Four Portland State University graduate students received Eisenhower Fellowships presented by the U.S. Department of Transportation at this year's annual meeting of the Transportation Research Board (TRB): David R. Soto Padín, Travis Glick, Gregory Norton and Jael Wettach-Glosser are all civil engineering students in the Maseeh College of Engineering & Computer Science at Portland State University.

David Soto Padín, current President of Students in Transportation Engineering and Planning (STEP) at PSU, presented his research in a poster, "Bikeshare + Transit Integration: Best Practices for Increasing Ridership (PDF)," during TRB's Eisenhower Fellowship poster session. He will be working on researching bike share as a "last mile" mode choice for rail rapid transit in the American context. He also presented research on bicyclist positioning behavior at signalized...

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This summer we're hosting three workshops through our program, the Initiative for Bicycle and Pedestrian Innovation (IBPI).

These are small group (20 - 25), hands-on, multi-day workshops taught by local experts from the Portland Bureau of Transportation (PBOT), Portland State University, Alta Planning + Design, Toole Design Group, Nelson\Nygaard, Washington County, and more.

A limited number of scholarships are available to help offset the costs of travel and registration. Scholarship applications will be accepted on a rolling basis for the June faculty workshop, so apply early! Scholarship applications for the two August workshops are due by Friday, April 6.

APPLY FOR A SCHOLARSHIP (due April 6th)


IBPI Faculty Workshop: Integrating Bike-Ped Topics into University Transportation Courses

June 19–20, 2018 at Portland State University

This two-day course is designed to help transportation planning and engineering faculty integrate a holistic approach to bicycle and...

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Maria Sipin, Graduate Assistant, Portland State University

Maria Sipin is a Portland State University grad student in Urban Planning and Public Health, and an IBPI Active Transportation Scholar. Watch Maria's video, "Communicating Intersections," on the power that transportation planners have to affect positive, equitable change in our daily lives. Or, read the 2018 final report she co-authored "Elevating People: Planning for Equitable Travel to Marquam Hill" - a report on OHSU’s vision for diversity and inclusion and their goals to reduce single-occupancy vehicle trips and promote the increased use of sustainable multimodal transportation.

IBPI 2017 - 2018 ScholarLinkedIn | PSU Institute for Sustainable Solutions Staff Member


Tell us about yourself:

I started grad school in fall 2016, just a week after moving to Portland from Los...

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To help maximize the implementation of U.S. DOT’s commitment to livable communities, the National Institute for Transportation and Communities (NITC) has launched its third round of pooled fund research funding in 2018. Agency partners are invited to submit problem statements by May 15, 2018.

The pooled fund program offers a process by which cities, counties, MPOs and other regional or local agencies can pool relatively small pots of research dollars to then leverage NITC matched funds for a single, collaborative project.

We held an online information session on February 28, 2018. Watch the video to learn more about the funding process, identifying partners, and crafting an effective problem statement:

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Principal Investigator: Nathan McNeil, Portland State University
Learn more about this research by viewing the Summary Report, related publications and the three Final Reports from each phase of the research on the Project Overview page. Hear firsthand from the researchers by watching the August 2017 webinar.

The third and final phase of our bike share equity research project has been published, with new findings from a survey of bike share users.

Riders targeted for equity-focused outreach efforts—lower-income individuals and people of color—were most likely to cite cost savings or discounted membership as reasons why they joined, while higher-income and white users were more likely to cite the convenience of using bike share. Lower-income riders were also more...

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The National Institute for Transportation and Communities (NITC) program has released its 2018 general research request for proposals. Faculty at NITC's partner universities* are invited to submit abstracts by April 2, 2018.


Through funding provided by the U.S. DOT, we will award at least $1 million under our general research grant in 2018 for projects that support NITC’s theme: improving mobility of people and goods to build strong communities. Our theme includes a few key topics:

  • Increasing access to opportunities
  • Improving multi-modal planning and shared use of infrastructure
  • Advancing innovation and smart cities
  • Developing data, models, and tools

Research projects must focus on transportation, with additional consideration given to projects that emphasize equity and diversity in their research and partnerships. We’re seeking projects that demonstrate a strong potential to move transportation research into practice, shape national and international conversations, and respond to the needs of practitioners and policymakers. 

Priority is given to projects that are collaborative, multidisciplinary, multi-campus, and support the development of untenured-tenure-track transportation faculty. 

Key Dates

  • Abstracts due: April 2...
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Principal Investigator: Liming Wang, Portland State University
Learn more about this curriculum and how you can apply it at your school by viewing the one-page Executive Summary and the full Final Report on the Project Overview page.

A NITC education grant funded a new course for planners, engineers, scientists and students to help improve their data processing workflow.

Liming Wang, an assistant professor in the Toulan School of Urban Studies & Planning at Portland State University, is on a mission to simplify data processing. A NITC education grant supported his efforts to develop a new course: Introduction to Data Science (Aug 6 - 10, 2018). The course is designed to help students and professionals to improve their workflow for data-intensive research. The course covers how to collect data, clean them up, visualize, explore, model and eventually compile the data with findings in a report.

"I've pretty...

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Alex Bigazzi, graduate of Portland State University and Assistant Professor at University of British Columbia

Alex Bigazzi, Assistant Professor of Civil Engineering and Community and Regional Planning, University of British Columbia

Alex Bigazzi, a former Post-Doctoral NITC researcher and student, received his Ph.D. in civil engineering from Portland State University in 2014. Learn more about Alex:

NITC Researcher ProfileLinkedIn | UCB Faculty Profile

Read an article on his recent research on congestion pricing


Tell us about yourself:

My name is Alex Bigazzi and I am an assistant professor, joint-appointed in transportation engineering and planning at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. My main research areas are transportation emissions and air quality and active travel.

Why did you decide to attend Portland State University?

The original decision was driven almost entirely by location. I was living in Portland, decided to go back to school for a second...

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This page serves as a homebase for our coverage of the 2018 Transportation Research Board (TRB) annual conference. Check back here for ongoing updates, as well as our Twitter and Facebook.

  • NITC GUIDE TO TRB (print-friendly PDF): our printable schedule of where all of our NITC researchers will be presenting at lectures, poster sessions, and workshops
  • NITC RECEPTION AT TRB: Join us for transportation bingo, co-hosted with TransitCenter, on Monday, January 8th (7–10:30pm) nearby at Fado Irish Pub
  • NITC STUDENT AWARD AT CUTC BANQUET: We’ll be celebrating our 2017 NITC “Student of the Year”, Jordan Preston of Oregon Tech at the annual CUTC Banquet. She has been working as a graduate research assistant...
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Principal Investigator: Miguel Figliozzi, Portland State University
Learn more about this research by viewing the two-page Project Brief, related publications and the full Final Report on the Project Overview page.

In the last decade there has been a national trend toward projects that involve roadway space reallocation across modes. "Road Diets," in which one or more travel lanes are removed to make space for wider and safer bicycle and pedestrian space, is a common type of roadway reallocation.

A new NITC report by Miguel Figliozzi and Travis Glick of Portland State University offers a new methodology for doing before-and-after studies of these projects using high-resolution transit data. The data used in this project was supplied by TriMet, the transit provider for the Portland, Oregon metropolitan region.

Typically, before-and-after studies of roadway changes have used data on vehicle speeds to determine effects of change, without considering transit. By using datasets from transit providers, researchers can measure transit and also general traffic speed, so the data serve both purposes.

"This is a new methodology; something that no one...

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