Vanessa Garrison, co-founder of national walking movement GirlTrek, gave the Ann Niles Active Transportation Lecture October 19 at Portland State University. Her simple, powerful message has mobilized more than 75,000 black women and girls since 2011 to start changing their lives and their communities for the better.
“Change starts with one woman,” she said. That is GirlTrek’s change theory: start with one woman, and there is a ripple effect.
Every time one woman is inspired by GirlTrek to commit to a daily habit of walking, so the theory goes, she can begin to motivate her friends, family or neighbors to walk with her and the movement gains another focal point around which to build momentum.
It's about health, but so much more.
In improving her own health, each GirlTrek walker gains the strength to effect other positive changes in her world.
With a group of women walking together every day, the neighborhood becomes safer. Then, depending on the needs of the community, more change begins to evolve. Are there safe sidewalks? Does traffic speed down the streets of the neighborhood? Should there be more destinations to walk to? What forms of social injustice can be addressed at the local level? These are questions that GirlTrek staff members love to help trekkers answer.
“Whatever it is that a women needs, to go back into her community and create change, we help bring her there,” Garrison said....
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Lynn Peterson, senior transportation advisor for Smart Growth America and former head of the Washington State Department of Transportation (and a graduate of PSU’s Masters in Urban Planning program), presented one of these approaches in her breakout session, ‘Practical Solutions: Least-cost planning and performance based design.’ She described several ideas that are important to implement when planning or vetting transportation projects, in... Read more
A new NITC report introduces an important tool for safety analysis: a naturalistic method of data collection that can be used to improve the cycling experience.
Before now, most naturalistic studies (studies where data are collected in a natural setting, rather than a controlled setting) in bicycle safety research have been captured by stationary cameras and haven't followed cyclists along a route.
Researchers in this study used first-person video and sensor data to measure cyclists' reactions to specific situations.
Safety research in general has advanced significantly through naturalistic driving studies, which gather data from real drivers to illuminate the causes of traffic incidents both major and minor. For motorized vehicles, the U.S. Department of Transportation has been developing portable, vehicle-based data collection technologies since the early 1990s.
Portland State University researchers Feng Liu, Miguel Figliozzi and Wu-chi Feng sought to capture the cycling experience with physiological sensors and helmet-mounted cameras.
Their report, Utilizing Ego-centric Video to Conduct Naturalistic Bicycling Studies, offers a successful method for integrating video and sensor data to record cyclists...
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The 2016 Transportation and Communities Summit set off on a different path from previous summits and brought new energy into discussion of the future of transportation. Around 285 people attended the summit, held Sept. 8-9 at Portland State University, an increase from last year.
First-time attendees made up a sizable percentage of conference-goers. Of those responding to a post-summit survey, more than 40 percent had never attended a summit before.
Responding to feedback from previous attendees, TREC organizers added a day of workshops before the main summit day. The workshops allowed attendees to dive deeper into specific transportation topics and interact with moderators and other participants to address real-world problems.
The lively poster session also served its goal of fostering conversations between practitioners, academics and students. Attendees consistently rate networking as one of the most valuable aspects of the summit, and the poster session—with more than twice the posters of previous summits—helped make those interactions more productive.
Topical breakout sessions form the backbone of the summit, showcasing the best thinking around issues from researchers and practitioners. Previous summits offered two breakout slots with four sessions each, meaning a single attendee could only attend a quarter of the sessions offered. The 2016 summit, by contrast, offered three breakout slots with...
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The success of TREC’s first summer program for high-school girls shows promise for the future transportation workforce. The National Summer Transportation Institute, held July 11-22, gave 22 girls classroom and hands-on instruction with transportation experts in various fields and sectors.
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Vanessa Garrison didn’t set out to build a health movement. Growing up in Seattle’s Central District, a historically black neighborhood, Garrison just wanted her household and her community to be healthy.
“It was a challenge for me to develop solutions that work for the women I love,” Garrison said.
