Urban Studies Commons^™

Launching The Wasatch Transportation Academy, Nathan Mcneil, Keith Bartholomew, Matthew Ryan

TREC Final Reports

The “Community Transportation Academy” model seeks to break down the barriers for community members to participate in transportation decision-making processes. Since 1991, the Portland Traffic and Transportation Course has held at least one course each year, connecting Portland residents with top planners, engineers, and decision-makers from agencies working on transportation in the region, with the goal of conveying the factors professionals consider, ranging from technical considerations, legal and policy mandates, other tradeoffs, and how the community can engage with and influence decisions. This project sought to implement a transportation academy in the Salt Lake City region inspired by the Portland …

Rideshare Practices In Developing Countries Vs Developed Countries, Francis Wambalaba

PSU Transportation Seminars

This project investigated strategies towards development, marketing and implementation of employer programs for reducing single occupancy vehicles to mitigate traffic congestion. It was guided by the following research questions: which socio-economic factors influence carpooling; how do environmental factors influence carpooling; and what are effective traffic management strategies for enhancing carpooling. The presentation will also strive to introduce the US context for purposes of perspective.

Public History Is Now, Sarah E. Dougher

Amplify: A Journal of Writing-as-Activism

A walking tour of downtown Portland in August 2021 raises questions for the writer about the purpose of “memory activism,” its relation to writing-as-activism. Drawing on critiques of urbanist Jane Jacobs and interrogating the concept of “reckoning,” the essay explores ways in which the streetscape and people there can deliver meaning and pose questions about systemic racism and unsheltered existence.

Gis Training In Transportation And Environmental Justice For Promoting Student Success In Steam Education, Joowon Im, Alan Klein, Amruta Sakalker

TREC Final Reports

Transportation land uses have a significant impact on vulnerable ecologies, especially in a rapidly urbanizing region like Dallas-Fort Worth. To study this relationship, the research team will develop a pilot ArcGIS lab course to expose high school students to critical regional tools and technology. This course will demonstrate the connections between transportation planning and design and environmental justice. The College of Architecture Planning and Public Affairs at UT Arlington will partner with CityLab high school in the Dallas Independent School District to develop a four-week lab course curriculum in ArcGIS and other emerging regional mapping technologies.

High school students will …

An Introduction To Gis For Dallas, Texas High Schoolers, Joowon Im, Alan Klein, Amruta Sakalker

TREC Project Briefs

A summary of TREC research project NITC-RR-1468,GIS Training in Transportation And Environmental Justice for Promoting Student Success in STEAM Education.

Mobility For The People: Evaluating Equity Requirements In Shared Micromobility Programs, Anne Brown, Amanda Howell, Hana Creger

TREC Final Reports

Technology-enabled shared micromobility services have expanded mobility for some travelers, but significant barriers to use limit their uptake among certain groups. To address these barriers, cities and professional transportation organizations have undertaken two distinct efforts to operationalize equity in shared micromobility services: 1) drafted equity frameworks in an attempt to clearly define equity within the transportation context and to provide guidelines for what cities should consider when designing equity-based mobility programs; and 2) some cities have attempted to ameliorate access disparities by establishing new requirements for shared micromobility programs. Both equity frameworks and program requirements mark important steps to operationalizing …

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.

A Walk In The Park: A Spatial Analysis Of Crime And Portland Parks, Cheyenne Pamela Hodgen

Dissertations and Theses

This thesis presents two individual research papers that examine the relationship between greenspaces and crime in Portland, Oregon. The two papers use an adapted street network buffer to better measure crime concentration around discrete locations. This methodological development allows for an improved measure of crime concentration around discrete locations.

