As part of the City of Portland Enhanced Transit Corridors Plan, the Portland Bureau of Transportation (PBOT) is working with TriMet and Jacobs Engineering to evaluate the impact of red colored transit priority lanes at key locations in and around downtown Portland. Transit priority lanes restrict… Read More

There has been an increase in the number of homeless individuals at airports in recent years. There are many reasons for this increase, including a reduced number of city shelters and the attractiveness of airports for homeless people due to their relative safety, transit accessibility, climate… Read More

Our multi-year study on automated transit fare collection offers a key finding that won't surprise you: Despite the convenience, the rush toward cashless fare systems has created barriers for lower-income riders seeking to use transit. Results from focus groups, surveys, and a review of current… Read More

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 Association of State Highway and Transportation… Read More

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 project to 1) raise awareness, deepen knowledge and… Read More

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 others. This strategy is incompatible with transit… Read More

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 the underlying causes of homelessness, there are… Read More

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 constructed in the region between 2001 and 2017 to… Read More

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 the model for TriMet in Portland, OR, as well,… Read More

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 been underserved in the past. The mobility… Read More

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 applied to entire transit systems, microscopic… Read More

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 observed in Portland. Thus, one of the pillars in the… Read More