Urban Studies Commons^™

Advisory Bike Lanes In North America, Michael Williams

PSU Transportation Seminars

Despite being used successfully for decades in Europe, Advisory Bike Lanes are an emerging facility type in North America and can be an effective tool for communities wishing to provide bicycle lanes on streets that are otherwise too narrow to accommodate them. This talk will introduce the concept and operation of advisory bike lanes and look at some lessons learned from the early installations of this facility in the U.S. and Canada.

The Effects Of Demand-Responsive Parking On Transit Usage And Congestion: Evidence From Sfpark, Nicole S. Ngo, Chandra Kiran Krishnamurth

TREC Final Reports

Parking is a serious issue in many urban areas, especially those experiencing rapid population growth. To address this problem, some cities have implemented demand-responsive pricing programs, where parking prices vary depending on the occupancy rate in a previous period. Yet, few empirical studies have rigorously evaluated these programs, though they have the potential to improve turnover and much needed parking availability in growing cities with limited infrastructure. In this study, we investigate the impacts of SFpark, a demand-responsive pricing parking program in San Francisco that began in 2011. We focus on metered, on-street parking and exploit the timing of SFpark …

Tod Beats Tad In Affordability Showdown, Brenda Scheer

TREC Project Briefs

A research project compares transportation affordability between transitoriented development (TOD) and transit-adjacent development (TAD).

How Does Transportation Affordability Vary Among Tods, Tads, And Other Areas?, Brenda Scheer, Reid Ewing, Keunhyun Park, Shabnam Sifat Ara Khan

TREC Final Reports

Transit-oriented development (TOD) has gained popularity worldwide as a sustainable form of urbanism; it concentrates development near a transit station so as to reduce auto-dependency and increase ridership. Existing travel behavior studies in the context of TOD, however, are limited in terms of small sample size, inconsistent TOD classification methods, and failure to control for residential self-selection. Thus, this study has three research questions. First, how can we distinguish between Transit-oriented development (TOD) and Transit-adjacent development (TAD)? Second, how do travel behaviors vary between TODs and TADs? Third, how does transportation affordability vary between TODs and TADs? This study utilizes …

When Cities Shrink, Affordability Does Too, Joanna Ganning, Jenna Rosie Tighe

TREC Project Briefs

To better understand the real costs of housing and transportation in a declining urban context, NITC researchers implemented a household survey to determine whether the assumptions made in existing research literature and in the LAI regarding household expenditures and transportation accessibility hold true when analyzing shrinking cities—generally, cities characterized by a long-term loss in occupied housing units. The project was led by Joanna Ganning of Cleveland State University, who has conducted previous research into shrinking cities with the support of the NITC program.

Impacts Of Bus Rapid Transit (Brt) On Surrounding Residential Property Values, Victoria Perk, Martin Catalá, Maximillian Mantius, Katrina Corcoran

TREC Final Reports

As bus rapid transit (BRT) grows in popularity in the United States, a better understanding of the mode’s impacts on land uses and property values is needed. Economic theory suggests, and literature has shown, that people are willing to pay higher housing costs to lower their costs of transportation to areas of economic activity. Does high-quality BRT service reliably provide such access and, thereby, increase residential property values? The hypothesis is that property values are higher closer to BRT stations, reflecting a premium for the access provided by the BRT service to various goods, services, employment, education, and recreation. There …

Homes Close To Fast Transit: The Value Is Still Rising, Victoria Perk, Martin Catalá, Maximillian Mantius, Katrina Corcoran

TREC Project Briefs

This research contributes to the relatively small body of literature on property value impacts of BRT in the U.S. by conducting a case study on Lane Transit District’s EmX BRT service in Eugene, Oregon, using econometric modeling techniques to estimate changes in property values associated with the BRT. The analysis is based on hedonic price regression analysis, where sale prices are modeled using several property characteristics that contribute to the market or sale price. The findings of this research indicate that the EmX BRT system does positively impact surrounding single-family home sale prices.

