Portland State University

Each year, through our Initiative for Bicycle and Pedestrian Innovation (IBPI) program, TREC offers a range of scholarships to assist students pursuing equitable, sustainable, and multimodal transportation. Four Portland State University students were awarded TREC scholarships for the 2020/2021 academic year: Darshan Chauhan of civil & environmental engineering, and Robert Hemphill, Philip Longenecker and Briana Orr of urban studies & planning.

Darshan Chauhan (Walter H. Kramer Fellowship)

Darshan Chauhan (see his NITC student spotlight here) is a graduate research assistant in civil engineering at Portland State University. He has served as the treasurer of STEP (Students in Transportation Engineering and Planning), PSU's transportation student group, and generously volunteers his time at a variety of transportation-related events via PSU's Transportation Research and Education Center (TREC). He defended his masters thesis on network flow problems in fall 2019, and is now a PhD student in the civil engineering...

In 2018, Vision Zero was adopted as part of Portland’s Regional Transportation Plan for the first time. This content analysis explored how concerns about safety were expressed in the planning process—did they adhere to a Vision Zero perspective or did they express a conventional mobility paradigm? What were the top concerns? Furthermore, did different stakeholder groups subscribe to Vision Zero more than others? Kelly Rodgers, a PhD student in the Toulan School of Urban Studies and Planning at Portland State University, explores paradigm conflicts around implementing vision zero in Portland.

Watch the interview with Kelly.

Kelly Rodgers is a PhD student in Urban Studies who is studying the use and influence of health indicators in transportation decision-making. She has been twice awarded the Dwight D. Eisenhower Transportation Fellowship and twice named a NITC Student Scholar. Kelly is also the Executive Director of Streetsmart, a non-profit organization developing an evidence-based platform that helps civic leaders integrate health, climate, and equity concerns into transportation. Kelly is the vice-chair of the Institute of Transportation Engineers' Health and Transportation Standing Committee, a member of the Transportation Research Board's...

Authored by Tammy Lee, Transportation Data Manager, Portland State University

For a deeper dive into bicycle volume data, watch the May 8 seminar with Tammy Lee and Kristin Tufte: Creating And Using A Publicly Available Multimodal Transportation Data Archive. Also, check out her earlier blog post on motor vehicle traffic volumes.

The weather these past few weeks has been beautiful: sunny, not too hot, not too cold, cherry trees blossoming… the ideal biking weather marred by a less than ideal pandemic.

Are social distancing measures affecting bike trips in Portland, OR? Maybe. Personally? Yes.

First, let’s get a few things out of the way before we provide summary observations:

• Analyzing bike data is not as “easy” as evaluating vehicle traffic data: the infrastructure for monitoring bike (and pedestrian) data isn’t anywhere close to how vehicle traffic is monitored. There just aren’t many bicycle count detectors. So if one detector stops working then what little data that was available in the first place became that much littler.

• ...

For a deeper dive into vehicle volume data, attend the May 8 online seminar with Tammy Lee and Kristin Tufte: Creating And Using A Publicly Available Multimodal Transportation Data Archive. At this seminar, the presenters will offer an updated data analysis that reflects the latest vehicles volumes.

Ask most Portland drivers and they’ll tell you that traffic has gotten worse over the past 10 years. And data from the Oregon Department of Transportation supports that feeling.  

But for now, temporarily at least, all that is in the past.

The first confirmed case of COVID-19 in Oregon was February 28; a little over a month after the first positive test in the US. Since that week, many have noticed differences in traffic on our streets. An analysis of data from PORTAL - our multi-modal transportation data archive for the Portland-Vancouver metropolitan region - reflects that drop in traffic. 

A number of articles have been published describing the effects of social distancing policies in...