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 Network

This 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 weighting scheme and exploring other model forms.

This national pooled fund study brings together cities and local jurisdictions in providing financial support for the project. These include the Oregon DOT, Virginia DOT, Colorado DOT, Washington D.C. DOT, Utah DOT, Central Lane MPO, City of Portland, OR and City of Bend, OR.

Applying an Equity Lens to Automated Payment Solutions for Public Transportation

Transit agencies are modernizing their fare collection systems in an effort to reduce the expense of collecting cash and increase operating efficiency. Yet, the equity implications for people who may be excluded or greatly inconvienienced by paying for transit through non-cash based collection technologies are not well understood. This project will address these equity concerns and will identify technology or solutions 'gaps' that need to be implemented to effectively address users excluded by automated "cashless" payment solutions and the equity groups.

This national pooled fund study brings together cities and local jurisdictions in providing financial support for the project. These include City of Gresham, OR; City of Eugene, OR; Denver RTD, CO; Lane Transit, OR; and moovel NA.

Eligibility

Only faculty members and research faculty at one of the six universities in the NITC research consortium are eligible to serve as Principal Investigators (PIs). This includes Portland State University, Oregon Institute of Technology, University of Arizona, University of Oregon, University of Texas at Arlington and University of Utah.

About the Pooled Fund Grant Program

Our Pooled Fund grant 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. Research statements were solicited from partner agencies in Spring 2018, and the projects were selected by the NITC Executive Committee to move forward for funding.

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The National Institute for Transportation and Communities (NITC), one of five U.S. Department of Transportation national university transportation centers, is a program of the Transportation Research and Education Center (TREC) at Portland State University. The NITC program is a Portland State-led partnership with the University of Oregon, Oregon Institute of Technology, University of Utah and new partners University of Arizona and University of Texas at Arlington. We pursue our theme — improving mobility of people and goods to build strong communities — through research, education and technology transfer.