. On the other hand, there is an implicit goal of encouraging participation in the system with the understanding that doing …

Neighborhood Change And The Role Of Environmental Stewardship: A Case Study Of Green Infrastructure For Stormwater In The City Of Portland, Oregon, Usa, Vivek Shandas

Urban Studies and Planning Faculty Publications and Presentations

Throughout the history of cities, the ecological landscape has often been buried, removed, or taken for granted. A recent recognition that humans are part of the global ecosystem, and that human actions both cause and are affected by ecological change, brings with it an awareness of the value of nature in cities and of natural systems on which cities depend. The feedbacks between humans and their environment within an urban context can have profound implications for the growth of and change in cities, yet there is a limited understanding of the interactions between biophysical changes in cities and the implications …

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 …

Development Of A Pedestrian Demand Estimation Tool, Kelly Clifton, Patrick Allen Singleton, Christopher D. Muhs, Robert J. Schneider

Civil and Environmental Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

Most research on walking behavior has focused on mode choice or walk-trip frequency. In contrast, this study is one of the first to analyze the destination choice behaviors of pedestrians. Using about 4,500 walk trips from a 2011 household travel survey in the Portland, OR, region, we estimated multinomial logit pedestrian destination choice models for six trip purposes. Independent variables included terms for impedance (walk-trip distance); size (employment by type, households); supportive pedestrian environments (parks, a pedestrian index of the environment variable called PIE); barriers to walking (terrain, industrial-type employment); and traveler characteristics. Unique to this study was the use …

Webinar: Pedestrians Count! – How To Measure Foot Traffic, Krista Nordback, Shawn Turner, Scott Brady, Theo Petritsch, David Jones

TREC Webinar Series

Learn from experts and share your knowledge of how to count pedestrians. Are people with clipboards the only way? What technologies work and how can we use them? How can an agency improve an existing or start a new pedestrian count program? Join us for an information sharing webinar on this quickly evolving topic. We will learn from leaders in the field and encourage active audience involvement, so come prepared to share your experience!

This IBPI webinar is part of a project sponsored by FHWA to study best practices in pedestrian traffic monitoring.

Portland State University is working with ICF …

Webinar, Part Ii: Four Types Of Cyclists: A National Look, Jennifer Dill

TREC Webinar Series

Originally developed by Roger Geller for the city of Portland, the "Four Types of Cyclists" typology (Strong and Fearless; Enthused and Confident; Interested but Concerned; No Way No How) has been adopted widely to help guide efforts to increase bicycling for transportation. This webinar will present findings from a new, national survey conducted in collaboration with the National Association of Realtors. We will address the following questions:

• Does the Four Types of Cyclists typology apply nationally?
• What are the characteristics of each type of cyclist?
• How does the existing environment, including bicycle infrastructure, affect the share of people in each …

Caring For The Land, Serving People: Creating A Multicultural Forest Service In The Civil Rights Era, Donna Lynn Sinclair

Dissertations and Theses

This qualitative study of representative bureaucracy examines the extension and limitations of liberal democratic rights by connecting environmental and social history with policy, individual decision making, gender, race, and class in American history. It documents major cultural shifts in a homogeneous patriarchal organization, constraints, advancement, and the historical agency of women and minorities. "Creating a Multicultural Forest Service" identifies a relationship between natural and human resources and tells a story of expanding and contracting civil liberties that shifted over time from women and people of color to include the differently-abled and LGBT communities. It includes oral history as a key …

Webinar, Part I: Americans' Views Of Transportation And Livable Communities, Jennifer Dill, Hugh Morris

TREC Webinar Series

The National Association of Realtors® and Portland State University conducted a nationwide survey in the 50 largest metropolitan areas, asking Americans about where they live, where they want to live, and their travel habits.

This webinar will present the key findings from that survey, including people’s preferences to live in mixed-use, walkable communities and what may help them walk, bicycle, and take transit more. The large sample (3,000) allows us to look at demographic differences, including between the generations (Millennials, Baby Boomers, etc.).

