Urban Studies and Planning Commons^™

Automated Bus Dispatching, Operations Control, And Service Reliability: The Initial Tri-Met Experience, James G. Strathman, Kenneth Dueker, Thomas J. Kimpel, Rick Gerhart, Ken Turner, Pete Taylor, Steve Callas, David Griffin

Center for Urban Studies Publications and Reports

This paper presents findings on initial changes in service reliability following Tri-Met’s deployment of a new bus dispatching system using automatic vehicle location and automatic passenger counter technology. Changes in on-time performance, headway variation, run time variation, and run times were determined with respect to pre-deployment levels. Changes in headway variation and run times were also used to estimate the initial benefits of the new system with respect to operating costs, passenger waiting, and passenger travel time.

Community Building Sourcebook: Land Use And Transportation Initiatives In Portland, Oregon, Tri-County Metropolitan Transportation District Of Oregon

TriMet Collection

No abstract provided.

Orbit: The Oregon Road Base Information Team Draft Summary Report Ii, Paul Bender, Mark Bosworth, Kenneth Dueker

Center for Urban Studies Publications and Reports

Data sharing among organizations has the potential to 1) decrease long-term costs of obtaining and maintaining data and 2) to facilitate data consistency and accuracy. Consistency includes both completeness and currency, while accuracy includes positional and relative accuracy of transportation features and their attributes, i.e. any data element related to roads or other transportation infrastructure.

ORBIT, the Oregon Road Base Information Team, is an ongoing effort to create an accessible and comprehensive GIS transportation base for use by public and private agencies with shared stewardship through stakeholder partnerships and standards. ORBIT is occurring concurrently with an effort at the national …

Pedestrian Infrastructure Improvements: Effects On Transit Use And Perceptions Of The Pedestrian Environment In Portland's Roseway Neighborhood, James G. Strathman, Kenneth Dueker, Peter Mye, Joyce A. Felton

Center for Urban Studies Publications and Reports

Over the past two years the Pedestrian Transportation (PTP) of the City of Portland has been engaged in a project to encourage walking and transit use through targeted infrastructure improvements. These improvements are intended to enhance pedestrian access to transit service by aiding street crossing and providing more amenities at bus stops. Other improvements include landscaping, sidewalks, curb extensions and ramps, and improved street lighting. One of the basic assumptions of this project is that the pedestrian environment is related to transportation choices. This report explores that assumption.

Evaluation Of The Lloyd District Parking Programs, City Of Portland: The Impacts Of Parking Pricing And Transportation Management Association Programs In A High-Density, Mixed-Use District, Martha J. Bianco

Center for Urban Studies Publications and Reports

This is the final report of the Lloyd District transportation management program and the subsequent survey.

During the one year that had elapsed between the implementation of the Lloyd District transportation and management programs and the survey information collected in this study, the drive alone mode for the trip to work by employees in the Lloyd District had decreased by 7 percent. For the District as a whole, the drive alone commute share is about 56 percent. These are remarkable achievements.

Gis-T Data Sharing Issues, Kenneth Dueker, J. Allison Butler

Center for Urban Studies Publications and Reports

The purpose of this paper is to develop a framework and principles for sharing of transportation data. The framework is intended to clarify roles of the various participants and the principles are intended to provide guidance for the participants. Both the framework and the principles are based on a GIS-T data model that defines relations among transportation data elements. (See Dueker and Butler (1998) for a detailed description of the data model. A simplified version is provided in the next section.) The data model guards against ambiguities and provides a basis for the development of the framework and principles for …

Light Rail Transit Impacts In Portland: The First Ten Years, Kenneth Dueker, Martha J. Bianco

Center for Urban Studies Publications and Reports

This paper examines how the first decade of light rail transit (LRT) in the Portland region has affected auto ownership, mode share, density, and property values. The empirical analysis provides evidence that light rail has had some positive effect of rail on single-family property values, transit use, and slower growth of two-plus car households in the outer part of the LRT corridor as compared to an outer part of a parallel bus corridor. These effects may be the result of households self-selecting to make housing location decisions where LRT is located, rather than current households changing mode.

