pedestrian safety | Transportation Research and Education Center

NITC education project helped build curriculum for colleges in upstate New York

Jul 13, 2016

In the spring of 2015, with guidance provided by the NITC program, students at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, New York created a pedestrian and bicycle plan for the City of Canandaigua, New York.

As part of their Sustainable Community Development capstone course, the students in environmental studies provided plans for a mixed use district along Route 332 in Canandaigua.

Course instructor Jim Ochterski credits PSU researcher Lynn Weigand’s NITC education project, Enhancing Bicycle and Pedestrian Education through Curriculum and Faculty Development, with providing essential resources for the course.

“Most of the students did not have any grounding in pedestrian planning and development, and [the NITC materials] made a huge difference,” Ochterski said.

Part of the mission of the NITC program is to enrich transportation education. One way our university partners do this is by developing curricula to advance transportation and livability goals in the classroom.

Weigand's project was intended for just this purpose. She created a module-based curriculum for bicycle and pedestrian planning and design that was designed to be adaptable for use in a variety of course offerings.

The HWS instructors took that curriculum and ran with it.

“We took on a major community project in ped/bike planning because we had these support materials from the program. It allowed us to...

Researchers create tool to forecast pedestrian demand

Nov 24, 2015

A new NITC project has developed a robust pedestrian demand estimation tool, the first of its kind in the country.

See the research here: Development of a Pedestrian Demand Estimation Tool

Using the tool, planners can predict pedestrian trips with spatial acuity.

The research was completed in partnership with Oregon Metro, and will allow Metro to allocate infrastructure based on pedestrian demand in the Portland, Oregon metropolitan area.

In a previous project completed last year as part of the same partnership, the lead investigator, Kelly Clifton, developed a way to collect data about the pedestrian environment on a small, neighborhood scale that made sense for walk trips. For more about how that works, click here to read our news coverage of that project.

Following the initial project, the next step was to take that micro-level pedestrian data and use it to predict destination choice. For every walk trip generated by the model in the first project, this tool matches it to a likely destination based on traveler characteristics and environmental attributes.

Patrick Singleton, a graduate student researcher at Portland...

Bicycle and pedestrian database grows, with help from high schoolers

Aug 18, 2015

Seven dedicated students spent their summer days in TREC’s offices at PSU this year, working to transform the Bike-Ped Portal project from a dream into a reality.

TREC already houses Portal, a vast collection of Portland-area traffic and transit data, and NITC researchers saw a need for a database on the national scale for non-motorized transportation modes.

Research associate Krista Nordback launched the NITC pooled-fund project, Online Non-motorized Traffic Count Archive, with co-investigator Kristen Tufte in the spring of 2014. A year ago, Bike-Ped Portal was little more than an idea.

Now it contains roughly four million individual records of bicycle, pedestrian and even equestrian movements in five states.

High school interns Jolene Liu, Tomas Ramirez, Tara Sengupta, Gautum Singh, Kim Le, Max Fajardo and Kimberly Kuhn worked full time for weeks in order to convert piles of unsorted documentation into usable formats.

Nordback engaged the team of interns through Saturday Academy, a...

TREC intern profile: Jolene Liu

Nov 26, 2014

Jolene Liu, a senior from Westview High School in Beaverton, completed a successful internship with TREC this year. The internship was funded by IBM through the Saturday Academy's Apprenticeships in Science and Engineering (ASE) program.

Liu worked under the tutelage of TREC researcher Krista Nordback for two months, stringing up an impressive list of accopmlishments over that time. She worked to help create the online non-motorized traffic count archive, a centralized database for bicycling and walking count data. Liu tested the database structure, summarized data formats and wrote help text for future users. She also processed manual counts of pedestrians and cyclists from intersections in Bend, Eugene, Portland and throughout Oregon.

For an IBPI professional development course, Liu also calibrated pedestrian counting equipment and demonstrated the equipment for course participants.

Perhaps most impressively, Liu co-authored a paper accepted for presentation at the annual meeting of the Transportation Research Board this coming January: "Creating a National Non-motorized Traffic Count Archive: Process and Progress," Paper 15-5310.

"She was amazing," Nordback said. "She took on tasks most undergrads wouldn't have been able to handle, plus she took amazing notes at our (Technical Advisory Committee) meeting in Salem.

