Authored by PeopleForBikes
According to a new study released by Portland State University’s Transportation Research and Education...
Read more
Authored by Tammy Lee, Transportation Data Manager, Portland State University
For a deeper dive into bicycle volume data, watch the May 8 seminar with Tammy Lee and Kristin Tufte: Creating And Using A Publicly Available Multimodal Transportation Data Archive. Also, check out her earlier blog post on motor vehicle traffic volumes.
The weather these past few weeks has been beautiful: sunny, not too hot, not too cold, cherry trees blossoming… the ideal biking weather marred by a less than ideal pandemic.
Are social distancing measures affecting bike trips in Portland, OR? Maybe. Personally? Yes.
First, let’s get a few things out of the way before we provide summary observations:
Analyzing bike data is not as “easy” as evaluating vehicle traffic data: the infrastructure for monitoring bike (and pedestrian) data isn’t anywhere close to how vehicle traffic is monitored. There just aren’t many bicycle count detectors. So if one detector stops working then what little data that was available in the first place became that much littler.
- ...
Image by Luije/iStock
Authored by Aaron Golub Director and Associate Professor, Nohad A. Toulan School of Urban Studies and Planning at Portland State University. Join Aaron and John MacArthur on May 22nd for a PSU Friday Transportation Seminar sharing early results from the research presented here.
With many transit agencies across the country1 eliminating cash handling at ticket counters and on-board vehicles for obvious health and virus transmission reasons, one may wonder: who will be negatively impacted by this?
Some riders can still use cash at ticket vending machines or at certain retail outlets, but for many, depending on where they live and which parts of the transit system they ride, this will be inconvenient. National data2 show clear disparities3 in access to alternatives to cash (credit and debit accounts) as well as the other tools needed to pay for things electronically (smartphones, cell data plans and internet at...
Read more
For a deeper dive into vehicle volume data, attend the May 8 online seminar with Tammy Lee and Kristin Tufte: Creating And Using A Publicly Available Multimodal Transportation Data Archive. At this seminar, the presenters will offer an updated data analysis that reflects the latest vehicles volumes.
Ask most Portland drivers and they’ll tell you that traffic has gotten worse over the past 10 years. And data from the Oregon Department of Transportation supports that feeling.
But for now, temporarily at least, all that is in the past.
The first confirmed case of COVID-19 in Oregon was February 28; a little over a month after the first positive test in the US. Since that week, many have noticed differences in traffic on our streets. An analysis of data from PORTAL - our multi-modal transportation data archive for the Portland-Vancouver metropolitan region - reflects that drop in traffic.
A number of articles have been published describing the effects of social distancing policies in...
Read more
Transportation professionals and educators are navigating new territory as they move their work online. People all over the world are sharing resources, inspiration and expertise in our new remote learning environment. With that in mind, we've put together this resource page (updates ongoing) to support transportation faculty in adapting their courses, and to inform our community on navigating the impacts of COVID-19 on transportation.
****
TEACHING TRANSPORTATION ONLINE: UNIVERSITY RESOURCES
Seminars and Webinars for Online Learning
We've put together a list of some of our most useful recorded transportation seminars for online learning (Google doc) on a variety of topics related to engineering, planning, and active transportation. PSU's Office of Academic Innovation offers this resource on teaching remotely during COVID-19.
Navigating the Sudden Shift to Remote Teaching
Faculty are getting creative with teaching planning and engineering concepts while infrastructure and normal mobility behavior is in flux. Do you have an anecdote...
Read more
- Shape the Active Transportation Roadmap: The project team will begin gathering input from transportation professionals in the coming months. Add your email address if you would like to be contacted.
Amid the explosion of active transportation literature over the last thirty years, practitioners struggle to effectively synthesize and use that research in their everyday practice. The interdisciplinary scope is vast: engineering, health and medicine, planning and design, psychology, public administration and policy, and many more. The search tools to find the sprawl of active transportation research on any one topic are inadequate, particularly for the average user. Meanwhile, there are still gaps in our knowledge about active...
Read more
MOBILITY BY E-BIKE STUDY
Share your trips with transportation researchers to grow knowledge about e-bike mobility and sustainability.
We're seeking e-bike users from all over the U.S. to join a new research project led by John MacArthur of Portland State University and Chris Cherry of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. They're looking at the sustainability effects of e-bikes and utilitarian travel behavior of e-bike users, including origin, destination, route, time, speed, mode replacement, and trip purpose. Passively share your trips with us - just plug in a dongle, download our app, and ride like you normally do. The study is open to U.S.-based participants who ride an e-bike with a Bosch onboard computer, and use an iPhone.
Questions? See our Frequently Asked Questions. To learn more and participate, visit the Mobility By E-Bike Study project website.
HOW DOES THE STUDY WORK?
1) Instrumentation
Researchers developed a low-impact instrumentation platform that leverages and merges the unique capabilities of e-bike and smartphone sensors. This technology relies on communication between the e-bike and...
Read more
Gabby Abou-Zeid is pursuing her M.S. at Portland State University and working with Dr. Kelly Clifton's SUPER (Sustainable Urban Planning & Engineering Research) Lab. Her research has focused on walkability and pedestrian travel as well as intersections between transportation and land use. Walkable urban design is critcal for resilient cities. Research questions include: How often, and for what trip purposes, are Tucsonans walking as a transportation mode? Which built environment features promote walkability according to both Tucson residents and existing literature? Do the built environment characteristics identified actually impact travel behavior? In Tucson, walkable urban design could benefit or improve public health, pedestrian safety, thermal comfort, local economies, and social capital in addition to helping to reduce the city's carbon footprint.
Photos by Cait McCusker
Portland State continued our tradition of standing out at last month's annual gathering of the Transportation Research Board (TRB). We've collected some highlight stories as well as posters and presentations of Portland State University research presented at the conference. Explore the links below to see what PSU researchers brought to D.C. this year, and read about some student and faculty accomplishments at the nation's largest transportation research conference.
We've also collected our best photos—Check out our TRB 2020 photo album here.
PORTLAND STATE UNIVERSITY HIGHLIGHTS
- Gabby Abou-Zeid won Top Ranked Masters Fellowship for the Eisenhowers Fellows
- Baxter Shandobil and Kelly Clifton won Best in Session from #TRBAM Public Transportation Planning and Development Committee (AP025)
- As co-author, Sirisha Kothuri won the AHB50 2019 Best Paper Award with a younger member. First author Hisham Jashami (Oregon State PhD student). Also co-authored by Chris. Evaluation of Driver Comprehension of...
Mike McQueen is a second year PSU masters in transportation engineering student working with John MacArthur and Kelly Clifton. A two-time Eisenhower Fellow, and the 2019 YPT National StreetLight Fellow, Mike researches e-bike travel behavior, and in this video he describes his work on How E-Bike Incentive Programs are...
Read more