This assessment of …

Multiple Stochastic Learning Automata For Vehicle Path Control In An Automated Highway System, Cem Unsal, Pushkin Kachroo, John S. Bay

Electrical & Computer Engineering Faculty Research

This paper suggests an intelligent controller for an automated vehicle planning its own trajectory based on sensor and communication data. The intelligent controller is designed using the learning stochastic automata theory. Using the data received from on-board sensors, two automata (one for lateral actions, one for longitudinal actions) can learn the best possible action to avoid collisions. The system has the advantage of being able to work in unmodeled stochastic environments, unlike adaptive control methods or expert systems. Simulations for simultaneous lateral and longitudinal control of a vehicle provide encouraging results

Incident Management In Intelligent Transportation Systems, Kaan Ozbay, Pushkin Kachroo

Electrical & Computer Engineering Faculty Research

Since the conception of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) in the 1980s, many transportation researchers have also worked on the development of incident management models and integrated systems for real-time operations. ITS created the required infrastructure for collecting, processing, and managing real-time traffic data that can be used to develop on-line incident management strategies. This book provides the reader with a broad picture of the overall incident management process in the context of ITS along with a quick review of the models and systems developed by numerous researchers worldwide. This book is a direct result of the long-term incident management research …

Feedback Control Theory For Dynamic Traffic Assignment, Pushkin Kachroo, Kaan Ozbay

Electrical & Computer Engineering Faculty Research

Traditionally, traffic assignment and traffic control in general have mostly been performed using optimisation techniques which do not lend themselves to real-time control. This volume presents feedback control techniques for performing traffic assignment in real-time, where traffic diversion control variables are instantaneous functions of sensed traffic variables. The authors outline the whole theory behind Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) which allows traffic variables to be sensed in real time and microprocessors to use the sensed traffic variable input to perform the traffic actuation tasks. They show h ow to design feedback controllers to perform dynamic traffic routing and assignment, and present …

Kennedy, 60 Minutes, And Roger Rabbit: Understanding Conspiracy-Theory Explanations Of The Decline Of Urban Mass Transit, Martha J. Bianco

Center for Urban Studies Publications and Reports

This paper will review the history of the GM Conspiracy Myth, as well as what legal theorists refer to as "the facts in the case." The legal explanation of what really happened goes only so far, though. The whole story about the decline of mass transit in the U.S. is a story about the failure of public policy and about conflict among competing constituencies in the transportation policy process. This paper will very briefly discuss this failure and this conflict and will then conclude with a consideration of - or at least a hypothesis for - the endurance of the …

The Connection Between Public Transit And Employment, Thomas W. Sanchez

Center for Urban Studies Publications and Reports

Even with a considerable amount of attention being paid to the role of public transportation in addressing inner-city mobility problems, there is very little evidence of the degree to which one affects the other. In other words, little research has specifically focused on how labor participation is impacted by increases in public transportation availability. Research on the spatial mismatch hypothesis has dealt with the relationship between labor participation and the spatial separation of jobs and houses; however, most analyses concentrate on commuting time or distance as a function of auto accessibility. Few, if any, studies have considered the relative impacts …

The Politics Of Implementation: Oregon's Statewide Transportation Planning Rule - What's Been Accomplished, Martha J. Bianco, Sy Adler

Center for Urban Studies Publications and Reports

This paper is a case study of the evolution of Oregon’s groundbreaking Transportation Planning Rule, from its adoption in 1991, up through present amendments. Our analysis is an assessment of how private- and public-sector investors grapple with the coproduction of the built environment under the constraints of a value system that emanates from the state, shepherded by litigious public interest groups. In this case, this value system is articulated in the Oregon administrative rule known as the Transportation Planning Rule. This Rule emphasizes a reduction in the reliance on automobiles and, among other things, requires a decrease in vehicle miles …

Marketing Central City Residence To An Aging Baby Boom: The Transportation Angle, Daphne Spain, Thomas W. Sanchez

Center for Urban Studies Publications and Reports

This paper proposes that the aging baby boom will contribute significantly to transportation problems in the future because 1) current land use patterns necessitate dependence on cars; and 2) aging baby boom women will drive more than elderly women do now. Policies that promote central city residence by stressing the transportation advantages of high-density living, therefore, should have particular appeal to baby boom women seeking prolonged independence. Such policies would also serve the interests of localities by reducing traffic congestion, pollution, and further sprawl. We suggest that a combination of direct and indirect housing policies comparable to those that financed …

The Impact Of Congestion Pricing And Parking Taxes On Spatial Competition, Anthony M. Rufolo, Martha J. Bianco

Center for Urban Studies Publications and Reports

Policymakers seeking to reduce reliance on single-occupant automobiles are giving serious consideration to methods to price roads during periods of congest ion and to increase the cost of parking. Such policies are intended to induce increases in carpooling and in the use of mass transit; however, they may have unintended consequences that counteract these goals in the long run. In particular, actual implementation of such policies may create differential price increases that affect the spatial competition for markets between firms located in the central city and those in the suburbs. Analyzing such policies using the spatial competition models of location …

