Portland State students join effort to make Salem sustainable

Dec 02, 2010

Portland State University transportation engineering students added their expertise to a yearlong effort to help Salem reinvent itself. The Urban Transportation Systems class looked at options to improve bicycle and pedestrian travel in the city’s downtown core.

The effort is part of the Sustainable Cities Initiative, one of three OTREC-funded initiatives. The initiative, led by co-directors Marc Schlossberg and Nico Larco at the University of Oregon, chooses one Oregon city per year to make its classroom, directing coursework to help the city adopt sustainable practices.

This year is the first to include Portland State University’s participation. Students in assistant Professor Chris Monsere’s Civil Engineering 454 class gave presentations Nov. 29 and Dec. 1 on several alternatives to improve bicycle and pedestrian transportation and safety. Projects included:

  • Accommodating the bicycle and pedestrian crossing on Union Street at Commercial Street while considering impacts to automobile traffic
  • Connecting cyclists and pedestrians at the end of the Union Street path at Wallace Road
  • A bicycle and pedestrian route west of Wallace Road
  • Converting selected one-way streets to two-way operation
  • Traffic analysis of options drafted by bicycle advocates for the intersection of Commercial and Liberty streets at Vista Avenue
    • ...
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Daylong discussion with local and state leaders will help federal agencies work better together

Jul 02, 2010

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...
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OTREC Awarded Miller Grant for Transportation Sustainability Roadmap Project

Jan 19, 2008

The Miller award will provide OTREC with the funding to develop a Transportation Sustainability Roadmap for Oregon. This roadmap will guide research, education and partnership initiatives, establishing the foundation for creating sustainable transportation research, education, and community engagement activities. The project will build momentum on a number of efforts currently underway including OTREC’s participation in the Oregon Environmental Council (OEC) workshop for transportation professionals to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and involvement in the development of the Best Practices Manual for a ìClean, Green and Smartî West Coast transportation corridor system and other national efforts through the U.S. Department of Transportation. This project will leverage the expertise of staff and partner faculty researchers in order to develop a more focused approach to sustainable transportation.

The Power and Value of 'Green' in Promoting Sustainable Travel Behaviors

The video begins at 4:40.

A major aspect of transportation planning is understanding behavior: how to predict it and how to influence it over the long term. Transportation models typically emphasize policy variables such as travel time and cost. While clearly important, we hypothesize that other variables may be just as influential, namely, variables related to environmental consequences such as greenhouse gas emissions. This work is motivated by several factors. First, there is evidence from behavioral economics in non-transport domains that providing personalized information regarding environmental impact can significantly modify behavior. Second, applications to transport appear to have potential as many studies find that environmental consciousness influences transport behavior. Third, there are a growing number of transportation websites that are reporting environmental savings. Finally, smartphones provide the technological means to provide real-time, person-specific travel information regarding trip times, costs, and environmental impacts. Results from a computer laboratory experiment will be presented, which indicate that providing informing regarding environmental impacts significantly increases sustainable behaviors. Further, the experiments suggest a “value of green” of around 44-84 cents per pound of CO2 savings.

Webinar: Improving Recreational Trail Accessibility with a Volcanic Ash Treatment

PRESENTATION ARCHIVE

OVERVIEW

Recreational trails serve as valuable transportation corridors and support the health of users. Wheelchair accessibility of recreational trails depends on a variety of conditions, including slope, cross-slope, and surface characteristics. This project focused on improving the firmness and stability of a 0.2-mile section of trail that was otherwise accessible. The existing trail surface consisted of loose ¼” off-specification aggregate on native soil. A volcanic ash-Portland cement binder, studied in prior research, was batched, distributed, mixed, wetted, and compacted on site to improve the firmness and stability of the surface resulting in a smoother surface with less rolling resistance. The webinar will present details of the trail conditions, materials, batching, placement, and surface characteristics before and after treatment.

KEY LEARNING OUTCOMES

Attendees will be able to:

  • Describe and differentiate pozzolanic and cementitious...
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Bio-Composites for West Coast Highways

The video begins at 2:09.

Out of Gas: The End of the Age of Oil

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The video begins at 2:35.

“We are faced with a grave crisis that may change our way of life forever. We live in a civilization that evolved on the promise of an endless supply of cheap oil. The era of cheap oil will end, probably much sooner than most people realize. To put this looming crisis in perspective, and to judge its significance, it helps to start from the beginning.”

In this presentation Dr. Goodstein examines the rapid disappearance of oil and predicts its depletion will arrive much sooner than projected. Imagining a world caught suddenly, and perhaps unprepared, without oil, Dr. Goodstein discusses the alternatives and their implications for the environment.

Taming the Dragon: Reducing the Climate Impact of the Transportation System

Lewison Lem, Principal Consultant of Parsons Brinckerhoff, on reducing the climate impact of the transportation system.

View paper: Transportation Strategies to Mitigate Climate Change

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The video begins at 1:49.

Sustainable Urban Logistics: SeuLo

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 Mamachari, Bicycle Neighborhoods, and Public Transportation: Sustainable-Infrastructure Lessons from Japan

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Slides are not available for this presentation.

During the March 2011 earthquake/ tsunami/nuclear disaster, the internet filled with stories of how something quite ordinary in Japanese life became an important lifeline—the bicycle. For example an 83-year-old woman escaped the tsunami by bicycle, and due to public-transport disruptions, bicycle stores sold out of bicycles as quickly as supermarkets sold out of food. However not just in disasters, but in daily life, the most reliable, sustainable form of transportation, next to walking, is via Japan’s estimated 80,000,000 bicycles, affectionately called mamachari.

This illustrated presentation, based on four-years of cultural-landscape research culminating the publication of世界が称賛した日本の町の秘密 (Secrets of Japanese Cities the World Admires. Tokyo: Yousensha, 2011), begins by discussing why mamachari are perfect for local transportation and the many practical ways Japanese use them. It then explores why many of Japan’s densely populated, fine-grained neighborhoods with auto-resistant narrow streets and nearby shopping, make ideal bicycle neighborhoods. Issues explored will include the mamachari’s impact on: neighborhood livability; sustainability; public health through active transportation; fostering direct human contact not possible with motor-car travel; and maintaining the compact human scale of communities by...

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