Portland State University

The Oregon Transportation Research and Education Consortium held the West’s first listening session Wednesday under the Sustainable Communities Partnership, the effort to get federal agencies working together on green transportation and housing projects. Regional administrators from the Department of Transportation, the Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Environmental Protection Agency met with local, regional and state leaders for open-ended discussions on building sustainable communities.

More than 150 people attended the daylong Oregon Community Dialogue at Willamette University  in Salem, organized by OTREC and facilitated by the National Policy Consensus Center. In one-on-one interviews, participants brainstormed the barriers to sustainable communities, the existing opportunities to work together and actions they could take to take to make their own communities more sustainable. They also discussed what they could accomplish if agencies did a better job of working together to pay for projects.

The discussions produced the following insights:

• Barriers to sustainable communities include a lack of shared vision on results, a lack of integration and coordination, a lack of marketplace incentives and confusion over how to achieve the goals.
• Federal agencies working better together would create opportunities for collaboration at all levels of government, give flexibility to use resources in new ways, allow for a better...

The video begins at 8:32.

Abstract: Would a logistics service provider be a success story, if its services are called; "A logistics assistant for households and a partner for retail and other services"? And would shopping malls be more environmentally friendly, if they have their "virtual duplicate" with delivery services? 

This talk will focus on a project in the Helsinki area now in its early piloting phase, called SeuLo, an abbreviation from Sustainable Urban Logistics. SeuLo-service may be characterized by the slogan: “A logistics assistant for households and a neutral partner for e-retail and other services.” The idea is to have a viewpoint of a household with its different logistics needs, rather than a viewpoint of different retailers or other services. This idea, after it was found, is very simple and natural, but its implementation as a demand chain network is complicated and has to be opened up using a “step by step” approach. Using the SeuLo-service, a household may shop from different e-retailers: grocery, local and organic food producers, pharmacy, laundry services or order books from public library in a consolidated order and have these parcels delivered as a single shipment.

The video begins at 3:33.

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The video begins at 9:39.

I-5 is the only continuous north/south interstate highway on the West Coast, providing a commerce link for the United States, Canada, and Mexico. In the Vancouver-Portland region, I-5 is one of two major highways that provide interstate connectivity and mobility. Operation of the I-5 crossing over the Columbia River is directly influenced by the 5-mile segment of I-5 between SR 500 in Vancouver and Columbia Boulevard in Portland. This segment includes interchanges with three state highways (SR 14, SR 500, and SR 501) and five major arterial roadways that serve a variety of land uses, and provides access to downtown Vancouver, two international ports, industrial centers, residential neighborhoods, retail centers, and recreational areas.

The existing I-5 crossing of the Columbia River consists of two side-by-side bridges, built four decades apart. The crossing, which served 30,000 vehicles per day in the 1960s, now carries more than 130,000 automobiles, buses, and trucks each weekday. The bridges are stretched far beyond capacity—the hours of stop-and-go traffic grow every year. As the metropolitan region grows, mobility and accessibility for automobile, vehicular freight, and transit will decline...