Validation Of Waimss Incident Duration Estimation Model, Wei Wu, Pushkin Kachroo, Kaan Ozbay

Electrical & Computer Engineering Faculty Research

This paper presents an effort to validate the traffic incident duration estimation model of WAIMSS (wide area incident management support system). Duration estimation model of WAIMSS predicts the incident duration based on an estimation tree which was calibrated using incident data collected in Northern Virginia. Due to the limited sample size, a full scale test of the distribution, mean and variance of incident duration was performed only for the root node of the estimation tree, white only mean tests were executed at all other nodes whenever a data subset was available. Further studies were also conducted on the model error …

Wide-Area Incident Management System On The Internet, Kaan Ozbay, Pushkin Kachroo

Electrical & Computer Engineering Faculty Research

The incident management process consists of four sequential steps-incident detection, response, clearance and recovery. Each of these components comprises of a number of operations and coordinated decision-making between the agencies involved. The provision of computer based support tools for the personnel involved will help develop appropriate strategies and increase efficiency and expediency. Existing systems are developed on various traditional computing platforms. However, with the advent of World Wide Web and Internet based programming tools such as Java, it is now possible to develop platform independent decision support tools for the incident management agencies. Any agency will be able to use …

The Oregon Dot Slow-Speed Weigh-In--Motion (Swim) Project: Final Report, James G. Strathman

Center for Urban Studies Publications and Reports

Weigh-in-motion (WIM) systems have provided an effective means of data collection for pavement research and facility design, traffic monitoring, and weight enforcement for over 40 years. In weight enforcement, WIM systems have been increasingly used to screen potentially overweight vehicles. Vehicles that exceed weight limits as measured on a WIM scale are then weighed on a static scale, which is subject to accuracy standards specified by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (1998). The use of WIM for screening purposes reduces queuing at weigh stations, resulting in considerable savings for both truckers and enforcement agencies. To date, however, WIM …

Automated Bus Dispatching, Operations, Control, And Service Reliability: Baseline Analysis, James G. Strathman, Kenneth Dueker, Thomas J. Kimpel, Rick Gerhart, Ken Turner, Pete Taylor, Steve Callas, David Griffin, Janet Hopper

Center for Urban Studies Publications and Reports

The authors of this report are engaged in a long term project to assess the impacts of Tri-Met's BDS on service reliability and transit use. The framework designed for this assessment focuses on documenting service reliability and passenger activity at three major junctures:

• The pre-operational (baseline) period;

• The initial (passive) period following implementation of the new system, when both drivers and dispatchers have access to schedule adherence information in real time, but before the development and use of operations control practices that exploit the information generated by the system;

• Full implementation, when operations control practices are defined …

Household Travel/Activity Decisions: Who Wants To Travel?, Catherine T. Lawson

Center for Urban Studies Publications and Reports

Researchers are using activity-based survey data to better understand the nature of the derived demand for travel. However, a strong theoretical construct for derived demand has yet to be developed. In order to understand the ramifications of considering travel as a derived demand, it is necessary to review some of the basic tenets of economics.

Some activities require travel (i.e. shopping or picking up children from daycare), while others are conducted entirely within the confines of the home. There is a set of activities that can be conducted either in or out of the home. A need to travel arises …

Effects Of Light Rail Transit In Portland: Implications For Transit-Oriented Development Design Concepts, Kenneth Dueker, Martha J. Bianco

Center for Urban Studies Publications and Reports

In the Portland, Oregon, region many local planners have embraced the neotraditional planning concept in the form of transit-oriented development (TOD). One of the primary components of transit-oriented development, light rail transit (LRT), has been in place in Portland long enough to provide data for analysis. Because neotraditional planners often emphasize LRT as a crucial element in decreasing auto use and in encouraging high-density development, this paper examines the effects of LRT in the Portland region including mode share, density, and property values. The empirical analysis provides evidence that light rail alone has not been sufficient to have an appreciable …

A Gis Methodology For Assessing The Growth Impacts Of Highway Improvements, Thomas W. Sanchez, Kenneth Dueker

Center for Urban Studies Publications and Reports

This paper presents a methodology to assess the induced land use effects of state highway improvements on urban development patterns. The methodology is applied to the case study City of Hillsboro, Oregon and illustrates a framework for data management and analysis. A set of temporal land use characteristics and spatial measures are used as predictors of urban development activities resulting from highway accessibility improvements. A multiple regression analysis tests the significance of these variables in predicting rates and locations of urban development. The primary objective of this research is to identify the relationship between capacity increasing highway improvements and changes …

