Check out a quick summary of our activities each day at TRB:
Researchers at campuses affiliated with the National Institute for Transportation and Communities, or NITC, will present 86 papers at the annual meeting of the Transportation Research Board of the National Academies. That's a record number for the Portland State University-based university transportation center, dating back to the 2006 founding of OTREC.
The NITC program is led by Portland State with partners University of Oregon, Oregon Institute of Technology, University of Utah and University of South Florida. The five universities had the work of 93 researchers, as author or coauthor, accepted for presentation Jan. 11-15 at the meeting, the preeminent national conference for transportation researchers. Around 12,000 people from around the world are expected to attend.
To present at the TRB meeting, researchers must submit full research papers for peer review. Only around half of the submitted papers are chosen for presentation at the meeting.
The researchers from NITC campuses will present 25...
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Knowing how many travelers use a transportation system is important for a number of reasons. Engineers and planners need to be able to estimate travel demand, and to do so they typically count the vehicles. Annual average daily traffic (AADT) counts have been collected for decades in the United States.
In recent years the demand has increased for non-motorized counts. For a...
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Despite the many connections between transportation and public health, many agencies tasked with long-range transportation planning have yet to completely consider effects on health, a Portland State University research team found. The research will be presented at the annual meeting of the Transportation Research Board in Washington, D.C. Jan. 11-15.
Patrick Singleton, a Portland State graduate student researcher, will present the paper “Incorporating public health in U.S. long-range metropolitan transportation planning: A review of guidance statements and performance measures,” during a poster session Tuesday. The paper grew out of concepts developed in a Portland State course on transportation and health taught by Prof. Kelly Clifton, who is a coauthor on the paper.
Individually, transportation and public health each have a wealth of research. That research doesn’t always cross over, Singleton said.
“The integration of these disciplines is in its infancy,” he said.
If transportation planning agencies were to fully consider transportation and health connections, those considerations would show up in their long-term plans, the research team reasoned. Performance measures would point to the potential effects of a health focus.
The researchers focused...
“Transportation Cost Index: A Comprehensive Performance Measure for Transportation and Land Use Systems and its Application in OR, FL, and UT” is a Portland State University research project that will be presented at the 2015 annual meeting of the Transportation Research Board.
Portland State University researchers Liming Wang and Jenny Liu are developing a comprehensive performance measure that enables planners and the public to evaluate the performance of transportation and land use systems over time and across geographic areas.
Transportation engineers have a long history of using performance measures such as the Highway Performance Monitoring System (HPMS) to evaluate the operation of the transportation system. Traditionally, such measures heavily focus on the traffic condition, especially for drivers.
Since the last decade, especially with the...
Read moreNever mind making a gingerbread house — Portland State University’s Students in Transportation Engineering and Planning (STEP) club has more ambition than that.
Every December the club gets together to create sweet solutions to planning challenges. Past objectives have included designing a gingerbread Columbia River Crossing in 2011, or last year’s “transportation and Portlandia” theme.
This year’s gathering, which took place Thursday, December 4, set out to create a gingerbread 20-minute neighborhood: a vibrant, densely packed area of delicious mixed residential and commercial land uses, also known as a transit-oriented development.
The STEP students stepped up as usual, creating some fantastic livable, and edible, neighborhoods for the holidays.
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Jolene Liu, a senior from Westview High School in Beaverton, completed a successful internship with TREC this year. The internship was funded by IBM through the Saturday Academy's Apprenticeships in Science and Engineering (ASE) program.
Liu worked under the tutelage of TREC researcher Krista Nordback for two months, stringing up an impressive list of accopmlishments over that time. She worked to help create the online non-motorized traffic count archive, a centralized database for bicycling and walking count data. Liu tested the database structure, summarized data formats and wrote help text for future users. She also processed manual counts of pedestrians and cyclists from intersections in Bend, Eugene, Portland and throughout Oregon.
For an IBPI professional development course, Liu also calibrated pedestrian counting equipment and demonstrated the equipment for course participants.
Perhaps most impressively, Liu co-authored a paper accepted for presentation at the annual meeting of the Transportation Research Board this coming January: "Creating a National Non-motorized Traffic Count Archive: Process and Progress," Paper 15-5310.
"She was amazing," Nordback said. "She took on tasks most undergrads wouldn't have been able to handle, plus she took amazing notes at our (Technical Advisory Committee) meeting in Salem.
"She got to watch...
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On Monday, October 27th, sixteen of the brightest minds in Portland, Oregon met at Portland State University to talk about the future of transportation in front of an eager audience.
Professionals, students, faculty and interested citizens gathered in the student union to listen to visions of futuristic infrastructure, connected "smart" cities, and complete overhauls of the current way of doing things.
The event, called "Let's Be Fearless," was organized to foster discussion around innovative ideas. It was also the unveiling of TREC, PSU's brand-new Transportation Research and Education Center.
It was intended as an informal, fun way to get creative minds thinking about transportation.
Each of the 16 participants had three minutes to sell their big idea to the audience about what should be next for Portland.
Participants included engineers from Intel, professors from PSU and transportation professionals from the Portland area.
Portland has often been considered a leader in progressive multi-modal transportation systems, but in recent years, the city seems to be running out of inspiration.
To help Portland maintain its leadership status, TREC wanted...
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Portland State University has earned a reputation for innovative transportation programs that span multiple disciplines, all in service of livable communities. That expertise is now available in a single place through the newly renamed TREC, Portland State’s transportation research and education center.
Growing out of OTREC, TREC is the steward of Portland State’s participation in the U.S. Department of Transportation’s University Transportation Centers program. The program has awarded Portland State more than $30 million since 2006, with a nonfederal match requirement amplifying the effect of the federal investment and touching more community partners.
The new website, trec.pdx.edu, lets visitors search for transportation research and researchers across campus by topic or browse by research area.
With leadership from Rep. Peter DeFazio, OTREC was founded in 2006 as a four-campus consortium and expanded into a broader transportation center. The original OTREC grant ran until 2014, funding 237 research, education and technology transfer projects. In addition to carrying on this legacy, TREC also:
- Builds on the Center for Transportation Studies, established in 1966. The longstanding ...
TREC supported the publication, in 2014, of the “Big & Awesome Bridges of Portland and Vancouver” book by Sharon Wood Wortman and Ed Wortman, a follow-up to 2006’s definitive volume “The Portland Bridge Book” geared toward young readers.
“Big & Awesome Bridges” has made huge strides toward advancing the knowledge of transportation engineering among area elementary school children. The book has been incorporated into the Portland Public Schools third-grade curriculum and placed in each third-grade classroom. The Vancouver Public Schools district has placed the book in each elementary school library and incorporated it into the fourth-grade curriculum.
Dozens of school and public libraries across the Northwest have bought copies of the book. Curricula in the book have been used to hold bridge-building and load-testing workshops, and the authors have held teacher trainings, activity nights and informational sessions. The book has been featured in local media outlets in Oregon, Washington and Idaho and is available at museums including the Oregon Historical Society and the Oregon Rail Heritage Center.
Current efforts are underway to bring the curricula and activities in “Big & Awesome Bridges” to students across the United States. More information on the book is at http://bigandawesomebridges.org/.
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