Implementing Oregon’s Energy Plan: Opportunities for Operations and ITS

Jon Makler, Portland State University

Summary:

Oregon’s 10-Year Energy Plan identifies intelligent transportation systems (ITS) as a key strategy for reducing energy consumption in the transportation sector. Other strategies, including fleet turnover, will take a look time to realize benefits for the state while ITS can be implemented and produce results sooner. This project’s goal was to identify operations/ITS opportunities whose near-term implementation or acceleration can aid the accomplishment of the energy plan’s goals. The research found that ITS can help save energy by reducing delay and by reducing VMT. A very small body of research indicates that ITS can save a moderate amount of energy with great certainty by reducing delay. In contrast, ITS has the potential to save a more significant amount of energy by reducing VMT but the feasibility is much less certain. Many local stakeholders felt that the benefits of technology were constrained by staffing resources and capabilities. The issue of traffic incident management (TIM) emerged as an area in which technology is vital but the ability to save energy depends on the degree of training provided to incident responders. As a result of this project, a statewide task force forged an agreement to support TIM training; its success prompted the formation of a similar group focused on the Portland metropolitan region.

Project Details

Project Type:
Research
Project Status:
In Progress
UTC Grant Cycle:
OTREC 2012

Other Products

  • Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board, No. 2423, Transportation Research Board of the National Academies, Washington, D.C., 2014, pp. 1–9. (PUBLICATION)