Research Projects | Transportation Research and Education Center

Do Travel Costs Matter? Using Psychological and Social Equity Perspectives to Evaluate the Effects of a Low-Income Transit Fare Program on Low-Income Riders

Principal Investigator: Liu-Qin Yang

Co-Investigators: Liming Wang , Aaron Golub

Access to transit can deliver a host of benefits to the riders and to the region. Previous research aiming to study these benefits has primarily relied on data collected from the opening of new routes or transit systems, and has focused on the genera ... Read More

Incorporating Bicycle Activity and Vehicle Travel Reduction from Bicycle Infrastructure into Strategic Planning Tools

Principal Investigator: Joe Broach

Co-Investigator: Kristina Currans

Planners and modelers at all levels of government have been grappling with the problem of how to better represent bicycling when modeling and forecasting future scenarios. Planners want to know how and to what extent infrastructure projects can incre ... Read More

Integrate Socioeconomic Vulnerability for Resilient Transportation Infrastructure Planning

Principal Investigator: Liming Wang

Co-Investigators: John MacArthur , Yu Xiao

The objective of this proposal is to develop a new methodology that incorporates community socioeconomic vulnerability in the evaluation of transportation infrastructure vulnerabilities for cities and regions facing multi-hazards such as the Portland ... Read More

Implementing a Community Transportation Academy

Principal Investigator: Nathan McNeil

Co-Investigator: Keith Bartholomew

For over 25 years, the Portland Bureau of Transportation has partnered with Portland State University to offer the Portland Traffic and Transportation Course – a 10-week course designed to provide local residents with the skills and knowledge to un ... Read More

Statistical Inference for Multimodal Travel Time Reliability

Principal Investigator: Avinash Unnikrishnan

Co-Investigators: Miguel Andres Figliozzi , Subhash Kochar

Travel time reliability is a key metric of interest to practitioners and researchers. There are several metrics available for travel time reliability - buffer index, planning index, probability of travel time being higher than a specific value, etc. ... Read More

New Mobility For All: Can Targeted Information And Incentives Help Underserved Communities Realize The Potential Of Emerging Mobility Options?

Principal Investigator: Nathan McNeil

Co-Investigator: John MacArthur

Low-income residents, immigrants, seniors, and people with disabilities – these are people who stand to gain the most from new tools and services that reduce transportation costs and travel time. However, issues of affordability, technology adoptio ... Read More

Updating ODOT Safety Investigation Manual

Principal Investigator: Christopher Monsere

Co-Investigators: Sirisha Kothuri , Jason Anderson , David Hurwitz

Researchers at Portland State University and Oregon State University have updated the Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT) Safety Investigations Manual (PDF), a resource to assist ODOT traffic investigators with highway safety project investiga ... Read More

Exploring Data Fusion Techniques to Estimate Network-Wide Bicycle Volumes

Principal Investigator: Sirisha Kothuri

Co-Investigators: Joe Broach , Nathan McNeil , Kate Hyun , Stephen Mattingly

Planners and decision makers have increasingly voiced a need for network-wide estimates of bicycling activity. Such volume estimates have for decades informed motorized planning and analysis but have only recently become feasible for non-motorized tr ... Read More

Resilient and Rapid Repair Measures for Seismically Vulnerable Bridges Following Major Earthquakes

Principal Investigator: Peter Dusicka

The Cascadia Subduction Zone (CSZ) earthquake threatens bridges across the Pacific Northwest. Damage is expected to be geographically spread throughout the region and will have a nearly simultaneous impact on transportation through several important ... Read More

Evaluation of Portland Shared E-Scooter Pilot Program Goals and Outcomes

Principal Investigator: John MacArthur

Co-Investigator: Jennifer Dill

Shared electric scooters (e-scooters) are fast becoming a mobility option across the U.S. Many cities are permitting their operation, in part, as a way to provide another option to driving private cars. This could reduce private vehicle miles travell ... Read More

Subcontract: ODOT Understanding Pedestrian Injuries and Social Equity

Principal Investigator: Nathan McNeil

Portland State University partnered with the project PI Josh Roll of the Oregon Department of Transportation on a two-phase research project examining pedestrian injury and social equity. Past research and planning has highlighted the existence of pe ... Read More

Connected Streetcar Project

Principal Investigator: Kristin Tufte

Co-Investigators: Larry Head , John MacArthur

This project will create a foundation for deploying connected vehicle infrastructure and facilitating connected vehicle research for the NITC UTC. Connected Vehicle (CV) technology and the associated data has the potential to help us better understan ... Read More