Cyclists ride on the Hawthorne Bridge

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...

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People talking and looking at materials in a workshop

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...

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A bicyclists rides down a neighborhood greenway
Principal Investigator: Jenny Liu, Portland State University
Learn more about this research by viewing the Executive Summary and the full Final Report, or watching the January 2018 seminar on the Project Overview page.

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...

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Left: Bicycles on a trail; Right: Young woman buying transit pass

The National Institute for Transportation and Communities (NITC) is soliciting proposals for our two 2018 Pooled Fund projects:

RFP now open; proposals due Oct 1, 2018

This 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...

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People looking at laptops
Principal Investigator: Liming Wang, Portland State University
Learn more about this curriculum and how you can apply it at your school by viewing the one-page Executive Summary and the full Final Report on the Project Overview page.

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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Electric Car Charging
Principal Investigator: John MacArthur, Portland State University
Learn more about this research by viewing the Executive Summary and the full Final Report on the Project Overview page.

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;...
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Student Work

With the departing class of 2018, we wanted to shine a light on a group of graduating Portland State University (PSU) masters students that focused their studies and expertise on transportation. 

Three groups of PSU students finishing the Master of Urban and Regional Planning (MURP) program chose to do workshop projects that tackled a specific transportation issue in the Portland area. Michael Harpool, a graduate of PSU's Master of Urban Studies (MUS) program, wrote his masters thesis on utilitarian skateboarding.

Masters in Urban and Regional Planning(MURP) projects:

 

Elevating People: Planning for Equitable Travel to Marquam Hill

Elevating People intersects with OHSU’s vision for diversity and...

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Class group photo

For the third year in a row, it was our pleasure to host the Oregon Summer Transportation Institute (OSTI) at Portland State University (PSU), a free two-week residential camp open to high school girls. This past July, our camp,  introduced twenty-three Oregonians to the transportation profession. The end goal? Our hope is to build an awareness in young women of transportation careers and inspire them to pursue areas of STEM study not traditionally open to them.

Made possible with support from the Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT), this free camp was led by Lisa Patterson, the Technology Transfer and Workforce Development Program Manager for PSU’s Transportation Research and Education Center (TREC). The camp featured guest lectures by local professional women from ODOT, PSU, TREC, the Portland Bureau of Transportation (PBOT), , TriMet, moovel, Roosevelt High School, eBay, Multnomah County, Toole Design Group, Alta Planning + Design, DKS Associates, Jarrett Walker + Associates, and Nelson\Nygaard. See photos from this year’s camp.

Students worked in groups on their “two week projects” to analyze and propose solutions for five...

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Stock image of bicycles

The National Institute for Transportation and Communities (NITC) program has released its 2018 Small Starts request for proposals (RFP). Faculty at NITC's partner universities* are invited to submit abstracts by September 17, 2018.

The Small Starts grant assists researchers (based at NITC partner universities) who are interested in transportation but have not had an opportunity to undertake a small project ($20,000 or less). Read about the Small Starts projects that were funded in 2017. Projects must be consistent with NITC's theme of improving the mobility of people and goods to build strong communities.

Our theme includes a few key topics:

  • Increasing access to opportunities
  • Improving multi-modal planning and shared use of infrastructure
  • Advancing innovation and smart cities
  • Developing data, models, and tools

Key Dates

  • RFP Opens: July 18, 2018
  • Proposals due: September 17, 2018
  • Award Selection: Sept-Oct 2018
  • Projects begin & funds...
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