Portland State University

Since 2016, the Transportation Research and Education Center (TREC) at Portland State University has hosted a free transportation summer camp for high school students. Isa Swain, an incoming sophomore in civil engineering at Portland State University, exemplifies why TREC engages in K-12 education: students' interest in transportation doesn't have to wait until the university. After attending the summer camp in 2020, Swain came to PSU to study civil engineering last year and is now on track to become a transportation professional. She also served as a camp counselor for this year's cohort of students. We interviewed Isa to get her perspective on the PSU summer camp and what it offers to students.

ABOUT THE CAMP

The 2023 transportation summer camp was held last month, with activities including bike tours, a jet boat tour, an exploration of the inside of a couple of Portland's bridges, a bridge-building contest, and of course the presentation of students' final projects to friends and family. Guest instructors shared their expertise and career insights with students, coming from local organizations including PSU, the City of Portland, The Street Trust, the Oregon Department of Transportation, Cycle Oregon, and Alta Planning + Design. 

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As a social determinant of health, transportation significantly contributes to people's well-being. Walkable, bikable, transit-oriented communities are associated with healthier populations. People in such communities are more physically active, less likely to be injured due to a crash, and less exposed to air pollution.

Because of these and other factors, researchers and practitioners have called for health indicators as one way to integrate public health concerns into transportation decision-making. However, it is unclear how indicators are actually being used and what their impact is on policy.

Research conducted by Kelly Rodgers, a National Institute for Transportation and Communities (NITC) Dissertation Fellow, explored how health-related indicators are being used in municipal transportation plans, whether they are institutionalized into transportation agency decision-making processes, and what influence they have on administrative decision-making.

"I have for some time been working at the intersection of health and transportation, and was interested in how health could be better integrated into transportation decision making. And I have also previously done work on performance measures. And so I kind of combined those two things, to see if health-related indicators were a way of getting transportation agencies to consider health in transportation planning," Rodgers said.

THE RESEARCH

Rodgers conducted case...

Portland State University (PSU) has been awarded a new contract by the National Cooperative Highway Research Program (NCHRP). To create a "Guide for Addressing Encampments on State Transportation Rights-of-Way," $350,000 in research funding will go toward developing a set of best practices to help state transportation agencies respond to temporary encampments on state transportation rights-of-way. These areas, including paved roads, bridges, and other transportation facilities managed by the state, are often some of the most accessible public land for people to occupy who have nowhere else to go.

A growing trend of encampments on state rights-of-way has presented unprecedented challenges for state departments of transportation (DOTs) in the design, construction, and maintenance of transportation facilities. As owners of some of the largest stretches of public land, DOTs must maintain the land for public use, and may lack resources to address the social welfare aspects of this stewardship. There are no widely accepted guidelines relating to this trend. By supporting this research, the NCHRP aims to help state DOTs respond to encampments in a way that assures rights-of-way remain open while...

In the 1970's, Portland had a dream: to create a "pleasurable human environment" by giving space to people rather than cars. Several car-free areas were identified in the city's ambitious 1972 Downtown Plan, approved by city council at the time.

Four Portland State University (PSU) students took that dream a little further this year. In the Fall 2022 term, Cameron Bennett, Owen Christofferson, Emily D’Antonio and Aidan Simpson created a Downtown Portland Living Streets Plan centered around a new street typology for Portland: Living Streets.

Like the public plazas common in cities outside the US, living streets are defined by slow speeds and shared space. But unlike European old towns, Dutch Woonerfs or Barcelona's Superblocks, Living Streets were designed specifically with Portland in mind. Bennett describes them as "a pedestrian-focused equivalent to the neighborhood greenways in Portland: Not explicitly car-free, but kind of...