Hilltop Planning, a group of students from the Master of Urban and Regional Planning (MURP) program at Portland State University, received a 2017 Student Project Award from the American Institute of Certified Planners (AICP) for their Planning Workshop project, OHSU Night Access Plan.
The group took third prize in NITC's 2016 student video contest with their short video about the Night Access Plan:
Read more
Better Block PDX, a nonprofit dedicated to revatilizing urban spaces, won a Spirit of Portland Award for work on projects including the Better Natio project. Better Naito, which repurposed a lane of Portland’s Natio Parkway to preserve bicycle and pedestrian access, grew out of a Portland State University engineering capstone project in 2015.
Gwen Shaw was then a senior at Portland State. Her work gained the attention of city leaders, with then-Commissioner Steve Novick singling out the quality of the project’s traffic control plan.
It began as a temporary demonstration project, but the city brought back Better Naito in 2016 and left the configuration in place for three months, as reported in BikePortland.
Shaw, who is still involved with Better Block PDX, the experience served as an introduction to transportation. “It’s the most educational experience you can get,” Shaw said.
“You’re meeting with the city traffic engineer and he stamps your report and asks you if you know what the MUTCD is,” she said. “It’s fun to get that experience.”
Shaw built that experience into a profession: she’s now a transportation analyst with Lancaster Engineering...
Portland State doctoral student Patrick Singleton won the best presentation award for the Doctoral Research in Transport Modeling and Traveler Behavior session of the Transportation Research Board annual meeting in Washington, D.C. This marks the second year running that a Portland State student has won the award, after Steven Gehrke won in 2016.
Singleton presented “Exploring the Positive Utility of Travel and Mode Choice,” drawn from his dissertation research. Positive utility of travel is a concept that travel can provide benefits and be motivated by factors beyond reaching a destination.
The award will be formally presented during the Network Modeling Committee meeting at next year’s Transportation Research Board conference.
Singleton continues to rack up awards. He has been named the NITC university transportation center student of the year and has received Eno and Eisenhower fellowships, being named the top-ranked Eisenhower recipient at the 2015 TRB annual meeting. He was also named a NITC dissertation fellow in 2016.
He is a doctoral student in the Civil and Environmental Engineering department and is involved in several TREC research projects. His adviser is Prof....
Read more of our TRB 2017 coverage here.
Tara Goddard, a doctoral candidate in the Nohad A. Toulan School of Urban Studies and Planning at Portland State University, has been selected as the 2016 NITC university transportation center student of the year.
NITC takes pride in the development of tomorrow’s transportation leaders, involving students in research and supporting student transportation groups.
Goddard is the 11th student of the year since Portland State established its university transportation center in 2006. She is being recognized at the Council of University Transportation Centers 2017 Annual Awards Banquet in Washington, D.C., where she's also attending the Transportation Research Board annual meeting.
Goddard’s dissertation research explores drivers’ attitudes and behaviors toward bicyclists. This reflects her broader interest in the intersectionality between transportation and the social sciences, and how professionals in both disciplines can work together to improve upon public spaces and the ways that people interact within them.
This research focus comes with exciting opportunities for future work, a future which is still being determined: Goddard has applied for academic positions in different parts of the world and is waiting to...
Read more
Patrick Singleton, a Portland State University doctoral candidate in the school of Civil & Environmental Engineering, has been selected as the 2015 NITC university transportation center student of the year.
To be nominated for this award, which includes a $1000 stipend and also covers the recipient’s attendance to the Transportation Research Board (TRB)’s annual meeting, graduate students must demonstrate technical merit and research accomplishments, as well as outstanding academic performance, professionalism and leadership.
The award comes at the close of an auspicious year for Singleton. In the spring of 2015 he attended the Eno Leadership Development Conference as an Eno fellow. He was also one of four civil and environmental engineering students from PSU to be awarded the Dwight David Eisenhower Transportation Fellowship in 2014, and at last year’s TRB annual meeting, he was selected as TRB’s top-ranked Eisenhower Fellow.
Singleton studies active travel behavior and travel demand. His postgraduate research at PSU has tackled statistical analysis of the complex decision-making processes surrounding walking and bicycling.
Together with his advisor,...
Read more
Last year, we reported on a Portland State University graduate student project that created a tailored transit solution for the Salem-Keizer area.