What Do We Know About Location Affordability In U.S. Shrinking Cities?, Joanna Ganning, Jenna Rosie Tighe

TREC Final Reports

In late 2013, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) launched the Location Affordability Index (LAI) portal. Their dataset uses models to estimate typical amount households spend on housing and transportation at the block group level, and calculates “H + T Affordability,” the percent of household income spent on these items. In our previous research, we analyzed 81 shrinking cities to determine how location affordability differs across various neighborhoods. Our results suggest that households in declining neighborhoods, as compared to stable or redeveloping neighborhoods, face the greatest H + T affordability challenges in shrinking cities. Furthermore, in declining neighborhoods, …

Annual Metro Regional Trail Count And Why Local Extrapolation Factors Matter, Geoff Gibson

PSU Transportation Seminars

Metro, Portland's regional governing agency, conducts annual two-hour counts along its regional trail every September. This upcoming fall (2017) will be the 10th year that the counts have been held, which means we at Metro can finally start seeing noticeable, long-lasting trends in the regional trail network. Perhaps more importantly, we are seeing how these data have directly impacted investments in future trail, bicycle, and pedestrian projects.

This seminar will cover the history of the program, details of how it's conducted and why it's conducted that way, how data are used (including an inside look at future iterations of Metro's …

Impact Of Bike Facilities On Residential Property Prices, Wei Shi

PSU Transportation Seminars

As many cities are investing in street improvement or transportation infrastructure upgrade projects to provide better bike access or more complete bike networks, the economic value of bike infrastructure and bike facilities remains an area where many practitioners, planners and policy makers are seeking more conclusive evidence. Using residential property values as indicators of consumer preferences for bicycle infrastructure, this study focuses on advanced bike facilities which represent higher levels of bike priority or bike infrastructure investments that have been shown to be more desirable to a larger portion of the population. Estimating ordinary least squares hedonic pricing models and …

Realistic Or Utopian? Coordinating Transit And Land Use To Achieve Equitable Transit-Oriented Development, Ian Carlton

PSU Transportation Seminars

Equitable transit-oriented development (E-TOD)—the prioritization of social equity as an outcome of TOD implementation—has become a U.S. DOT policy stance, an objective of many other government bodies, and part of many NGOs' missions. But is it feasible to coordinate transit and land use in ways that allow us to achieve these goals, or is this a classic example of a wicked problem?

This talk will use Portland as a case study to explore some of the internal contradictions inherent in E-TOD goals, the systemic challenges that must be considered, and glimmers of hope for delivering E-TOD. Transportation and land use …

Webinar: The Association Between Light Rail Transit, Streetcars And Bus Rapid Transit On Jobs, People And Rents, Arthur C. Nelson

TREC Webinar Series

What are the job, residential development and market rent outcomes of Light Rail Transit (LRT), Streetcar Transit (SCT) and Bus Rapid Transit (BRT)?

LRT, SCR and BRT investments are spreading rapidly across the country but there is scant evidence of their effect on where people work and live, and effects on market rents as an indicator of value. This webinar will summarize several years of NITC-sponsored research into development outcomes associated with these transit investments. The webinar will be led by NITC researcher Arthur C. Nelson who was the principal investigator of two projects: Do TODs Make a Difference? and …

Planning Transportation For Recreational Areas, Anne Dunning

PSU Transportation Seminars

Population growth and increased accessibility of formerly remote destinations have created new needs for planning mobility to and within recreational areas.

Transportation planners studying recreational travel face unusual travel-demand peaks, travelers who are often unfamiliar with their surroundings, and a uniquely important need for traveler and community communication. Planners must consider what characteristics of an individual area make it attractive to visitors, as well as local goals for the special resources of the area.

This presentation will characterize unique facets of mobility in recreational areas, and pose approaches to planning transportation systems to serve them.

Can Location Value Capture Pay For Transit? Organizational Challenges Of Transforming Theory Into Practice, Deborah Salon

PSU Transportation Seminars

Successful public transit systems increase the value of locations they serve. Capturing this location value to help fund transit is often sensible, but challenging.

This presentation will define location value capture, and synthesize lessons learned from six European and North American transit agencies that have experience with location value capture funding.

The opportunities for and barriers to implementing location value capture fall into three categories: (1) agency institutional authority, (2) agency organizational mission, and (3) public support for transit.

When any of these factors is incompatible with a location value capture strategy, implementation becomes difficult. In four of the cases …

Developing A Model For Transit Oriented Development In Latino Immigrant Communities: A National Study Of Equity And Tod, Gerardo Francisco Sandoval

TREC Final Reports

This research project is a continuation of a previous NITC-funded study. The first study compared the MacArthur Park TOD in Los Angeles to the Fruitvale Village TOD in Oakland. The findings from this new study further validate the key findings from the first study. This new comparative case study analyzed the extension of Los Angeles’ Gold Line into Boyle Heights and the revitalization linked to Boyle Heights due to two TODs built in that neighborhood. I conclude from all four cases that TODs can help serve as catalysts for neighborhood revitalization in low-income communities by paying attention and building upon …

Hilltop Planning Workshop Team, Lea Anderson

PSU Transportation Seminars

"Oregon Health & Science University Night Access Plan"

Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) is a nationally renowned academic, research and health institution. At its current capacity, OHSU sees over 250,000 patients a year, teaches 5,000 students, employs about 16,000 people, and utilizes over 2,000 contract workers. Simply put, there are a lot of people who need to access the OHSU central campuses (Marquam Hill and South Waterfront) every day. Furthermore, because OHSU is a medical and research institution, there are large numbers of people needing to access the campuses at all hours of the day and night.