Those solutions, however, did set off a movement: GirlTrek, a community-based walking movement that has reached 250,000 black women and girls across the country. Garrison co-founded GirlTrek and serves as its chief operating officer.
> Garrison will tell her story at the Ann Niles Active Transportation Lecture Oct. 19 at Portland State University. Reserve a space if you plan to attend.
“Seattle is one of the most active cities in the country, but my household was completely inactive,” Garrison said. “All the women in my family were really experiencing health challenges due to chronic disease.”
Those problems ran deeper than simply inactivity. Obesity and inactivity often have roots in concerns about safety and other community issues built on historical trauma and systemic racism. A fitness-only approach, Garrison reasoned, would fail to overcome these powerful forces.
With friend Morgan Dixon, who would become her GirlTrek co-...
The study includes evidence that walking and biking have a significant positive effect on wellbeing, and suggests that bicycling to work may benefit mental as well as physical health.
Read the journal article here: Commute well-being differences by mode: Evidence from Portland, Oregon, USA
The article grew out of Smith’s dissertation, a NITC-funded research project on the connection between commute modes and happiness or well-being.
Visit the project page to learn more: Peak of the Day, or the Daily Slog?
Smith created a...
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Cooperation. It’s the fundamental concept of a shared world, and it’s in evidence all over Portland, Oregon today as the 2016 International Open Streets Summit kicks off.
The Open Streets Project is an advocacy project led by The Street Plans Collaborative, and Portland was chosen to host its third Open Streets Summit this year. (The first was held in Los Angeles in 2014, and last year Atlanta, Georgia hosted one.)
The four-day conference is happening this year through a partnership between Street Plans, which is based in Miami with offices in San Francisco and New York, 8–80 Cities based in Toronto, Ontario, and locally the City of Portland Bureau of Transportation, IBPI and TREC. All are organizations dedicated to the idea of livable cities.
It was also supported through the sponsorship of Metro, Transit Center, People for Bikes, Uber and...
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For someone who refuses to make predictions, Brian David Johnson has a long list of examples of how the future he envisioned came true.
It’s his job, after all.
As a futurist, Johnson helps organizations imagine what they’ll be doing 10 years in the future and then models the steps they’ll need to achieve that vision.
Johnson will describe his work, and offer insights relevant to transportation professionals, as the keynote speaker at the Transportation and Communities Summit Sept. 9 at Portland State University.
Transportation figures heavily into both popular visions of the future and Johnson’s work—but not in the same way. “Cities and transportation and infrastructure are some of the most important parts of futurecasting”—Johnson’s name for this method of modeling—he said.
Although audiences raised on jet pack-based transportation science fiction don’t welcome this message, “the cities of the future are going to look like the cities of today,” Johnson said. “It’s one of the most unpopular things I tell people.”
But consider the alternative. “Culturally, we value the past, and our future will look a lot like that,” Johnson said. “I don’t think that’s a bad thing. ‘The Jetsons’ is a sci-fi dystopia.”
Finding a future that looks like the present, or even the past, is a surprising theme in Johnson’s work, which has included consulting for firms such as Intel and trade...
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Thanks in part to the U.S. Department of Transportation's Smart City Challenge competition, the interest in data and technology among transportation professionals has never been higher. That's especially true in Portland, one of the competition's seven finalist cities.
PORTAL, the region's multimodal transportation data archive, is central to any detailed understanding of how our transportation system works now and will work in the future. Kristin Tufte, the director of PORTAL, looks beyond the data streams to the bigger question: what do we do with all this information?
Tufte addresses that question in a new blog post for the Intel Science and Technology Center for Big Data:
The list of data sources available to Smart Cities for use in urban analytics is almost endless: data from connected and automated vehicles, data from connected intersections, probe data from cell phones, crowd-sourced data, fixed-sensor data, air quality readings, and more. A critical question is: How can we use this vast store of data to improve people’s lives?
Read the full blog at ISTC Big Data