Transportation Commons^™

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 …

A Constraint Programming Approach To Load Capacity Planning In Container Vessels, Byung Kwon Lee, Joyce M. W. Low

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

A container vessel carries containers of various characteristics, in terms of size, weight, and contents. The cargo load of a container vessel, being subjected to a set of operational conditions and restrictions regarding ship stability and safety, is a fundamental element in decision-making when a shipping line provides logistics services to clients. This study presents a constraint programming-based model for the capacity planning of a container vessel under various operational conditions. The proposed model generates base solutions and is complemented with a rich scenario-based analysis that utilizes real-life ship data of a container vessel operated by a liner shipping company …

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 …

Negotiating Transportation Insecurity: Local Responses And Coping Strategies In San José, Ca, Andrew Ng, Melissa Beresford

Mineta Transportation Institute

People rely on transportation every day to access food, work, and social activities. Transportation insecurity—the lack of regular access to adequate transportation—can therefore cause significant disruptions to livelihoods. Understanding how people experience transportation insecurity in metropolitan areas may contribute to building better transportation systems and help formulate ways to alleviate persistent and underlying transportation issues. In this study, the researchers interviewed San José residents who experience transportation insecurity to better understand their experiences and identify the major ways that they cope with lack of adequate transportation. The researchers then used inductive techniques for thematic text analysis to identify patterns major …

A Geographical Contribution On Interurban Passenger Rail Transportation In The United States, Matthieu Schorung

Mineta Transportation Institute

Why does the rail infrastructure of the United States lag behind those of many other developed countries? Where is U.S. high-speed rail? This research approaches this in a dilemma by exploring Amtrak’s traditional rail services and high-speed rail projects in the nation to understand the workings of public rail transportation policies, what they contain, and how they are developed and pursued by the different stakeholders. This research utilizes case studies and a multiscale approach to analyze the territorialization of intercity rail transportation policies. The analysis demonstrates the emergence of a bottom-up approach to projects, notably apparent in the California HSR …

Modeling Factors Contributing To Dockless E-Scooter Injury Accidents In Austin, Texas, Amin Azimian, Junfeng Jiao

Research Collection College of Integrative Studies

Objective: Over the past few years, increased e-scooter ridership has raised concerns about the growing number of injury accidents involving e-scooters. Additionally, given the lack of appropriate e-scooter accident data, the extent to which built environment and socioeconomic factors affect e-scooter safety is unclear. In consideration of these issues, this study was aimed at identifying the factors contributing to the number of e-scooter injury accidents in Austin. Methods: We developed zero-inflated Poisson (ZIP) and zero-inflated negative binomial (ZINB) models on the basis of 2018 dockless e-scooter injury accident data collected from the Patch platform. The results indicated that the ZIP …

Rural Pregnant Women’S Experiences With Substance Use Disorder: A Qualitative Study, Cami Weber

Dissertations

Rural pregnant women with substance use disorder (SUD) are an understudied vulnerable population that often experiences poor pregnancy outcomes (Higgins et al., 2019; Jumah, 2016; Kramlich et al., 2018; Shaw et al., 2015). Despite the high prevalence and high burden associated with SUD, rural women are less likely than non-pregnant women to seek addiction treatment and complete an outpatient treatment program during pregnancy (Shaw et al., 2015). This study aimed to give voice to rural Missouri women with SUD. The research questions explored the life experiences and motivations for seeking treatment using a qualitative, descriptive research design with grounded theory …

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 …

Psu Student Research From The Trb 2022 Annual Meeting: Effect Of Covid-19 On Property Value Premium Of Light Rail Transit, Sangwan Lee

PSU Transportation Seminars

The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted health and transformed many aspects of our lives, such as travel behavior and residential location preference. For instance, since the outbreak, there was a sharp decline in the ridership of public transportation. Moreover, since the pandemic, a shifting preference toward suburban and exurban areas from denser urban areas like Central Business Districts has been reported. Accordingly, a question arises whether the plummeted transit ridership, alongside the anecdotal and empirical evidence that some households prefer to disperse away from the cities, could combine to transform the long-standing housing price mechanism related to transit proximity. Thus, we …

Psu Student Research From The Trb 2022 Annual Meeting: Drone Facility Location Considering Coverage Reliability: Application To Emergency Medical Scenarios, Darshan Chauhan

PSU Transportation Seminars

Public service agencies like hospitals, fire, rescue, and police departments are required to maintain a high level of service. These service standards often come as reliability constraints. For example, fire-related incidents require a 90% response rate in 4 minutes. We consider a case study of tackling out-of-hospital cardiac events using AED-enabled drones in Portland, OR. Environmental factors, majorly wind speed and direction, significantly impact drone performance. We formulate the drone location problem as a robust multi-period maximum coverage facility location problem. We model the coverage reliability constraint as a chance constraint on failure probabilities. For our context, multiple periods translate …

Ever More Difficult: For Migrants Reaching The Greek Island Of Lesvos, Conditions Grow More Dire By The Day, Chloe Powers

Colby Magazine

Chloé Powers ’19 is the coordinator of Moms2Moms, a grassroots project providing housing to single mothers seeking asylum, and she’s involved in several other migrant solidarity initiatives, including search and rescue efforts, LGBTIQ+ migrant solidarity, and local mutual-aid projects. With the images she has taken, Powers shares her experiences from the Greek island of Lesvos.

