Transportation Commons^™

Living Streets: A Pathway Toward Inclusive, Equitable, And Accessible Pedestrian Streets, Eavan Moore, Kevin Tracy, Jason Nolin, Zoie Wesenberg, Oscar Saucedo-Andrade, Kate Wihtol

Master of Urban and Regional Planning Workshop Projects

Since 2009, the Portland Bureau of Transportation (PBOT) has aimed to prioritize pedestrians above all other transportation modes. By putting pedestrians first, cities can improve outcomes for communities and transform streets into welcoming public spaces. Pedestrian streets help achieve this goal by reallocating space that was once dedicated to the movement and storage of cars to spaces for people to interact, socialize, and recreate. By developing a typology and an evaluation framework for pedestrian streets, this document attempts to answer the question, what could pedestrian streets look like in Portland’s Central City?

Small Towns With Big City Problems: Mobility Challenges And Solutions In Our Natural Areas, Danya Rumore, Philip Stoker, Zacharia Levine, Lindsey Romaniello

TREC Project Briefs

Western North America boasts an abundance of scenic mountains, ski areas, stunning desert landscapes and national parks. Living near these natural amenities are small communities, many of which are becoming increasingly popular places to live and visit. The influx of visitors creates unique transportation and mobility challenges for these small towns and cities, such as seasonal spikes in severe roadway congestion and a desire for e-bike share programs in communities of less than 1,000 people. These challenges often in turn affect community character and wellbeing.

Given their proximity to these impacted communities, NITC researchers Danya Rumore of the University of …

Understanding The Operating Landscape Of The Global Airline Industry: A Dea Integrated Alternating Conditional Expectation Approach, Joyce M. W. Low, Kum Khiong Yang

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Purpose: This study investigates the relationships between service efficiency in 5 major cost centres (namely, business orientation, network coverage, physical resources, maintenance, repair and overhaul (MRO), and human resources) and profitability in the global airline industry. Design/methodology: The study integrates the Slack-based Model (SBM) of Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) with the Alternating Conditional Expectation (ACE) regression to understand the relationships between an airline’s profitability and its efficiencies in 5 identified operations areas. Findings: Based on the observational data obtained from 75 international airlines, the relationships between operational performances and profitability are found to be curvilinear and contingent on an airline’s …

Modeling The Effect Of A Road Construction Project On Transportation System Performance, Venu M. Kukkapalli, Srinivas S. Pulugurtha

Mineta Transportation Institute

Road construction projects create physical changes on roads that result in capacity reduction and travel time escalation during the construction project period. The reduction in the posted speed limit, the number of lanes, lane width and shoulder width at the construction zone makes it difficult for the road to accommodate high traffic volume. Therefore, the goal of this research is to model the effect of a road construction project on travel time at road link-level and help improve the mobility of people and goods through dissemination or implementation of proactive solutions.

Data for a resurfacing construction project on I-485 in …

Modeling The Influence Of Land Use Developments On Transportation System Performance, Ajinkya S. Manes, Srinivas S. Pulugurtha

Mineta Transportation Institute

The growth in the urban population has influenced urban sprawl, congestion, and subsequently, delays on the existing road infrastructure. New land use developments occur in every part of the city due to rapid economic development and to meet the demand for better living standards. The induced traffic volume generated from such land use developments often results in increased congestion and vehicular delay on the existing roads. With recent advancements in the technology, it is possible to capture continuous, and comprehensive travel time data for every major corridor in a city. Therefore, the goal of this research is to model the …

Analysis Of Disengagements In Semi-Autonomous Vehicles: Drivers’ Takeover Performance And Operational Implications, Francesca M. Favaro, Sky Eurich, Syeda Rizvi, Shivangi Agarwal, Sumaid Mahmood, Nazanin Nader

Mineta Transportation Institute

This report analyzes the reactions of human drivers placed in simulated Autonomous Technology disengagement scenarios. The study was executed in a human-in-the-loop setting, within a high-fidelity integrated car simulator capable of handling both manual and autonomous driving. A population of 40 individuals was tested, with metrics for control takeover quantification given by: i) response times (considering inputs of steering, throttle, and braking); ii) vehicle drift from the lane centerline after takeover as well as overall (integral) drift over an S-turn curve compared to a baseline obtained in manual driving; and iii) accuracy metrics to quantify human factors associated with the …

