Research Projects | Transportation Research and Education Center

NSF SCC RAPID: Consumer Responses to Household Provisioning During COVID-19 Crisis and Recovery

Principal Investigator: Kelly Clifton

Co-Investigator: Rebecca Lewis

When the COVID-19 pandemic first swept across North America and led to emergency shutdowns during the spring of 2020, the way people acquired food and household necessities was dramatically impacted. As stay-at-home orders minimized personal travel, ... Read More

Research Roadmap for the AASHTO Council on Active Transportation (NCHRP 20-123(02))

Principal Investigator: Jennifer Dill

Co-Investigators: Christopher Monsere , Nathan McNeil

Funded by the National Cooperative Highway Research Program (NCHRP), a team of researchers from the Transportation Research and Education Center (TREC) at Portland State University (PSU) and Toole Design prepared the Research Roadmap for the American ... Read More

Advancing Transportation Resilience and Recovery Collaborations in the Greater Portland Metro Region

Principal Investigator: John MacArthur

Portland State University (PSU)’s Transportation Research and Education Center (TREC) and the Regional Disaster Preparedness Organization (RDPO), supported by the City of Portland’s Bureau of Emergency Management (PBEM), are collaborating on a pr ... Read More

NSF Collaborative Research: RAPID: Maintain Mobility and Reduce Infection Through a Resilient Transit and Micromobility System

Principal Investigator: John MacArthur

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused unprecedented disruptions to health, the economy, and transportation systems in cities. The key strategy to combat growth in the infection rate is through "social distancing," maintaining physical separation from othe ... Read More

Homelessness: A Guide for Public Transportation (TCRP J-11/Task 40)

Principal Investigator: John MacArthur

Co-Investigator: Marisa Zapata

Unemployment, low wages, poverty, and lack of affordable housing are the main drivers of an increasing homeless population throughout the U.S. in recent years. Transit agencies are being impacted by homelessness. While transit agencies cannot address ... Read More

Active Transportation Return on Investment Study

Principal Investigator: Jennifer Dill

Co-Investigators: Jenny Liu , Marisa Zapata

The Active Transportation Return on Investment (ATROI) study aimed to provide a quantitative and qualitative assessment of the benefits of active transportation infrastructure in the Portland, OR region. The study used a selection of projects constru ... Read More

Bi-objective Optimization for Battery Electric Bus Deployment Considering Cost and Environmental Equity

Principal Investigator: Xiaoyue Cathy Liu

Co-Investigators: Aaron Golub , Ran Wei

Led by Xiaoyue Cathy Liu of the University of Utah, researchers have created a web-based modeling tool that enables U.S. transit providers to explore the impacts of changing over their systems to battery electric buses, or BEBs. The researchers ran ... Read More

Methodologies to Quantify Transit Performance Metrics at the System-Level

Principal Investigator: Travis Glick

Performance metrics have typically focused at two main scales: a microscopic scale that focuses on specific locations, time-periods, and trips; and, a macroscopic scale that averages metrics over longer times, entire routes, and networks. When applie ... Read More

National Scan of Bike Share Equity Programs

Principal Investigator: John MacArthur

Co-Investigators: Nathan McNeil , Joe Broach

As bike share systems around the United States have grown in number and size in recent years, there has been an increasing effort to ensure that those systems are accessible to all residents, particularly those who have the fewest resources or have b ... Read More

Effect of Residential Street Speed Limit Reduction from 25 to 20 mi/hr on Driving Speeds in Portland, Oregon

Principal Investigator: Christopher Monsere

Co-Investigators: Sirisha Kothuri , Jason Anderson

In 2015, the City of Portland adopted Vision Zero's objective of eliminating transportation-related fatalities and serious injuries. Speed, through analysis of crash data, was determined to be a contributing factor in 47% of the fatal crashes observe ... Read More

Novel Approaches to Model Travel Behavior and Sustainability Impacts of E-Bike Use

Principal Investigator: John MacArthur

Co-Investigator: Christopher Cherry

Electric bikes (e-bikes) are a new mode of transportation that could substantially improve efficiency in the transportation system if adopted as substitutes for cars. Researchers at University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Portland State University, and ... Read More

NSF Collaborative Research: Non-Additive Network Routing and Assignment Models

Principal Investigator: Avinash Unnikrishnan

Network assignment models are widely used to study the flow of commodities on infrastructure with a network structure (such as roadway drivers or freight shipments) and form the basis of transportation planning for urban areas. Currently, most networ ... Read More