Transportation defines Portland, Oregon. Portland State University (PSU) shapes transportation professionals who, in turn, shape cities across the world. Our students conduct cutting-edge research under the guidance of the world’s foremost transportation research faculty at PSU - from both the Toulan School of Urban Studies & Planning and the department of Civil & Environmental Engineering of MCECS.
WHAT MAKES TRANSPORTATION UNIQUE AT PORTLAND STATE UNIVERSITY (PSU)?
A PSU research center dedicated to transportation: Students have the advantage of TREC - the Transportation Research and Education Center which is home to one of five national university transportation centers. We lead the National Institute for Transportation & Communities (NITC), a six-university consortium that receives an average of $4.4 million per year from the U.S. DOT to support transportation research projects and students. PSU also supports other related research centers on smart cities, population, aging and more.
An active and engaged...
The Transportation Research and Education Center (TREC) at Portland State is committed to open-access learning. Grounded in research, we connect students and professionals to current best practices in transportation through free webinars and seminars open to the public. Since 2002, we have maintained an extensive education library, archiving over 500 hours of these videos and countless megabytes of reading material.
Want to learn on your own time and/or earn professional development credits (AICP, and more)? Explore the TREC Education Library, or check out our “Top Ten” list below.
TREC TOP TEN: GREATEST MOBILITY HITS of 2018
Below are our most popular presentations from 2018 - watched by a combined total of 2,367 viewers:
An Accessible Approach to Shared Streets
The movement of goods throughout the supply chain is complex, fraught with uncertainties, and not without room for improvement. Portland State University recently received a $167,000 grant to support research investigating the development and evaluation of an intelligent freight transportation matching system. The system could improve freight and trucking networks critical to supply chain performance by reducing inefficient capacity—the problem of keeping trucks full of cargo while they’re on the road.
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The latest report from The National Institute for Transportation & Communities (NITC) offers help to planners seeking to incorporate emerging travel modes—including car sharing, bike sharing, ride hailing, and autonomous vehicles—into regional travel demand models. More specifically, it brings these new travel modes into the Regional Strategic Planning Model (RSPM) tool. As more people start taking advantage of new...
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BIKE/PED COUNT SURVEY: CALL FOR INPUT
Researchers at Portland State University, University of Texas at Arlington, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Toole Design Group are conducting a scan to identify locations where bicycle counts are taking place around North America, and hope to enlist your help! If you collect bike count data (or oversee counts) in your jurisdiction, please consider taking our quick survey to tell us a little bit about your count locations and data.
The survey can be accessed here: tinyurl.com/BikeCounterScan
THE NEW PROJECT
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THE NEW PROJECT
Portland State University is embarking on a collaborative research effort, funded by the National Cooperative Highway Research Program (NCHRP), to help road users better understand bike-specific traffic signals. Over the next year, Dr. Christopher Monsere and Dr. Sirisha Kothuri of PSU's Transportation Research and Education Center (TREC) will work with researchers from Oregon State University and Toole Design Group to identify gaps in driver comprehension and causes of confusion when both bike signals and motor vehicle signals are present...
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Through our long-standing program, the Initiative for Bicycle and Pedestrian Innovation (IBPI), we convene Portland's leading experts to teach multi-day workshops for active transportation professionals looking to hit the ground running (or cycling!) as they design multimodal options in their communities. We've been teaching these essential design skills for over a decade now, and have tutored over 550 professionals, from 34 states and 5 countries with many success stories. These intensive, immersive learning opportunities serve as a valuable source of knowledge, connections, and inspiration to each cohort, so let us know if you’d like to be notified about our 2019 IBPI workshops and study abroad program.
Integrating Bike-Ped Topics into University Transportation Courses (June 19–20, 2018)
Now in our 7th year hosting this two-day workshop, it enables planning and engineering faculty to overcome the limits of traditional, car-centric curriculum to be inclusive of emerging topics in bicycle and pedestrian design. Educators leave with a portfolio of materials, activities and resources to broaden their course design into a multimodal perspective. Led by...
We held our annual flagship professional development event, Transportation & Communities, on September 13 and 14. In honor of the event's ten-year anniversary, we changed up the format: Rather than a typical conference with one-hour sessions and a keynote gathering, we offered a selection of intensive half-day workshops. See photos from the event.
The workshops gave practitioners a chance to take a deep dive into new skills in order to walk away with new tools or frameworks that could be applied to their work. We offered a review of congestion mitigation strategies, universal access and equity in pedestrian planning, and discussion on how smart technology could be implemented in suburban communities. Several workshops were based on findings from new research by the National Institute for...
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Portland, Oregon's 2035 Comprehensive Plan calls for “City Greenways” - a citywide network of park-like streets focused on moving pedestrians and bicycles safely. Such a connected network of safe, welcoming active transportation options could have significant benefits for residents—but which residents?
Benefits of bike and pedestrian infrastructure include environmentally sustainable transportation, livability, and improvements in economic development and public health. While these outcomes are well documented, it is also known that both transportation and...
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The National Institute for Transportation and Communities (NITC) is soliciting proposals for our two 2018 Pooled Fund projects:
Exploring Data Fusion Techniques to Derive Bicycle Volumes on a NetworkThis project will address the need of cities and municipalities to combine bicycle data from different sources (such as manual counts, automatic counts, and crowd-sourced data from apps such as Strava) to assess an accurate accounting of bicycle traffic on a network. Current work on data fusion techniques is limited and additional research is needed to fully understand the choice of weighting techniques, inclusion of spatial vs. temporal variation in the...
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