Portland State University

Transportation defines Portland, Oregon. Portland State University (PSU) shapes transportation professionals who, in turn, shape cities across the world. Our students conduct cutting-edge research under the guidance of the world’s foremost transportation research faculty at PSU - from both the Toulan School of Urban Studies & Planning and the department of Civil & Environmental Engineering of MCECS.

WHAT MAKES TRANSPORTATION UNIQUE AT PORTLAND STATE UNIVERSITY (PSU)?

• A PSU research center dedicated to transportation: Students have the advantage of TREC - the Transportation Research and Education Center which is home to one of five national university transportation centers. We lead the National Institute for Transportation & Communities (NITC), a six-university consortium that receives an average of $4.4 million per year from the U.S. DOT to support transportation research projects and students. PSU also supports other related research centers on smart cities, population, aging and more.

• An active and engaged...

The movement of goods throughout the supply chain is complex, fraught with uncertainties, and not without room for improvement. Portland State University recently received a $167,000 grant to support research investigating the development and evaluation of an intelligent freight transportation matching system. The system could improve freight and trucking networks critical to supply chain performance by reducing inefficient capacity—the problem of keeping trucks full of cargo while they’re on the road.

BIKE/PED COUNT SURVEY: CALL FOR INPUT

Researchers at Portland State University, University of Texas at Arlington, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Toole Design Group are conducting a scan to identify locations where bicycle counts are taking place around North America, and hope to enlist your help! If you collect bike count data (or oversee counts) in your jurisdiction, please consider taking our quick survey to tell us a little bit about your count locations and data.

The survey can be accessed here: tinyurl.com/BikeCounterScan

THE NEW PROJECT

We held our annual flagship professional development event, Transportation & Communities, on September 13 and 14. In honor of the event's ten-year anniversary, we changed up the format: Rather than a typical conference with one-hour sessions and a keynote gathering, we offered a selection of intensive half-day workshops. See photos from the event.

The workshops gave practitioners a chance to take a deep dive into new skills in order to walk away with new tools or frameworks that could be applied to their work. We offered a review of congestion mitigation strategies, universal access and equity in pedestrian planning, and discussion on how smart technology could be implemented in suburban communities. Several workshops were based on findings from new research by the National Institute for...