Many states are adopting the Safe System approach (USDOT, 2022) to improve traffic safety. As the role of speed in injury severity is becoming increasingly clear, one of the key elements of a Safe System approach is Safer Speeds. Specifically, higher motor vehicle speeds lead to higher injury… Read More

This project provides the first systematic, multi-site validation of low-cost community-deployable edge-AI camera sensors integrated with YOLO-based computer vision for pedestrian and vehicle counting in real-world transportation settings. Building on the team's ongoing PacTrans-funded work on… Read More

The overall goal of this research is to improve the seismic safety and resiliency of highway bridges in the Pacific Northwest during earthquakes. Past earthquakes have shown that liquefaction-induced lateral spreading can be a major cause of collapse for pile foundations. Bridge engineers generally… Read More

The Portland Bureau of Transportation (PBOT) manages a bridge inventory including National Bridge Inventory (NBI) bridges, non-NBI pedestrian bridges, and culverts. Historically, condition data has been stored in disparate and/or non-digital formats, hindering efficient management and decision… Read More

Transportation safety analysis has traditionally relied on police-reported crashes to identify dangerous locations. This reactive approach overlooks the many near-miss incidents and perceived hazards that occur daily but go unrecorded. Understanding such incidents is essential for proactive… Read More

Project Lead: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill | Project PI: Sarah O’Brien | PSU team PI: Sirisha Kothuri | In a project funded by the National Cooperative Highway Research Program (NCHRP), Portland State University is partnering with the University of North Carolina at Chapel… Read More

BACKGROUND Developed through NCHRP Project 20-123(02), AASHTO Council on Active Transportation Research Roadmap (2021) highlighted the critical need for targeted research for the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials’ (AASHTO) Council on Active Transportation (CAT)… Read More

Transportation decision-makers typically use benefit-cost analysis (BCA) to evaluate the tradeoffs of transportation projects. However, it is difficult to produce state-specific measures that are multimodal and can consistently evaluate the full range of public and private benefits and costs for… Read More

This applied research project aims to adapt and further train YOLOv9 to enhance its ability to accurately detect, track, and count cyclists and pedestrians in video data from the Portland Metro Area. The method will also extract surrogate safety metrics, such as Post Encroachment Time, which are… Read More

Counts provide the foundation for measuring nonmotorized travel along a link or a network and are also useful for monitoring trends, planning new infrastructure, and for conducting safety, health, and economic analyses. Most agencies still use manual counting methods, however over the last decade,… Read More

Researchers will conduct an evaluation of the Better Bike Share Partnership (BBSP) Living Lab. BBSP provided five organizations in Detroit, Chicago, Cincinnati, Portland and Philadelphia with funding, support and resources to develop best practices addressing significant barriers to shared… Read More

This project is led by the Transportation Research and Education Center (TREC) at Portland State University (PSU), in collaboration with the Institute for Tribal Government (ITG) at PSU, Toole Design Group, the Highway Safety Research Center at University of North Carolina (UNC-HSRC), Sheri Bozic … Read More