Entrans: Leveraging Kinetic Energy Harvesting Signal For Transportation Mode Detection, Guohao Lan, Weitao Xu, Dong Ma, Sara Khalifa, Mahbub Hassan, Wen Hu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Monitoring the daily transportation modes of an individual provides useful information in many application domains, such as urban design, real-time journey recommendation, as well as providing location-based services. In existing systems, accelerometer and GPS are the dominantly used signal sources for transportation context monitoring which drain out the limited battery life of the wearable devices very quickly. To resolve the high energy consumption issue, in this paper, we present EnTrans, which enables transportation mode detection by using only the kinetic energy harvester as an energy-efficient signal source. The proposed idea is based on the intuition that the vibrations experienced by …

Can Ridehailing Deliver Equity? Lessons For New Mobility Planning, Anne Brown

PSU Transportation Seminars

Modes including ridehailing, bikeshare, and e-scooters offer the potential to revolutionize how people travel. But as cities and agencies work to integrate these new services into the existing transportation landscape, the equity implications of these modes remain murky.

This talk presents research on ridehail travel and equity from Los Angeles and compares the equity outcomes of ridehailing to the previous status quo embodied by taxis. The research highlights both the promise of new mobility services and the remaining obstacles to delivering equitable access. Findings yields implications for policies that cities and planners can advance to ensure that new travel modes …

Webinar: Engaging Youth To Choose Car-Free Mobility, Autumn Shafer

TREC Webinar Series

Today’s youth are tomorrow’s riders, bikers, walkers, voters, and transportation planners. As more transit agencies begin to offer free fare passes to public middle and high school students, it is important to have good communication strategy in place to encourage transit usage so they don't miss out on the potential to affect behavior change.

Thus, transit agencies need to develop age-appropriate messaging strategies and tactics that promote youth car-free mobility.

This webinar will present results from a NITC research project that sought to create and evaluate communication messaging that fosters more positive attitudes, intentions, and behaviors related to transit and …

Making The Seemingly Impossible Project Real Through Local Improvement Districts, Andrew H. Aebi

PSU Transportation Seminars

The planning process identifies community needs but often needs the creative use of financial leverage to make those projects a reality on the ground. Timing is important on Local Improvement District (LIDs), and the window of opportunity is often short.

For Portland's Bureau of Transportation, managing the public's desire for streets in good condition with room to walk and bike safely and accommodating freight movement and population growth can be a tall order. Add in the need to work with water, sewer and underground utilities, and things get complicated.

When needs exceed resources, smart strategies can help fill the gap. …

Do Transportation Network Companies Decrease Or Increase Congestion?, Gregory D. Erhardt, Sneha Roy, Drew Cooper, Bhargava Sana, Mei Chen, Joe Castiglione

Civil Engineering Faculty Publications

This research examines whether transportation network companies (TNCs), such as Uber and Lyft, live up to their stated vision of reducing congestion in major cities. Existing research has produced conflicting results and has been hampered by a lack of data. Using data scraped from the application programming interfaces of two TNCs, combined with observed travel time data, we find that contrary to their vision, TNCs are the biggest contributor to growing traffic congestion in San Francisco. Between 2010 and 2016, weekday vehicle hours of delay increased by 62% compared to 22% in a counterfactual 2016 scenario without TNCs. The findings …

That Bike Is Too Heavy: Merging Bicycling Physics, Human Physiology And Travel Behavior, Alexander Y. Bigazzi

PSU Transportation Seminars

Are the Biketown bikes too heavy? Does better gear motivate people to cycle more? How much faster will someone go on an e-bike?

Although urban cycling is widely known as physically active transportation, the actual physics of cycling have been given little attention in transportation engineering and planning. In contrast, the field of sports science has developed detailed data and models of road bicycle performance, but only for sport and racing cyclists.

What can we learn about utilitarian cycling by integrating knowledge of the physical attributes of bicycles and cyclists?

This seminar examines the ways in which bicycle physics, and …

Auto-Calibration Of Wim Using Traffic Stream Characteristics, Johnson Baker

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This project evaluates the performance of Weigh-in-Motion (WIM) auto-calibration methods used by the Arkansas Department of Transportation (ARDOT). Typical auto-calibration algorithms compare the WIM measured weights of vehicles from the traffic stream to reference values, using five-axle tractor-trailer configured trucks for comparisons, e.g. Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) Class 9. Parameters of the existing algorithms including the Front Axle Weight (FAW) reference value, the sampling frequency required to update the calibration factor, and thresholds for Gross Vehicle Weight (GVW) bins were evaluated. The primary metric used to estimate algorithm performance was Mean Absolute Percent Error (MAPE) between the WIM and static …

Value Capture To Fund Public Transportation: The Impact Of Warm Springs Bart Station On The Value Of Neighboring Residential Properties In Fremont, Ca, Shishir Mathur

Mineta Transportation Institute

This study estimates households’ willingness to pay for single-family houses and condominiums/townhouses located within 2 miles of Warm Springs (WS) BART Station in Fremont, CA. The study finds that, compared to the houses sold in the referent category (2 to 5 miles away and sold during the pre-project-announcement period of 2000-2001), an average-priced single-family house within two miles of the WS BART Station was higher in price by 9% to 15%. The total property value increment for the single-family houses is large enough to fund the $802 million Warm Springs BART Extension Project cost five times over.

