Portland State students redesign busy Portland street for active transportation
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In the U.S., women are far less likely to bicycle for transportation than men. Explanations include, among others, safety concerns (traffic and crime), complex travel patterns related to household responsibilities, time constraints, lack of facilities that feel safe, and attitudes. This talk will explore how this gender gap emerges in childhood, using data from the Family Activity Study. The study collected data from 300 Portland families (parents and children) over two years, allowing us to see how things change over time.
Jennifer Dill is a Portland State University professor and the director of TREC. She teaches courses in transportation policy, pedestrian and bicycle planning, and research methods. Her research interests focus on the interactions of transportation planning, travel behavior, health, the environment and land use. In general, she is interested in answering these questions: How do people make their travel and location decisions? How do those decisions impact the environment? How do our planning decisions impact people's travel and location decisions? Prior to entering academia, she worked as an environmental and transportation planner.
To be published later this spring is some of the first bicycle-focused research into shared space, a controversial urban design approach pioneered in the Netherlands in the 1990s.
Allison Duncan, a PhD candidate in urban studies & planning at Portland State University, earned a NITC dissertation fellowship in 2014 and used the research grant to study shared space intersections in the United Kingdom.
Shared space designs have recently been adopted at a handful of sites in the UK and others scattered across Europe, Australia and New Zealand. They are characterized by a lack of physical guidelines such as curbs, road surface markings and traffic signs to define who has the right-of-way.
The idea is for pedestrians, cars and bicycles to mingle in a common zone and use eye contact and natural communication to make sure no one gets hurt.
“Cyclists and pedestrians are supposed to be able to treat it more like a plaza and just cross where they want to, and drivers are supposed to yield,” Duncan said.
As a street design scheme, shared space isn’t exactly new. It’s more or less the way all streets were designed until the advent of cars, and is still the norm in many Asian countries where cars share the roads with a crowd of two- and three-wheeled...
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As cities move to increase levels of bicycling for transportation, many practitioners and advocates have promoted the use of protected bike lanes (also known as “cycle tracks” or “protected bikeways”) as an important component in providing high-quality urban infrastructure for cyclists. These on-street lanes provide more space and physical separation between the bike lane and motor vehicle lane compared with traditional striped bike lanes. However, few U.S. cities have direct experiences with their design and operations, in part because of the limited design guidance provided in the past. There is limited research from North America on protected bike lanes, but preliminary evidence suggests that they can both improve the level of comfort of cyclists and potentially increase the number of people cycling. This research evaluates protected bike lanes in five distinct contexts varying in population, driving and cycling rates and cultures, and weather: Austin, Texas; Chicago, Illinois; Portland, Oregon; San Francisco, California; and, Washington, District of Columbia.
These five cities participated in the inaugural “Green Lane Project” (GLP) sponsored by...
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