Over the …

Is It Working? Are The Region's And City's Transportation Policies And Actions Moving Us In Their Desired Directions?, Roger Geller

PSU Transportation Seminars

The City of Portland and the Metropolitan Region have strong policies in place to encourage transportation through means other than the single-occupancy vehicle. Both governments have numeric goals for the proportion of trips to be made by walking, bicycling, transit, shared vehicles, working at home and driving alone. Indeed, the City of Portland desires that by 2035 no more than thirty percent of commute trips be made by people driving alone. Similar policies have driven transportation planning in the city and region for decades.

To understand if these policies will be effective it's necessary to understand whether their antecedents have …

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 …

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 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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

Mobility And Accessibility In Shrinking Cities, Joanna Ganning

TREC Project Briefs

A University of Utah researcher explores the synthesis of mobility- and accessibility-based transportation planning in the context of urban decay.

Transit Can Inspire Neighborhood Revitalization, Gerardo Francisco Sandoval, Roanel Herrera

TREC Project Briefs

In-depth case studies explore how transit-oriented development can revitalize neighborhoods without displacing low-income residents.

Methods To Increase Fuel Efficiency In Post-Production Automobiles, Hope J. Corsair

TREC Final Reports

While much focus has been placed upon the identification of completely novel technologies for the future of personal transportation world-wide, the majority of the US and the world at large will be reliant upon petrol for personal transportation well into the future. While EVs, alternative fuels, and hybrid cars have all started to make an impact on the market, with varying amounts of success and consumer accessibility, their relative market share is and is projected to continue to be low. Furthermore, a large segment of the population is not readily able to ever purchase a new car as a consumer …

Transit And Economic Resilience, Arthur C. Nelson, Matt Miller, Joanna P. Ganning, Philip Stoker, Jenny H. Liu, Reid Ewing

Urban Studies and Planning Faculty Publications and Presentations

Do fixed-guideway transit systems facilitate resilience with metropolitan areas? There is little literature making this connection theoretically and none testing it empirically. This paper helps close this gap in both respects. In evaluating metropolitan areas with light rail transit systems the authors find evidence that transit corridors on the whole performed better than control corridors during the recovery period of two recessions: that of the early 2000s and the so-called Great Recession. In particular, during the Great Recession transit corridors outperformed control corridors among many economic sectors. Outcomes were more impressive during recoveries from both the recession of the early …

Office Rent Premiums With Respect To Distance From Light Rail Transit Stations In Dallas And Denver, Arthur C. Nelson, Dejan Eskic, Joanna P. Ganning, Shima Hamidi, Susan J. Petheram, Jenny H. Liu, Reid Ewing

Urban Studies and Planning Faculty Publications and Presentations

It seems an article-of-faith that real estate markets respond more favorably to location within one-half mile of transit stations. Planning and public decision-makers have thus drawn half-mile (or smaller) circles around rail transit stations assuming larger planning areas would not be supported by the evidence. Recent research, however, has shown market-responsiveness well beyond one-half mile. We contribute to this literature by evaluating the distance-decay function of office rents in metropolitan Dallas and Denver with respect to light rail transit (LRT) station distance. Using a quadratic transformation of distance we find office rent premiums extending in the range of two miles …

Commuter Rail Transit And Economic Development, Arthur C. Nelson, Matt Miller, Keuntae Kim, Joanna P. Ganning, Jenny H. Liu, Reid Ewing

Urban Studies and Planning Faculty Publications and Presentations

Commuter rail transit (CRT) is a form of rail passenger service connecting downtowns and other major activity centers with suburban commuter towns and beyond. Between 1834 and 1973, only three public CRT systems were built in the U.S. serving New York, Chicago and then Boston. There are now 25 such systems. Modern CRT systems aim to expand economic development in metropolitan areas. But do they? This paper evaluates the economic development performance of five modern CRT systems. The authors find that several economic sectors perform well within 0.50 miles of CRT stations. The authors offer planning and policy implications.