This year, residents of 37 new apartment buildings in the Portland area are receiving surveys in the mail. The reason? Portland State University researchers are requesting information about how they travel.

Knowing how residents of these high-density affordable and mixed-income housing developments get around town is key to guiding future development in the metropolitan area.

Metro—the regional government of the Portland, Oregon area—strategically invests in transit-oriented development, or TOD, to help more people live in neighborhoods served by high-quality transit. In a partnership going back nearly twenty years, PSU has supported the Metro TOD program by collecting data on residents' travel habits. This latest round of surveys will add to a knowledge base that has been useful for both Metro and PSU, for several reasons.

WHY COLLECT TRAVEL DATA FROM TOD RESIDENTS? 

Using this information, Metro can refine its TOD funding program model to ensure that future developments achieve intended outcomes. 

Patrick McLaughlin, senior development project manager for housing and transit-oriented development at Metro, joined the TOD project in April 2016. Part of his job is to assign gap funding to affordable housing projects that may require subsidies. To evaluate whether Metro's TOD Program should support a particular development, he said, we "plug it into our model to see how much ridership we anticipate this project generating, compared to a less dense project that you would expect the market to build on its own."

One of the aims of transit-oriented development is to create opportunities for housing with greater access to transit, particularly in places where existing communities are at risk of gentrification and displacement.

"We invest in projects we think are going to give us more transit ridership. So what this work does is allow us to go back and see if we were right, and if not, we can use this data to help us recalibrate the model," McLaughlin said.

Since its establishment in 1998, Metro's TOD program has invested over $40 million dollars to construct roughly 6,800 housing units adjacent to Portland’s transit system. The program plays an important role in supporting development that aligns with Metro’s 2040 Regional Growth Concept, which aims to preserve the region's quality of life by protecting natural areas while promoting economic growth.

Led by researchers Jennifer Dill and Nathan McNeil, the data collection also benefits PSU: The university maintains a vast clearinghouse of transportation data, and the TOD surveys are a valuable source of insights on how the built environment affects travel behavior.

CONSISTENCY AND PROGRESS OVER DECADES

One of the most useful aspects of this research is how long-term it is, which allows Metro to observe changes and trends over time.

"We have maintained a consistent survey instrument over all these years, so it allows us to compare across years and put each new batch of surveys into the context of the ones that have come before," McNeil said.

The current round of surveys represents the largest number of residents that have been surveyed to date.

HOW DO TOD RESIDENTS TRAVEL?

So what have the researchers learned from all these surveys?

In short, living in a TOD does indeed change people's travel behavior, making them less likely to drive and more likely to use transit and other modes. In 2019, Dill and McNeil leveraged funding from the National Institute for Transportation and Communities (NITC) to go back and revisit residents of the same buildings they had surveyed fifteen years earlier, gathering information on how their travel habits had changed. The second wave of surveys revealed three changes from the baseline that are consistent with the objectives of TODs:

1. The number of people commuting to work by driving alone went down.
2. The number of people walking or biking to work at least one day a week rose.
3. The number of people living in low-car households (fewer cars than adults) increased.

In the past, many TOD housing units were studio or one-bedroom apartments, a trend which seems to be changing. In the current group of buildings, there are more affordable housing units and more multi-bedroom units— which means more families. A recent NITC project corroborates this: Most people moving into transit station areas these days are established households, including many with children.

This ongoing research can help planners understand the factors influencing travel behavior at TODs, including neighborhood features.

RELATED PROJECTS

• Metro Transit-Oriented Developments (TODs) Surveys (2025, in progress)
• Revisiting TODs (2019)
• Transit Oriented Developments Survey (2014)
• Transit Oriented Developments Survey (2010)
• Travel Choices at Transit Oriented Developments: Survey Results from Portland’s Eastside (2007)
• Estimating the Impacts of TODs on Travel and Transit Use (2006)

Photo courtesy of Metro

Portland State University's Transportation Research and Education Center (TREC) is home to the U.S. DOT funded National Institute for Transportation and Communities (NITC), the Initiative for Bicycle and Pedestrian Innovation (IBPI), PORTAL, BikePed Portal and other transportation grants and programs. We produce impactful research and tools for transportation decision makers, expand the diversity and capacity of the workforce, and engage students and professionals through education and participation in research. To get updates about what's going on at TREC, sign up for our monthly newsletter or follow us at the links below.

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