"She got to watch...

PSU students help determine Cully neighborhood's walkability needs

Jul 11, 2014

Three Portland State University graduate students in the Nohad A. Toulan School of Urban Studies and Planning used GIS technology to collect and analyze residents’ thoughts about walkability needs for Portland, Oregon’s northeast Cully neighborhood.

Their report, Engaging Cully, was the final product of a ten-week course called Public Participation Geographic Information Systems (PPGIS), taught by PSU professor Vivek Shandas.

In PPGIS, community input is used to create GIS-based data and diagnostics maps which can inform planners’ decision-making process. Team members Travis Driessen, Brandi Campbell and Eduardo Montejo worked with community-based organizations and residents to assess the needs of the Cully neighborhood’s pedestrian network using PPGIS methods.

Prior to this project, Driessen, who is working toward a graduate certificate in Geographic Information Systems at PSU, was already collaborating with David Hampsten, a board member of the Hazelwood Neighborhood Association and member of the East Portland Action Plan, to help Prioritize Portland! – a coalition consisting of multiple organizations including the ...

NITC program awards funding for new round of research, education projects

Jul 08, 2014

The executive committee of the National Institute for Transportation and Communities, or NITC, program has selected a third round of research, education, and technology transfer projects for funding. This grant is part of the University Transportation Center (UTC) program funded by the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Office of Research and Technology, and is a partnership between Portland State University, the University of Oregon, the Oregon Institute of Technology, and the University of Utah. The committee chose eight projects, totaling $800,000, under the NITC theme of safe, healthy and sustainable transportation to foster livable communities.

The projects are national in scope and support innovations in priority areas including public transit and active transportation.

Projects selected include:

An analysis of the effects of commuter rail on population deconcentration.
A look into prioritizing pedestrians at signalized intersections.
A study of cyclist-vehicle interaction.
An evaluation of an eco-driving intervention.

...

Portland State University students enhance Tigard's walkability

Jun 30, 2014

Several notable transportation projects have come out of Portland State University’s Master of Urban and Regional Planning (MURP) program this spring.

Each year, graduating students finish up their two-year program of study by forming into groups and carrying out a professional project. Clients work with Portland State University to identify planning needs that would be a good fit for the MURP program, and students choose projects based on their interests.

...

OTREC researchers will present on bike/ped counts at traffic data conference

Jun 26, 2014

OTREC researchers Krista Nordback and Sirisha Kothuri will present research at the North American Travel Monitoring Exposition and Conference (NATMEC) from June 29 to July 2, 2014.

The conference, organized by the Transportation Research Board, provides an opportunity for traffic monitoring professionals to share information about collecting and using traffic data.

Nordback will talk about what professionals can do to maintain bicycle count programs at the state level. She will give a presentation on the feasibility of using existing traffic signals to collect bicycle counts, and on what to do with that data once it is gathered.

Kothuri will present strategies for counting pedestrians using existing resources such as signal controllers and software already installed at intersections.

Nordback and Kothuri will draw from their own research as well as from the work of Miguel Figliozzi, Chris Monsere, ...

Student planning project yields professional results for Beaverton

Jun 20, 2014

Portland State University’s Master of Urban and Regional Planning (MURP) program matches students with clients every year to execute professional-level planning projects.

This spring, InSite Planning Group, a team of six MURP students, conducted a detailed corridor study for the city of Beaverton.

The ...

U.S. DOT assistant secretary tours Portland

Jun 16, 2014

Bicycle and pedestrian safety has emerged as a top priority for U.S. Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx and the Department of Transportation. With this in mind, the department’s top research official visited Portland State University, home to the U.S. DOT-designated national center for livable communities.

Greg Winfree, the assistant secretary for research and technology, visited Portland State’s transportation research and education center June 13. Center Director Jennifer Dill and researcher Christopher Monsere gave Winfree a tour of the center’s living laboratory: Portland’s active transportation infrastructure.

Winfree, an advocate for improving safety for vulnerable road users, explored the city’s various bicycle safety efforts, including bike boulevards, protected bike lanes, bike boxes, bike-specific signals and signage. He also learned of pedestrian research involving traffic signals, crossings and...

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