This year, the flexible transit system created by students in the Master of Urban and Regional Planning (MURP) program has become a reality.
The West Salem Connector service launched as a year-long pilot program on June 1.
The new service, which focuses on improving transit access for those who actually use it in low-demand areas, will be free for the first six months.
Students in the MURP program spend about five months completing workshop projects, which focus on real-world planning problems and see them through. Not every student project, however, makes it to the stage of implementation.
The fact that the Salem-Keizer flexible transit line is becoming a reality reflects the quality of this group's work.
The Paradigm Planning group consisted of MURP students Darwin Moosavi, Brenda Martin, Matt Berggren, Lauren Wirtis, Mike Sellinger and CJ Doxsee. The project, ...
Read more
Portland State University students in the Master of Urban and Regional Planning (MURP) program came up with some innovative transit solutions for the Salem-Keizer area, just south of Portland, Ore. in the Willamette Valley.
The Salem-Keizer transit provider, known as Cherriots, requested that a planning group come up with alternative forms of transit that would be a better fit for the study area. MURP students Darwin Moosavi, Brenda Martin, CJ Doxsee, Mike Sellinger, Lauren Wirtis and Matt Berggren took on the challenge as their capstone project.
The bus service currently provided by Salem-Keizer Transit is inefficient in the low-density neighborhoods of West Salem, South Salem, and Keizer. Buses in those neighborhoods often run half-full, or nearly empty, along looping, circuitous roads that lack an interconnected grid pattern.
The student team, Paradigm Planning, proposed a “flexible transit” system which can better serve this type of low-density suburban area.
Fixed-route transit is typical bus service, in which buses come to predefined stops at regularly scheduled intervals. Demand-responsive or paratransit, the opposite extreme, is an on-demand service typically reserved for the elderly or disabled, in which a rider calls to be picked up by a bus at...
OTREC was well-represented at this year’s Western ITE conference, the 2013 conference for the Western District of the Institute of Transportation Engineers. Eight graduate student researchers presented papers at the conference, which took place July 14 through 17 in Phoenix, Arizona.
Portland State University students Katherine Bell, Kirk Paulsen, Adam Moore, Wei Feng, Sirisha Kothuri, Pamela Johnson, Sam Thompson and Alex Bigazzi attended the three-day conference and showcased their work in transportation research.
The conference was held at the Arizona Biltmore, a 1920’s luxury hotel created by architects Albert Chase McArthur and Frank Lloyd Wright. For the engineering and planning students, the Biltmore held its own attraction as an example of unique architecture, and in between events they enjoyed walking the grounds.
Katherine Bell, a Master’s student whose research interests include planning, modeling and performance measures for freight, gave a presentation on the use of a smart phone application with a GPS device for freight data collection. This was her second time presenting at the...
Read moreOTREC at Portland State University is pleased to announce the 2013 OTREC/NITC scholars.
Each year, OTREC and NITC recognize outstanding students, awarding them scholarships to further their work on transportation projects.
This year's scholarship winners tackle a range of projects, including long-range visions on how to improve equity in transportation, plans for proposed facility upgrades at specific locations, investigations into new ways to strengthen pavement, and the development of advanced technologies to assist the flow of transportation in the real world.
Each year, Portland State University’s MURP, or Master’s of Urban and Regional Planning, program hosts a public presentation to showcase the work of its graduating master’s students. Students who graduate with a Master’s in Urban and Regional Planning spend the last two terms of their program collaborating on workshop projects, completing planning tasks for local clients or business organizations.
This year’s presentations took place on Wednesday, attended by a crowd of about a hundred PSU students, professors, MURP clients and community members. Six groups presented their projects. Some of the projects were transportation-focused, especially one titled "Lombard Re-Imagined."
Swift Planning Group, composed of members Kathryn Doherty-Chapman, Zef Wagner, Brian Hurley, Jake Warr, Rebecca Hamilton, and Jodi Jacobson-Swartfager, developed a plan to improve Lombard Street, a key transportation corridor in North Portland.
The challenge facing the group had to do with the many roles that Lombard street plays. The street is both an arterial throughway and a state highway. It is an overdimensional freight route, for trucks that are too big to go anywhere else in North Portland, and it has also been designated as a main street in Metro’s 2040 Growth Concept. The various...
Read more
