OTREC extends a warm welcome to our newest staff member, Susan Peithman. Susan started work July 22 as OTREC's new Research and Education Program Administrator, who will serve to help allocate research funds to various transportation projects.
Peithman has lived in Portland, Oregon for six years and loves the city. She grew up in the Midwest, and says that Portland is a different world from Kansas City, Kansas, where she spent her education and early career.
She obtain her Bachelor's degree in Chemistry from the University of Illinois at Chicago, and afterward worked for the City of Chicago in the area of bicycle and pedestrian transportation.
Bicycling has been her primary means of transportation for 13 years, and she is always glad to see research that improves bicycle safety and infrastructure.
 
She has also spent time working for the Bicycle Transportation Alliance, as well as for Alta Planning & Design, a planning firm based in Portland whose mission is to improve communities "one trip, one step, one street, park, trail, and intersection at a time."
During her time at Alta, Peithman became familiar with OTREC and its research priorities, and says that she is pleased to be part of an organization that sponsors some of the best...
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In transportation funding decisions, you don’t count until you’re counted. That fact can lead to cyclists and pedestrians, often overlooked in traffic counts, getting less than their share of transportation money. OTREC hosted a conference Sept. 15 to address that problem.

“Without the data, you have an incomplete picture of how the (transportation) system is being used,” said OTREC researcher Chris Monsere, the conference organizer. “And it’s easier to make the case for resources if you know how the system is being used.”

The conference, called the “Bike and Pedestrian Program Information Exchange & Technology Transfer Summit Meeting,” brought together officials from local and state transportation agencies and consultants to share features of the best counting programs and technology. The forum helped bridge a gap between people who count motor vehicles and those who count bicycle and pedestrian traffic.  

“We wanted to raise a little awareness of both sides of the equation,” Monsere said. “There are things both can learn from the other.” <All presentations available  for download at the end of this article>

Nonmotorized counting programs often get large numbers of motivated people involved quickly and have a strong network for distributing results of counts. Motorized counts tend to be more systematic and uniform.

The motorized traffic counts have a jump on their non-motorized counterparts, Monsere said. That’s largely a result of...

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