The first contribution, explores the relationship between different greenspace types and crime, breaking down different crime types into discrete categories. The results of this study suggest that overall, Portland greenspaces do not experience a concentration of crime, however, different patterns emerge as greenspace and crime types are disaggregated. Only one greenspace …

Regional Decision-Making In Oregon’S Area Commissions On Transportation, Cole P. Grisham

Hatfield Graduate Journal of Public Affairs

Long after other areas of Oregon had already done so, the local agencies in the Portland region served by the Oregon Department of Transportation decided to form a regional Area Commission on Transportation. Why they decided to do so and what caused local agencies to delay forming one until long after other regions was not immediately clear. In this article, I examine the policy documents around the formation of the Region 1 ACT and how its policy history represents wider historical trends on regional transportation decision making nationally. To do so, I describe Oregon’s regional policy making structure followed by …

Safety Interventions For Houseless Pedestrians, Peter Domine, Sean Doyle, Asif Haque, Angie Martinez Sulvaran, Nick Meusch, Meisha Whyte

PSU Transportation Seminars

Cities across the U.S. are facing alarming increases in traffic fatalities, especially among the number of pedestrians who are struck and killed by drivers. Last year, 70 percent of all pedestrian fatalities in Portland were of people experiencing houselessness. As the Portland Bureau of Transportation (PBOT) is updating the city's Vision Zero Plan, a team of PSU urban and regional planning masters students have been investigating how to reduce the risk of being hit and killed specifically for unhoused people. During this presentation, the Street Perspective team will explain the situation, review their approach, and then share the recommendations they'll …

E-Scooters In Tucson, Az: Modeling Placement, Charging, And Rebalancing, Jianqiang Cheng

TREC Project Briefs

Are e-scooters just the first sign of a shared-mobility revolution? If they are, then researchers at the University of Arizona intend to make sure that the emerging transportation system has functional models on par with other modes of transportation. In 2018, approximately 100 U.S. cities had already launched shared e-scooter programs, accounting for 38.5 million trips. However, the models to manage e-scooter sharing are only recently being developed. In a project funded by the National Institute for Transportation and Communities (NITC) and led by Dr. Jianqiang Cheng, the research team set out to develop data-driven, decisionmaking models for shared-mobility system …

Data-Driven Optimization For E-Scooter System Design, Abolhassan Mohammadi Fathabad, Xiaofeng Li, Jianqiang Cheng, Yao-Jan Wu

TREC Final Reports

The objective of this project is to develop data-driven, decision-making models for shared-mobility system design and operation. Specifically, we will use shared e-scooters as a representative system, with the ultimate goal of facilitating an electric shared-mobility revolution that promises a more sustainable future. In the past few years, shared e-scooter systems have gained increased popularity around the world because of their benefits to health, traffic congestion, the environment, and accessibility. As of 2018, approximately 100 U.S. cities have launched shared e-scooter programs, accounting for 38.5 million trips. However, the business model to manage e-scooter sharing remains nascent, with many challenges …

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 …

Vancouver Climate Adaptation Strategy, Jodi Mescher, Jenna Cangialosi, Jai Daniels, Trevor Luu, Ellen Mickle, Jamie Shalvey

Master of Urban and Regional Planning Workshop Projects

This report is intended to be used internally by the City to guide climate adaptation policies in conjunction with the Climate Action Plan (see right). Key elements of this report include an analysis of the City’s climate change risks and populations most vulnerable to climate change, a review of best practices from other cities, insights from community engagement, and recommended strategies for supporting climate adaptation.

East Portland Resilient Island Vision Plan, Blair Vallie, Mary Chase, Mirna Ali, Journie Gering, Rica Perez, Allan Wilson

Master of Urban and Regional Planning Workshop Projects

To execute the East Portland Resilient Island Project, RIP City Planning has partnered with Portland’s Disaster Resilience and Recovery Action Group (DRRAG), an organization composed of representatives from Portland Bureaus of Development Services, Emergency Management, Environmental Services, Water, Planning and Sustainability, Transportation, and Parks & Recreation, as well as Portland State University’s Institute for Sustainable Solutions. DRRAG and RIP City Planning see this project as a prime opportunity to better understand and enhance the East Portland Community Center's role in fostering social connectivity and community-level disaster planning. Through abundant engagement efforts with local community groups and EPCC patrons, we aim …

Newberg Car Camping Initiative, Katie Carroll, Ryan Haight, Mary Hendricks, Scott Sharba, Anthony Tortorici, Paul Vickers