Mobility Of Older Adults In Mexico City: A Mixed Methods Approach, Jessica Villena Sanchez

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation covers the topic of the mobility of older adults in Mexico City using a mixed methods approach. First, I looked at the literature to uncover what is known about elderly mobilities coming from the Global South. Second, I analyzed the 2017 Household Origin Destination Survey to reveal travel behavior patterns and transport mode choice of older adults in Mexico City. Third, I revealed mobility experiences from older adults living in different neighborhoods in Mexico City by conducting twenty two telephone interviews. Lastly, I created joint displays that included both previous results to better understand how the findings from …

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 …

On The Feasibility Of Speed Limits In Ocean Container Shipping, Manwo Ng

Information Technology & Decision Sciences Faculty Publications

The maritime industry is witnessing an increasingly loud call to contribute to the global trend towards environmental sustainability and decarbonization. One possible policy measure is the use of speed limits to reduce harmful emissions from ocean shipping. While the idea of slowing down ships to obey speed limits might seem intuitive, one key distinguishing characteristic of container shipping is that it is designed to adhere to a fixed, typically weekly, sailing schedule. This paper contributes to the literature investigating the feasibility of speed limits by demonstrating that speed limits are not always feasible in container shipping because of the rigid …

The Need To Enact Federal, Environmental-Friendly Incentives To Facilitate Infrastructure Growth Of Electric Automobiles, Vamsikrishna Karanam

Honors Undergraduate Theses

As newer technological advancements are developed and introduced, a question regarding their adoption into society has become known. If such advancements in technology mutually benefit the people using them as well as the environment we live in, should there not be provisions in place to incentivize the creation and purchase of these technological advancements.

Electric vehicles are an advancement of technology that is currently available for widespread adoption in the transportation sector of our country. However, questions as to why EVs should be adopted will be asked by critics. That is the question this thesis attempts to answer. Our global …

Public Transportation In Central Florida: Setting The Tone For Public Rail Use, Zoe Johnson

Honors Undergraduate Theses

The purpose of this research is to analyze the use of the public train usage in Central Florida to determine the feasibility of high-speed rail usage in the future. This study will be split into parts and expanded upon. The first part will observe rider perspective, values, and issues regarding rail transportation as is available in Central Florida. In further installations, which will be conducted separately from this thesis, there will be an analysis of the providers of rail transportation. It is hypothesized that there will be a moderate demand for rail transportation used by the public.

Original: The main …

Setting The Agenda: The Legal And Historical Context To Best Understand How Transportation Technology Might Be Regulated To Combat Forced Labor, Brittany Eastman

Journal of Law and Mobility

Transportation is a piece of all human activity. As individuals and as a society, the logistics of getting people and goods from one place to another is a question we answer countless times a day. Just today, billions of people drove to work, took the bus to school, used a rideshare to get to the store, or took the train into the city to enjoy an evening out on the town. This list does not even consider all the items people have ordered online which will be shipped and delivered to homes. Even more exciting is the innovation that inspired …

A Primer On The Human Readiness Level Scale (Ansi/Hfes 400-2021), Kelly Steelman, Holly Handley, Katie Plant (Ed.), Gesa Praetorius (Ed.)

Engineering Management & Systems Engineering Faculty Publications

"The Human Readiness Level (HRL) Scale is a simple 9-level scale for evaluating, tracking, and communicating the readiness of a technology for safe and effective human use. It is modeled after the well-established Technology Readiness Level (TRL) framework that is used throughout the government and industry to communicate the maturity of a technology and to support decision making about technology acquisition. Here we (1) introduce the ANSI/HFES 400-2021 Standard that defines the HRL scale and (2) provide concrete examples of evaluation activities to support the application of HRLs in the development of automated driving systems."

Schedule Reliability In Liner Shipping Timetable Design: A Convex Programming Approach, Abraham Zhang, Zhichao Zheng, Chung-Piaw Teo

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Container liner shipping is the primary mode of moving manufactured products across continents. Partly due to inherent uncertainties at sea and ports, the liner shipping industry has long had a notorious reputation of schedule delays and unreliable on-time performance. This paper formulates a new approach to incorporate schedule reliability targets in liner shipping timetable design, to balance bunker consumption, time taken for the voyage, and schedule delays. We first model a surrogate problem using a copositive program through a moment decomposition approach and solve it as a convex semidefinite programming relaxation. We next incorporate schedule reliability targets implicitly by exploiting …