Promising Practices For Long-Term Community Engagement, Meg Merrick, Andrée Tremoulet, Tina Dippert

Institute of Metropolitan Studies Publications

Washington County has initiated a planning process to rethink the structure and support system for its ongoing, long-term community participation program. The impetus for this planning process began with a fall 2014 announcement by the service provider that had supported the county’s Citizen Participation Organizations (CPOs) and the Committee for Citizen Involvement (CCI) for several decades, Oregon State University Extension, that it would no longer continue this role effective fall 2015. The planning process has since evolved into an opportunity to take a thorough look at the program and plan a system of engagement for the 21st century.

Washington County …

Portland’S Food Economy: Trends And Contributions, Jamaal Green, Greg Schrock, Jenny H. Liu

Institute for Sustainable Solutions Publications and Presentations

The primary goal of this report is to document the scope, growth, and contribution of the food economy to the city of Portland and the region. Specifically, this report addresses the following research questions:

• What is the "food economy," and how is it defined?
• What is the size of Portland’s food economy, and how has it changed in recent years?
• How is the food economy distributed spatially within the city and the region? How is this changing?
• What kind of employment opportunities does Portland’s food economy offer? How do they compare to the broader economy?
• Who works in Portland’s food …

Columbia Corridor Drainage Districts Governance Study, Thomas Potiowsky, Jenny Liu, Mike Paruszkiewicz, Jeff Renfro, Marisol Cáceres, Peter Hulseman

Northwest Economic Research Center Publications and Reports

This study focused on major questions related to drainage district consolidation in the Columbia Corridor, arising from the geographic and economic diversity that characterizes the four entities. The magnitude and type of economic activity within the districts varies considerably, and results in a broad range of operational resources and levee system requirements.

The Landscape: Equity, Elizabeth Morehead

Metroscape

Elizabeth Morehead uses data from Greater Portland Pulse to point to educational and economic disparities as well as the disproportionate involvement of racial and ethnic minorities in the region's criminal justice system.

Go By Transit! Out-Of-Town Adventures On Local Public Transportation, Linn Davis

Metroscape

Linn Davis recounts his epic public-transit journeys to far-flung areas of the metroscape, and the surprising discoveries he made along the way.

Indicators Of The Metroscape: Housing Affordability And A $15 Minimum Wage, Elizabeth Morehead

Metroscape

Elizabeth Morehead focuses on housing affordability and the impact of a $15 minimum wage.

Make Way For The Orange Line And A Milwaukian Renaissance, Ben Maras

Metroscape

Ben Maras describes how residents of Milwaukie, Oregon feel about the new TriMet Orange Line that will surely bring change to this city just over 20,000.

Periodic Atlas Of The Of The Metroscape: The Power Of The Pyramid, Meg Merrick

Metroscape

Meg Merrick explains an important tool for understanding demographics - the population Pyramid. She then uses this tool to describe demographic trends in Portland and Beaverton's neighborhoods.

Toward A Spatial-Temporal Measure Of Land-Use Mix, Steven R. Gehrke, Kelly Clifton

Civil and Environmental Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

Urban planning and public-health research has long been interested in the connection between land-use mix and travel. Interest from urban planners stems from the potential of transportation efficiency gains achieved by an increased land-use mix and subsequent shortening of trip lengths; whereas, public-health research advocates an increased land-use mix as an effective policy for facilitating greater physical activity. Yet, despite the transportation, land-use, and health benefits related to improving land-use mix and the extent of topical attention given by researchers, no consensus has been reached regarding the magnitude of its effect on travel. This absence of agreement may largely be …

Come Out Come Out Wherever You Are: A Content Analysis Of Homeless Transgender Youth In Social Service Literature, Shannon Crossley

PSU McNair Scholars Online Journal

Homeless, transgender youth are underrepresented in research studies in the United States and over-represented among the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) transitional-age (16 – 24) homeless youth population, at a reported 20 - 40% of the entire homeless youth population. Although this figure is staggering, it is not representative of the actual number of LGBTQ youth currently living on the streets. Exact numbers are unknown due to fear of victimization and discrimination faced both by their homeless peers and in services that are established for homeless youth. This study critically examined how homeless, transgender, transitional-age youth are represented …