Master of Urban and Regional Planning Workshop Projects

The Newberg housing market is experiencing the effects of a rapidly growing population on a relatively static housing stock. As competition for a limited supply of housing increases, low- and moderate-income households face the choice of absorbing rising housing costs or being priced out of their homes. This pressure has shown to result in increased rates of housing instability and houselessness in comparable communities across the state. Concerns around housing affordability prompted the Newberg City Council to adopt a 5-Year Housing Work Program in 2020. The 5-Year Housing Work Program consists of 49 housing-related directives intended to address a variety …

Legalizing Mobile Dwellings : A Guide For Expanding A Unique Affordable Housing Option In Your City, Grace Coffey, Scott Goodman, Matthew Hall, Sam Huck, Andrew Oliver

Master of Urban and Regional Planning Workshop Projects

In much of the United States, housing options are limited while costs rise. The purpose of this report is to analyze the utility and functionality of mobile dwellings as an interim housing option to provide shelter and basic living needs on private residential lots. The policy context presented below for permitting mobile dwellings as part of the solution for growing issues of housing affordability focuses on Oregon and the Portland Metro region, but could be applicable in a variety of urban contexts.

While missing middle housing and ADUs have received much attention in recent years as a solution for addressing …

Envisioning An Equitable Central City, Tanja Olson, Caroline Crisp, Heidi Hinshaw, Sarah Pearlman, Laurel Priest, Jacob Storm

Master of Urban and Regional Planning Workshop Projects

This Master of Urban and Regional Planning (MURP) Workshop project working with our clients, City of Portland’s Bureau of Transportation and Bureau of Planning and Sustainability, advances the pursuit of equity within Portland’s Central City. Six MURP students acted as the consultant, under the name VF Planning, and with the guidance of Portland State University professors.

Portland’s Central City (CC) stretches from the West Hills to SE 12th Avenue and includes ten subdistricts: Lower Albina, Lloyd, and Central Eastside to the east and Pearl, Old Town/Chinatown, Goose Hollow, West End, Downtown, South Downtown/University, and South Waterfront to the west of …

Safety Interventions For Houseless Pedestrians, Peter Domine, Sean Doyle, Asif Haque, Angie Martínez Sulvarán, Nick Meusch, Meisha Whyte

Master of Urban and Regional Planning Workshop Projects

In 2016, the City of Portland adopted the Vision Zero Action Plan with the goal of eliminating traffic deaths and serious injuries on Portland’s streets. The Portland Bureau of Transportation (PBOT) also makes a commitment in all of its plans to create a more equitable transportation system by prioritizing areas of the city with a disproportionate number of BIPOC community members and people with lower incomes, all of whom face a greater risk from traffic violence. To achieve its Vision Zero goals, the City and PBOT have undertaken a number of actions, including redesigning streets through traffic calming and traffic …

Addressing Gendered Harassment And Women's Travel Needs, Madeline Brozen

PSU Transportation Seminars

This presentation will cover experiences, disparities, and solutions to gendered travel differences. Madeline will discuss research from a worldwide survey of harassment on public transit with specific insights from Los Angeles and research from two agency-led studies in Los Angeles. The talk will cover the large issues that make women's travel needs distinct from their male counter-parts - safety and complex travel patterns and some promising solutions for addressing these disparities.

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.

Hygiene, Storage, And Waste Management For The Unsheltered Community: Gaps & Opportunities Analysis, Jacen Greene, Todd Ferry, Lisa Hawash, Marisa Zapata, Nicholas M. Puczkowskyj

Homelessness Research & Action Collaborative Publications and Presentations

This study, completed in early February 2022, included focus groups and interviews with 18 government employees and service providers, interviews with 19 people experiencing unsheltered homelessness, a review of research literature and news articles on the topic, and previous surveys and research from Portland State University to better understand gaps and opportunities in providing hygiene, storage and waste management to people living unsheltered.

