Portland State University

Since 2011, Portland State University and the Initiative for Bicycle and Pedestrian Innovation have offered a unique opportunity to students: a two-week study abroad course that introduces participants to cities with stellar bike cultures. In past years, classes have explored the Netherlands. This year’s class of fourteen students, led by Professor John MacArthur and supported by funding from the Scan Design Foundation, explored Denmark. See photos from the trip.

Students chose to go on the trip because they knew of the countries’ renown as excellent places to cycle and wanted to learn new strategies that they could bring back to the US. Melissa Kostelecky, a PSU student pursuing a Graduate Certificate in Sustainable Transportation, was inspired to take the trip because she is on a mission to create a better world for her children. In biking, she sees “relief from the isolated, sedentary lifestyle that car dominance has,” “economic freedom,” “a...

In recent years, there has been an increase in the number of people experiencing unsheltered homelessness in the United States. People who are in this situation have nowhere to go at night or during bad weather, except places not designed for humans to sleep: like a car, park, abandoned building, bus or train station, airport, or rest area. Because airports tend to have amenities like public bathrooms and sheltered rest areas, many airports are struggling to respond to the rise in homelessness. A new report from the Airport Cooperative Research Program (ACRP), Strategies to Address Homelessness at Airports, explains what airports, specifically, can do to mitigate the impacts of this crisis. Researchers at TREC worked with PSU's Homelessness Research and Action Collaborative (HRAC) on the project, led by the Cadmus Group.

Research at the Intersection of Transportation and Homelessness

Meeting the needs of unhoused individuals is not core to the mission of airports, and airport operators often do not have specialized expertise to address these needs. Yet, airport staff have in fact needed to address...

As a social determinant of health, transportation significantly contributes to people's well-being. Walkable, bikable, transit-oriented communities are associated with healthier populations. People in such communities are more physically active, less likely to be injured due to a crash, and less exposed to air pollution.

Because of these and other factors, researchers and practitioners have called for health indicators as one way to integrate public health concerns into transportation decision-making. However, it is unclear how indicators are actually being used and what their impact is on policy.

Research conducted by Kelly Rodgers, a National Institute for Transportation and Communities (NITC) Dissertation Fellow, explored how health-related indicators are being used in municipal transportation plans, whether they are institutionalized into transportation agency decision-making processes, and what influence they have on administrative decision-making.

"I have for some time been working at the intersection of health and transportation, and was interested in how health could be better integrated into transportation decision making. And I have also previously done work on performance measures. And so I kind of combined those two things, to see if health-related indicators were a way of getting transportation agencies to consider health in transportation planning," Rodgers said.

THE RESEARCH

Rodgers conducted case...

How can emerging data sources most effectively be integrated with traditional sources? A new article in the July 2023 issue of Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board reports that rather than replacing conventional bike data sources and count programs, old “small” data sources will likely be very important for big data sources like Strava and StreetLight to achieve their potential for predicting annual average daily bicycle traffic (AADBT).

The article, "Evaluating the Potential of Crowdsourced Data to Estimate Network-Wide Bicycle Volumes," was authored by TREC researchers Joe Broach, Sirisha Kothuri and Nathan McNeil of Portland State University along with Md Mintu Miah, Kate Hyun and Stephen Mattingly of the University of Texas at Arlington, Krista Nordback of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; and Frank Proulx of Frank Proulx Consulting, LLC.

Transportation agencies have invested heavily in count infrastructure and models to estimate motor vehicle volumes through networks. Efforts to develop network wide bicycle volume estimates have been hampered by lack of bicycle counters and limited other data sources from which to draw volume estimates. Until recently, most data on bicycle activity came from national or regional household travel surveys, along with observed counts of cyclists—...