The latest report from The National Institute for Transportation & Communities (NITC) offers help to planners seeking to incorporate emerging travel modes—including car sharing, bike sharing, ride hailing, and autonomous vehicles—into regional travel demand models. More specifically, it brings these new travel modes into the Regional Strategic Planning Model (RSPM) tool. As more people start taking advantage of new opportunities, like hopping into and out of self-driving taxis, the needs of the roadway system will inevitably change.
THE REGIONAL STRATEGIC PLANNING MODEL
The RPSM is a performance-based planning tool first developed by the Oregon...
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THE NEW PROJECT
Active transportation modes such as bicycling are associated with benefits like lower congestion and emission levels, and improvements in public health. Many cities are interested in increasing bicycle activity, but in order to understand what works, cities require accurate accounting of bicycle traffic. This requires re-thinking the way we conduct estimation methods, data inputs, and modeling techniques.
To that end, a group of local agency partners pooled resources to fund the research project:...
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THE NEW PROJECT
Portland State University is embarking on a collaborative research effort, funded by the National Cooperative Highway Research Program (NCHRP), to help road users better understand bike-specific traffic signals. Over the next year, Dr. Christopher Monsere and Dr. Sirisha Kothuri of PSU's Transportation Research and Education Center (TREC) will work with researchers from Oregon State University and Toole Design Group to identify gaps in driver comprehension and causes of confusion when both bike signals and motor vehicle signals are present...
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Through our long-standing program, the Initiative for Bicycle and Pedestrian Innovation (IBPI), we convene Portland's leading experts to teach multi-day workshops for active transportation professionals looking to hit the ground running (or cycling!) as they design multimodal options in their communities. We've been teaching these essential design skills for over a decade now, and have tutored over 550 professionals, from 34 states and 5 countries with many success stories. These intensive, immersive learning opportunities serve as a valuable source of knowledge, connections, and inspiration to each cohort, so let us know if you’d like to be notified about our 2019 IBPI workshops and study abroad program.
Integrating Bike-Ped Topics into University Transportation Courses (June 19–20, 2018)
Now in our 7th year hosting this two-day workshop, it enables planning and engineering faculty to overcome the limits of traditional, car-centric curriculum to be inclusive of emerging topics in bicycle and pedestrian design. Educators leave with a portfolio of materials, activities and resources to broaden their course design into a multimodal perspective. Led by...
We held our annual flagship professional development event, Transportation & Communities, on September 13 and 14. In honor of the event's ten-year anniversary, we changed up the format: Rather than a typical conference with one-hour sessions and a keynote gathering, we offered a selection of intensive half-day workshops. See photos from the event.
The workshops gave practitioners a chance to take a deep dive into new skills in order to walk away with new tools or frameworks that could be applied to their work. We offered a review of congestion mitigation strategies, universal access and equity in pedestrian planning, and discussion on how smart technology could be implemented in suburban communities. Several workshops were based on findings from new research by the National Institute for Transportation & Communities (NITC), the six-university consortium which sponsored the event. The NITC...
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Learn more about this and other "Smart Cities" technology by registering for this September 14 workshop.
Connected Vehicle (CV) technology is coming to Portland, Oregon. We're excited to announce the first step in what could be a long-term game changer for the city: during the winter of 2018, researchers from Portland State University and University of Arizona will work with the City of Portland to deploy a test concept of CV tech on the Portland Streetcar.
Primarily funded by the National Institute for Transportation and Communities (NITC), the Connected Streetcar Project is one of the Portland Bureau of Transportation’s (PBOT) 2018 Smart Cities pilot projects, and also part of the city’s ...
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Portland, Oregon's 2035 Comprehensive Plan calls for “City Greenways” - a citywide network of park-like streets focused on moving pedestrians and bicycles safely. Such a connected network of safe, welcoming active transportation options could have significant benefits for residents—but which residents?
Benefits of bike and pedestrian infrastructure include environmentally sustainable transportation, livability, and improvements in economic development and public health. While these outcomes are well documented, it is also known that both transportation and environmental amenities are typically unevenly distributed in the urban context....
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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 NetworkThis 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...
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This course is being offered again April 3–10, 2019. Learn more and register here.
"Scientific Computing for Planners, Engineers, and Scientists," our data science course for transportation professionals, has completed its second year and continues to help planners and engineers improve their data processing workflows.
Taking an ocean of numbers and converting it into compelling infographics, charts and narratives that communicate results is a key part of the transportation profession, and a daunting challenge. That's why we created this week-long data science course. It's also why we're offering a one-day workshop that focuses specifically on transportation...
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The market for electric vehicles (EVs) is changing dramatically in the United States, and zero-emissions vehicles could replace internal combustion engine automobiles in the near future. Oregon has one of the highest per-capita EV sales markets in the country, and has declared an ambitious goal of complete electrification of the private automobile industry by 2050. This makes Oregon a prime testing ground for the climate-friendly vehicles.
A new study conducted by John MacArthur, a researcher at the Transportation Research and Education Center (TREC) at Portland State University, analyzed survey responses from 4,069 EV owners in Oregon to identify the biggest challenges and opportunities for the emerging industry. Some key findings:
- EV owners demonstrated a high level of satisfaction with their vehicles;...