Reckoning With Induced Vehicle Travel, Jamey Volker

PSU Transportation Seminars

Empirical research shows that expanding roadway capacity induces more driving - the so-called "induced travel" phenomenon. However, environmental impact assessments and cost-benefit analyses of roadway capacity expansion projects have historically ignored, underestimated, or misestimated this induced travel effect. As a result, they frequently overestimate the projects' potential to relieve congestion and reduce air pollution. That spurred our team at the National Center for Sustainable Transportation (UC Davis) to develop an online tool to facilitate estimation of induced vehicle travel from capacity expansion projects. This presentation will explain the induced travel phenomenon, introduce our induced travel calculator and its offshoots, …

Is Transit-Oriented Development Affordable For Low And Moderate Income Households?, Reid Ewing, Sadegh Sabouri, Justyna Kaniewska, Hassan Ameli, Wookjae Yang, Fatemeh Kiani, Junsik Kim, Douty Chibamba

TREC Final Reports

The transportation and land use planning paradigm is shifting away from segregated uses connected by highways and roads to more compact, mixed-use developments connected by high-quality transit. This new paradigm has brought transit-oriented development (TOD) to the fore, and researchers continue to highlight advantages of this style of well-integrated land use and transportation planning. When it comes to affordability, what counts isn’t housing costs alone but the combination of housing plus transportation costs (H+T). If TODs do, in fact, command higher rents due to increased transit accessibility, this creates an issue of social equity, especially if higher housing costs are …

Understanding The Impact Of Decentralizing Homeless Services On Transportation And Mobility In Salt Lake County, Sarah L. Canham, Jeff Rose, Ivis Garcia Zambrana, Shannon O. Jones

TREC Final Reports

In 2019, the delivery of homeless sheltering services in Salt Lake County transitioned from a centralized emergency shelter—The Road Home Salt Lake Community Shelter and Resource Center (TRHSLC)—operated by The Road Home to a decentralized, scattered site model with multiple “Homeless Resource Center” (HRC) locations operated by multiple service providers. To understand to what degree and to which “proximity” to public transportation and other needed services was achieved, this study examined: 1) how the decentralization of homeless services influenced transportation demand and mobility patterns for persons experiencing homelessness (PEH); and 2) how transportation and mobility changes affected access to services …

How Affordable Is Housing In Transit-Oriented Developments?, Reid Ewing, Nicole Iroz-Elardo, Arlie Adkins

TREC Project Briefs

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?

Is Transit-Oriented Development Affordable for Low and Moderate Income Households?, a study funded by the National Institute of Transportation and Communities (NITC), examines housing costs for households living in TODs. Led by Reid Ewing …

Optimizing Housing And Service Locations To Provide Mobility To Meet The Mandated Obligations For Former Offenders To Improve Community Health And Safety, Anne Nordberg, Jaya Davis, Stephen Mattingly, Sarah R. Leat, Mansi Patel, Michael Mitchell, Santhosh Medeti, Craig Keaton, Jobaidul Boni, Jhanvi Manishkum, Alireza Fallahi, Sheida Khademi

TREC Final Reports

Roughly 2,000 inmates return to communities each day in the U.S. Unsuccessful reentry jeopardizes community safety, promotes re-incarceration, and increases costs to taxpayers to support the criminal justice apparatus. Research indicates that strong networks of support reduce recidivism, but most communities remain ill-equipped to successfully support former offenders. Our community partner, Unlocking DOORS in Dallas, TX, is a reentry brokerage firm that coordinates services including housing, mental and physical health services, job retraining, transportation, and parole or probation obligations. This, like most reentry service providers, assists former offenders navigating a patchwork of logistical hurdles including individual offender obligations, scarce offender …

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 …

Navigating Urban Spaces: Indoor & Outdoor Wayfinding Technology For Vision-Impaired People, Martin Swobodzinski, Amy T. Parker

TREC Project Briefs

Navigating an unfamiliar place is uniquely challenging for people with disabilities. People with blindness, deafblindness, visual impairment or low vision, as well as those who use wheelchairs, can travel more independently in urban areas with the aid of effective wayfinding technology. A new report from the National Institute for Transportation and Communities (NITC) explores how to leverage low-cost methods to enable people to more easily move through public, urban indoor and outdoor spaces.

The study, led by Martin Swobodzinski and Amy Parker of Portland State University, used focus groups, two case studies, and an in-person structured wayfinding experience on the …