This fall, the Friday transportation seminar series at Portland State University has focused on data collection and how information is used to make transportation investments. The Oct. 26 seminar, with the University of Minnesota’s Greg Lindsey, covered tracking and modeling travel behavior.

Engineers and planners alike have relied on traffic counts for their traffic models, but data behind bike and pedestrian travel has been fuzzy. Now, researchers such as Lindsey are offering new methods for conducting bike and pedestrian counts on trails and multiuse paths.

With little guidance from the Federal Highway Administration, Lindsey said, most of the efforts in creating best practices have bubbled up from communities like the Twin Cities, chosen as Nonmotorized Transportation Pilot Cities. Lindsey and his researchers monitored six trails in Minneapolis, using inductive loops and infrared beams.

To address calibration problems and offer validity to their field numbers, Lindsey also sent students into the field to verify counts. The technology allowed for finer-grained detail, especially over a 24-hour period. OTREC Director Jennifer Dill noted, “Too much in the past we’ve lumped “bike and peds” together and your work and analysis is demonstrating that they truly are different modes, with different behaviors.”

Lindsey stressed the importance of conducting this type of research, and measuring our “bicycle miles traveled” and “pedestrian miles traveled” in...

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PRESENTATION ARCHIVE

OVERVIEW

The aim of this research is to investigate pedestrian behavior at signalized intersections using state-of-the-art LIDAR sensing technologies and to use this data, along with vehicular data, to develop a more effective multimodal signal control system.

In the presentation, the presenters will describe a novel method of collecting pedestrian crossing behaviors at signalized intersection, discuss the findings and implications of data analytics, and introduce a novel approach to dynamic flashing yellow arrow mechanisms to reduce the conflict between left turn vehicles and crossing pedestrians.

KEY LEARNING OUTCOMES

  • Understand the framework of LiDAR sensing solutions;
  • Understand how to collect pedestrian behaviors at intersections;
  • Understand how to provide new protection for crossing pedestrians with object-tracking technologies.

THE RESEARCH

This webinar is based on a study funded by the National Institute...

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PRESENTATION ARCHIVE

OVERVIEW

Intelligent transportation systems (ITS) change our communities by improving the safety and convenience of people’s daily mobility. The system relies on multimodal traffic monitoring, that needs to provide reliable, efficient and detailed traffic information for traffic safety and planning. How to reliably and intelligently monitor intersection traffic with multimodal information is one of the most critical topics in intelligent transportation research.

In multimodal traffic monitoring, we gather traffic statistics for distinct transportation modes, such as pedestrians, cars and bicycles, in order to analyze and improve people’s daily mobility in terms of safety and convenience.

In this study, we use a high-resolution millimeter-wave (mmWave) radar sensor to obtain a relatively richer radar point cloud representation for a traffic monitoring scenario. Based on a new...

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PRESENTATION ARCHIVE

OVERVIEW

With so many Probe-Data Vendors in the market, and the fact that each offers their own unique solutions, it can be challenging to identify which vendor(s) would best meet the needs of an organization. Based on a study prepared for the Seattle Department of Transportation, this presentation will provide highlights around eight Probe-Data Vendors and their capabilities, limitations, and quality of data.

KEY LEARNING OUTCOMES

  • An understanding of primary vendors that offer probe data and related products
  • Key probe data sources used to put together data summaries
  • An understanding of the types of platforms that exist and basic analytical capabilities
  • Data quality considerations from each of the vendors offering probe data

SPEAKER

Scott Lee, CEO, IDAX Data Solutions

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PRESENTATION ARCHIVE

OVERVIEW

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 travel modes.

Recently, new sources of bicycling activity data have emerged such as Strava, Streetlight, and GPS-enabled bike share systems. These emerging data sources have potential advantages as a complement to traditional count data, and have even been proposed as replacements for such data, since they are collected continuously and for larger portions of local bicycle networks. However, the representativeness of these new data sources has been questioned, and their suitability for producing bicycle volume estimates has yet to...

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