Darshan Chauhan, Portland State University
Darshan Chauhan is a graduate research assistant in civil engineering at Portland State University. He currently serves as the treasurer of STEP (Students in Transportation Engineering and Planning), PSU's transportation student group, and generously volunteers his time at a variety of transportation-related events via PSU's Transportation Research and Education Center (TREC). He will defend his masters thesis on network flow problems this year, and plans to continue on to earn his PhD. In the 2018/2019 academic year, Darshan earned a Walter H. Kramer Fellowship from Portland State University.
Tell us about yourself?
I am a second-year Masters student in the civil engineering program with a transportation focus at PSU. I have been training with Prof. Unnikrishnan here to understand, model, and tackle uncertainties in different transportation networks. Before coming to Portland, I completed my Bachelor’s degree in civil engineering at BITS Pilani Hyderabad Campus, working as an undergraduate researcher in areas like fracture mechanics, optimization, and alternate cementitious materials through my junior and senior years. After completing my masters, I am continuing for my Ph.D. in transportation at PSU. Apart from school, I really enjoy...
Read more
Photo of CUPA 2019 Graduation Ceremony by Nina Johnson
As the spring term comes to a close and many Portland State University students celebrate graduation, we'd like to take a moment to highlight two excellent transportation-focused projects from this year's Master of Urban and Regional Planning (MURP) graduates of the College of Urban and Public Affairs. Last year's graduating masters students worked on equitable travel to Marquam Hill, active transportation in North PDX, car-free access to the outdoors and an examination of skateboarding for transportation.
This year, two student groups took on projects related to walking and bicycling.
ReadyStreets: Human Powered Mobility in the Post-earthquake Recovery Period
SAFE (Supporting Access for Everyone) Planning Group: Kerry Aszklar, Jaye Cromwell, Bryan Nguyen, Joey Posada, Sabina Roan, and ...
Read more
In the latest report published by TREC, we partnered with Explore Washington Park (EWP) to better understand how to meet the needs of underserved populations in Washington Park.
EWP was formed as a Transportation Management Association and operates as a 501(c)3 non-profit with a license agreement with the City of Portland for transportation management in Portland's Washington Park and everything in it: Oregon Zoo, Portland Children's Museum, World Forestry Center, Hoyt Arboretum, Portland Japanese Garden, International Rose Test Garden and all of the park space in between. A Metro grant in 2017 provided investments to support transit to and within the park...
Read more
Our Transportation Undergraduate Research Fellowship (TURF) program is in its third year, and we're excited to introduce our 2019 cohort. The TURF program advances critical thinking and research skills under the guidance of a PSU transportation faculty mentor. This year's fellows are working on various research initiatives at TREC, including e-scooters, bicycle and pedestrian count data, multimodal trip generation, pedestrian safety and equitable transit.
TURF is funded by an education grant through our U.S. DOT funded program the National Institute for Transportation and Communities (NITC). Students were selected through a competitive application process; we had 103 applications from 23 U.S. states and 4 countries.
The TURF fellows will spend six weeks during the summer of 2019 at Portland State University, tackling transportation engineering and planning research questions.
MEET THE 2019 TURF FELLOWS
Anaisabel Crespo - Leiva, SUNY...
- August 2020: Read the latest research paper with updated model & findings.
- Download the White Paper: Estimating the Effect of E-bikes On Person Miles Travelled and Greenhouse Gas Emissions (PDF)
- Download the White Paper:...
Authored by Malia Knapp-Rossi, Project Manager Intern at Better Block PDX and Master of Urban and Regional Planning Student at Portland State University.
Learn more about the Better Block PSU pathway program here.
Better Block PDX, a public spaces advocacy nonprofit, has spent the last four years working with Portland State University (PSU) students to develop design and implementation plans for community-driven transportation projects. Read about Better Block project milestones. In collaboration with PSU faculty, PSU’s Institute for Sustainable Solutions (ISS), graduate-level urban planning and engineering students, the City of Portland’s Bureau of Transportation, and community organizations—Better Block PDX created the annual PSU Project Pathway program.
This Pathway program empowers PSU students and the greater Portland community to collaborate on low cost, transportation projects to serve neighborhood needs. These D.I.Y urbanism projects are fully integrated into the academic curriculum. The next generation of engineers and planners develop detailed traffic plans, public participation events, and transportation performance measures in order to create a safe and effective implementation path. The Pathway program provides a practicum...
Read more
Since 1994, every Federal agency must develop a strategy for addressing “environmental justice” (EJ) – the disproportionately adverse human health or environmental effects on low-income and minority populations (sometimes called “EJ Populations”). In transportation planning this means including those communities' voices in the planning process, and evaluating the social impacts early on in the planning and project development process.
But what happens if EJ Populations move or grow during the sometimes decade-long project development process?
"If you're in a community that is changing, can you rely on forecasting to look ahead and have a detailed view of EJ impacts into the...
Read more
The Maseeh College of Engineering & Computer Science department of Civil and Environmental Engineering is pleased to announce that Mike McQueen, a first year master's student studying transportation, has been awarded the Young Professionals in Transportation StreetLight Graduate Fellowship. He was also one of seven Portland State University students to be awarded an Eisenhower Fellowship at this year's annual meeting of the Transportation Research Board.
Young Professionals in Transportation (YPT) is an international nonprofit coalition of organizations which helps provide professional development, fellowship, and networking for young professionals in the transportation field. This is the first year that YPT has offered the Graduate Fellowship award, thanks to a partnership with StreetLight Data, a transportation analytics firm. Mike was selected from an international pool of applicants.
The award includes a plaque, one year of YPT membership, a monetary scholarship, and one month of access to StreetLight Insight. Insight is a platform that transforms anonymous, archival location data derived from millions of mobile devices into useful metrics that describe travel patterns. Mike plans to use the StreetLight Insight to assist his...
Read more
We’ve been hosting an annual summit that connects national mobility-focused research to local practice for eleven years now. Registration for Transportation and Communities Summit 2019 is now open, and this year we’re focusing our attention on three key themes: Intersection of Transportation and Housing / Land Use; New Mobility in Active Transportation; and Multimodal Data: Collecting, Processing, Analyzing, and Using.
In exploring the multimodal data theme further, we’re excited to welcome our keynote Ben Wellington—a data scientist and policy analyst from New York, NY. The founder of I Quant NY, his data analysis has influenced local government policy including changes in NYC street infrastructure, the way New Yorkers pay for cabs and the design of NYC subway vending machines, and made it’s way to TEDTalks “Making Data Mean More Through Storytelling” and “How We Found the Worst Place to Park in New York City — using Big Data”.
Across the world, the Open Data movement is growing and more and more cities are releasing data to the public. As citizens push for more...
Read more
Automobile traffic congestion in urban areas comes with significant economic and social costs for everyone. According to the 2015 Urban Mobility Report, the total additional cost of congestion was $160 billion. As more people move to metropolitan areas, the problems only intensify. The latest NITC report offers a new approach to urban traffic signal control based on network consensus control theory which is computationally efficient, responsive to local congestion, and at the same time has the potential for congestion management at the network level.
Traffic signals represent a significant bottleneck. As...
Read more