How And Where Should I Ride This Thing? “Rules Of The Road” For Personal Transportation Devices, Kevin Fang, Asha Weinstein Agrawal, Ashley M. Hooper

Mineta Transportation Institute

In recent years, “Personal Transportation Devices” (PTDs) have exploded onto streets and sidewalks. These small devices transport individual persons at slow speeds and are either human-powered or motorized. Examples include electric (kick) scooters, skateboards, e-skateboards, roller blades, and Segways. One key to successfully integrating PTDs into community streets will be the implementation of consistent and suitable regulations over user behavior: “rules of the road” for PTD riders. To help local officials identify appropriate rules for rider behavior, this report documents and analyzes existing PTD regulations across 176 jurisdictions and then presents recommendations for a set of state-level “rules of the …

Distilling Managerial Insights And Lessons From Ai Projects At Singapore's Changi Airport (Part 2), Steve Lee, Steven M. Miller

Asian Management Insights

Since 2017, Changi Airport group (CAG) has initiated a host of pilot projects that use connective and intelligent technologies to enable its move towards digital transformation and SMART Airport Vision. This has resulted in a first wave of deployment of AI and Machine Learning-enabled applications across various functions that can better sense, analyse, predict, and interact with people.

Ai Gets Real At Singapore's Changi Airport (Part 1), Steve Lee, Steven M. Miller

Asian Management Insights

Ranked as the best airport for seven consecutive years, Singapore’s Changi Airport is lauded the world over for the efficient, safe, pleasurable and seamless service it offers the millions of passengers that pass through its facilities annually. Much of Changi Airport’s success can be attributed to the organisation’s customer-oriented business focus and deeply embedded culture of service excellence, combined with a host of advanced technologies operating invisibly in the background. The framework for this technology enablement is Changi Airport Group’s (CAG’s) SMART Airport Vision—an enterprise-wide approach to connective technologies that leverages sensors, data fusion, data analytics, and artificial intelligence (AI), …

How Will Autonomous Vehicles Change Local Government Budgeting And Finance? Case Studies Of On-Street Parking, Curb Management, And Solid Waste Collection, Benjamin Y. Clark

TREC Final Reports

This report is an examination of parking, curb zones, and government service changes in the context of AVs. Given that there are very few actual AVs on the road, the analysis in this report is an attempt to project what we might see, using the current phenomenon as starting points. The report uses a mix of econometric modeling, cost accounting, and case studies to illustrate these projections. The first section of this report looks at the effects of transportation network companies (TNCs)—Uber and Lyft in particular—on parking revenue in the city of Seattle. The results of the study indicate that …

The E-Bike Potential: Estimating The Effect Of E-Bikes On Person Miles Travelled And Greenhouse Gas Emissions, Michael Mcqueen, John Macarthur, Christopher Cherry

TREC Final Reports

Many cities have goals for reducing automotive VMT in order to reduce tailpipe emissions and to reduce congestion. Conventional cycling is a good solution, though its uptake has slowed in recent years in several cities, despite the implementation of greenways, bikeshare, and bike lines (Anderson and McLeod 2017). Electric bicycles (e-bikes) could be an effective new part of the solution to combat mode shift stagnation. The e-bike is a recently introduced mode of travel that is rapidly gaining in popularity throughout the United States.

The e-bike can offer a cheaper alternative to car travel (Popovich et al. 2014) and can …

How E-Bike Incentive Programs Are Used To Expand The Market, Michael Mcqueen, John Macarthur, Christopher Cherry

TREC Final Reports

The electric bicycle (e-bike) is a low emission mode of transportation that offers communities benefits in the areas of health, planning, time, cost, street safety, congestion, air pollution, noise pollution, and energy security (Blondel, Mispelon, and Ferguson 2011). In a recent study conducted by Portland State University, e-bikes have been found to enable more people to ride a bicycle for longer distances despite physical limitations, difficult terrain, and the presence of cargo (MacArthur et al. 2018). However, overall e-bike adoption in the United States remains limited due in part to high purchase cost (Dill and Rose 2012; Popovich et al. …