She will spend three months in Lisbon, Portugal starting in January 2016, where she will work with faculty at Instituto Superior Técnico (IST), part of the University of Lisbon.
Clifton will collaborate there with assistant professor João de Abreu e Silva, a fellow travel behavior researcher whose areas of interest lie in transportation systems and land use patterns, specifically in urban environments.
Clifton’s research into bicycle and pedestrian travel demand modeling and the consumer behavior of active travelers has the potential to be applied in downtown Lisbon, an...
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If transportation projects need to span long distances or enable millions of trips to be considered of regional significance, what does that mean for active transportation? An Intertwine Alliance forum, hosted Jan. 27 by the Initiative for Bicycle and Pedestrian Innovation at Portland State University, raised that among its many discussion questions.
The "How We Get There Matters" Regional Active Transportation Forum was sponsored by Metro, the Safe Routes to School National Partnership and Portland State University's Initiative for Bicycle and Pedestrian Innovation.
Speakers from organizations across the region offered their perspectives for participants, presenting ways to think of walking and bicycling as regionally significant. Discussion followed, with participants offering ideas in how to best make the case for elevating active projects to that level.
Participants spanned the public, private and nonprofit sectors and represented urban, suburban and rural communities. They arrived at Portland State’s Native American Student and Community Center by a variety of transportation modes.
Jennifer Dill, professor of urban studies and planning at Portland State University and director of TREC and the NITC program, has been awarded the 2015 Dale Prize from California State Polytechnic University, Pomona.
She will spend Wednesday and Thursday at Cal Poly this week, attending a colloquium with students, educators and planning professionals and a formal banquet to receive the award.
The Dale Prize is an annual event organized by the department of urban and regional planning at Cal Poly Pomona. They recognize planning excellence with a pair of prizes each year: a $5,000 award to a scholar and a $5,000 award to a practitioner. Dill is receiving the scholar prize for 2015, and the practitioner prize goes to Fred Dock, director of transportation for the City of Pasadena, who is also a nationally recognized leader in multimodal transportation analysis and walking accessibility.
The department focuses on a different planning theme each year. This year’s theme is Streets for Everyone: Advancing Active Transportation.
Dill’s research into active transportation accessibility and mode share has made national headlines, most recently as part of the...
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The National Institute for Transportation and Communities (NITC) invites new proposals for general research in 2015.
NITC is the U.S. Department of Transportation’s national center for livable communities and one of five U.S. DOT national university transportation centers. The NITC program is a Portland State-led partnership with the University of Oregon, Oregon Institute of Technology, University of Utah and University of South Florida.
NITC is focused on contributing to transportation projects that support innovations in livability, incorporating safety and environmental sustainability. We will award at least $1 million to research and technology transfer projects that support NITC’s theme.
What's new in ths RFP
This request for proposals has a special emphasis on economic impacts. Up to $250,000 of these funds will prioritize research projects that study the economic impacts of livable communities.
All projects should range from $30,000 to $150,000 and must focus on research and technology transfer. Technology transfer proposals should support the application of transportation research to practice, including dissemination of research results, continuing education, and training.
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Sirisha Kothuri, an active transportation researcher who received her doctorate from PSU in 2014, was announced as the NITC university transportation center student of the year on Saturday, Jan. 10 at TRB.
Kothuri, a former OTREC scholar and NITC dissertation fellow, devoted her doctoral research to optimizing transportation infrastructure for pedestrians. Her dissertation, "Incorporating Pedestrian Considerations into Signal Timing," focuses on ways to minimize the wait time at traffic signals experienced by people on foot.
Pedestrians are the most vulnerable group of road users, so safety is a top priority for many jurisdictions, with less focus being placed on travel time. Kothuri believes that there is a critical need to incorporate pedestrian considerations into signal timing design, in part because unacceptable delay can impact signal compliance and thus impact safety.
The overall objective of her research is to make traffic signals more responsive to pedestrian needs.
Findings from Kothuri’s research can inform practitioners in determining treatments that can benefit pedestrians by considering their needs and reducing delay.
On Tuesday of this week's TRB annual meeting, Kothuri presented a poster titled "Exploring Thresholds for Timing Strategies on a Pedestrian Active Corridor."
She will share more of her pedestrian research in a...
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In a morning workshop on Sunday at TRB's annual meeting, Patrick Singleton of Portland State University was named the top-ranked Eisenhower Fellowship recipient
The session featured innovative research from second- and third-year Eisenhower doctoral fellowship recipients from top universities across the nation.