Orbit: The Oregon Road Base Information Team, A Draft Summary Report, Mark Bosworth, Kenneth Dueker, Philip J. Wuest

Center for Urban Studies Publications and Reports

It is clear that transportation organizations across the nation are integrating GIS into operations at many different levels—from day to day use for data display, to full-scale enterprise level integration for operations, inventory management, research and a variety of other purposes. The cost of building and maintaining a current and accurate GIS database can be substantial within any given organization. For some smaller level organizations—small counties, cities or special districts, the cost of gathering data, organizing it and implementing systems within expensive software on an expensive operating platform can be downright discouraging. Also, as more complex data structures are accumulated …

Transit Time Internet Access, Janet Vorvick, Kenneth Dueker

Center for Urban Studies Publications and Reports

Transit Time Internet Access (TTIA) is a World Wide Web (WWW) application which delivers real-time bus schedule information to users of the Internet. TTIA allows a bus rider to request and receive schedule deviation information about a specific bus at a specific timepoint. This report explains the design of TTIA, the specifics of the implementation, the issues of scope, the problems that were encountered and some conclusions.

A Proposed Method Of Transportation Feature Identification, J. Allison Butler, Kenneth Dueker

Center for Urban Studies Publications and Reports

Geographic information systems (GIS) are being increasingly deployed by transportation agencies to help them display, review, and utilize data. The primary items of interest are transportation facilities and services, which may take the form of highways, airports, bus routes, and seaports, among others. Using GIS software, transportation facilities are represented as geometric shapes; i.e., points, lines, and areas. However, it is increasingly apparent to GIS users in the field of transportation that a geometry-based approach is not sufficient.

The offered solution is to develop a feature-based GIS approach for transportation. The central requirement of such an approach is to have …

Simulation Study Of Learning Automata Games In Automated Highway Systems, Cem Unsal, Pushkin Kachroo, John S. Bay

Electrical & Computer Engineering Faculty Research

One of the most important issues in Automated Highway System (AHS) deployment is intelligent vehicle control. While the technology to safely maneuver vehicles exists, the problem of making intelligent decisions to improve a single vehicle’s travel time and safety while optimizing the overall traffic flow is still a stumbling block. We propose an artificial intelligence technique called stochastic learning automata to design an intelligent vehicle path controller. Using the information obtained by on-board sensors and local communication modules, two automata are capable of learning the best possible (lateral and longitudinal) actions to avoid collisions. This learning method is capable of …

Sliding Mode For User Equilibrium Dynamic Traffic Routing Control, Pushkin Kachroo, Kaan Ozbay

Electrical & Computer Engineering Faculty Research

Presents a solution to the user equilibrium dynamic traffic routing (DTR) problem for a point diversion case using feedback control methodology. The sliding mode control technique which is a robust control methodology applicable to nonlinear systems in canonical form is employed to solve the user equilibrium DTR problem. The canonical form for this problem is obtained by using a feedback linearization technique, and the uncertainties of the system are countered by using the sliding mode principle. Simulation results show promising results.

Issues In The Design Of A Stop-Level Transit Patronage Model, James G. Strathman, Kenneth Dueker, Zhongren Peng

Center for Urban Studies Publications and Reports

Tri-Met, the transit agency serving the Portland, Oregon metropolitan area is implementing a new bus dispatching system (BDS) that includes automated vehicle location (AVL) technology. An important objective in the agency's decision to invest in a new dispatching system was to maintain or improve service reliability in an urban environment characterized by rapid growth and worsening traffic congestion.

Exploring And Visualizing The Census Transportation Planning Package (Ctpp) Urban And Statewide Elements, Thomas J. Kimpel, Kenneth Dueker, Philip J. Wuest, David R. Brooks

Center for Urban Studies Publications and Reports

The purpose of this report is to document the types of transportation analyses that can be undertaken with the Census Transportation Planning Package (CTPP). In particular, this report focuses on exploring and visualizing the various elements of the CTPP data set. It is structured as a series of small-scale studies that have incorporated the use of CTPP data in order to generate information on a number of transportation-related topics. A general overview of each study is given, along with a description of the CTPP data used in the analysis, and a brief interpretation of the results. It is hoped that …

Parking Strategies To Attract Auto Users To Public Transportation, Martha J. Bianco, Kenneth Dueker, James G. Strathman

Center for Urban Studies Publications and Reports

No abstract provided.