Singleton was one of four civil and environmental engineering students from PSU to be awarded the Dwight David Eisenhower Transportation Fellowship in 2014.
The paper he presented, "The theory of travel decision-making: A conceptual framework of active travel behavior," integrates theories from economics, geography and psychology to arrive at a unifying framework for understanding and predicting active travel decisions.
It examines the thought processes behind individuals' short-term travel decisions and explains the roles of activities, built environment factors, socio-demographics, perceptions, and habit in influencing those decisions.
Singleton's award marks the second year in a row that a Portland State student has taken the top honor, following Kristina Currans.
Singleton's adviser, Prof. Kelly Clifton, said she's proud of his accomplishment and the continued achievement of Portland State students. "It shows the strength of the program," Clifton said.
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Sunday, Jan. 11 is workshop day at the annual meeting of the Transportation Research Board in Washington, D.C.
Krista Nordback of TREC presents at the 1:30 p.m. (all times Eastern) workshop "Making Bicycle and Pedestrian Data Programs Count."
Nordback's will offer her portion of the workshop, "Data Sharing: A Count is a Terrible Thing to Waste," with Jeremy Raw of the Federal Highway Administration. The presentation covers the state of the practice for data warehousing of bicycle and pedestrian traffic data. It's in room 150B.
Patrick Singleton of Portland State University presents at a workshop showcasing the work of second- and third-year Eisenhower doctoral fellowship recipients from top universities across the country. Singleton presents "The theory of travel decision-making: A conceptual framework of active travel behavior." The workshop begins at 9 a.m. in Room 202A.
For a full listing of presentations from NITC campus-affiliated researchers each day at TRB, download our guide to TRB....
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Monday, Jan. 12 marks the first day of lectern and poster presentations at the annual meeting of the Transportation Resarch Board in Washington, D.C. It's also the busiest day for researchers representing the National Institute for Transportation and Communities' member campuses.
Marc Schlossberg leads a team from the University of Oregon presenting the NITC project "Rethinking Streets: Evidence-Based Guide to 25 Complete Street Transformations." The presentation highlights the book of the same name, which uses evidence from completed street projects from around the United States in order to help communities imagine alternative futures for their streets. You can watch a NITC Webinar on the topic or learn more. The lectern presentation at TRB starts at 3:45 p.m. (all times eastern) in room 209A of the convention center.
Reid Ewing of the University of Utah presents on the NITC project "Effects of Light-Rail Transit on Traffic in a Travel Corridor." The analysis found that, after the opening of a Salt Lake City light-rail line, traffic on an...
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Tuesday marks another busy day of lectern and poster presentations at the annual meeting of the Transportation Research Board in Washington, D.C., with presentations from core TREC faculty along with current and former NITC student of the year recipients. The day concludes with the annual NITC reception, which all are welcome to attend. More information on the reception is at bit.ly/nitc-trb2015.
TRB helps mark the 10th anniversary of Portal, TREC's multimodal transportation data archive, with a presentation at 10:15 a.m. in room 151A. Kristin Tufte of Portland State, who manages Portal, presents her paper on the history of the program and some of the ambitious changes it's undergoing. Portal was founded in 2004 by Robert Bertini, who also co-authored the paper with Morgan Harvey. Portal started with a single data source, freeway loop detector, and has grown in ten years to contain freeway data, arterial signal data, travel times from Bluetooth detection systems, transit data and bicycle count data. Portal has also grown geographically, and Tufte will offer examples of how Portal data has been used by regional partners – with a focus on measuring the performance of the multimodal transportation system, but also including educational elements and research.
Sirisha Kothuri recently earned a...
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Today marks the last full day of presentations at the annual meeting of the Transportation Research Board and the final day of NITC lectern and poster sessions.
The NITC project Lessons from the Green Lane continues to resonate, with the data spinning off four papers -- three of them presented today -- at TRB. Nathan McNeil delves into greater detail about buffers that separate cyclists from motor-vehicle traffic, and which define protected bike lanes. He presents the paper "Influence of Bike Lane Buffer Types on Perceived Comfort and Safety of Bicyclists and Potential Bicyclists" at 2:45 p.m.
McNeil broke down users and potential users of different bike facilities into groups defined in the Four Types of Transportation Cyclists categories. He analyzed the increase in comfort a user experienced in a protected lane over a standard bike lane.
The biggest increase came in the "interested but concerned" segment seen as key to getting more people to use bikes. "If something is physically separated, 'interested but concerned' people feel much more comfortable," McNeil said. "It suggests that the market that's...
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