Since 2011, Portland State University and the Initiative for Bicycle and Pedestrian Innovation have offered a unique opportunity to students: a two-week study abroad course that introduces participants to cities with stellar bike cultures. In past years, classes have explored the Netherlands, Sweden, and Denmark. This year’s class of eight students, led by Hau Hagedorn and Drusilla van Hengel, spent two weeks this summer traversing Denmark by public transportation, foot, and (of course) bike. Check out some photos from the trip.

Students came from all over the country—from Portland to Connecticut—to attend the course. What they all had in common was a desire to learn from a city that is renowned to have some of the best bike infrastructure in the world. The students wanted to bring their newfound knowledge back to their respective towns to make the world a safer, happier place for their loved ones and communities.

Ern Tan—the founder of Civic Cincinnati, a grassroots urbanism advocacy group in Ohio—said before the trip that she was looking forward to seeing the promise of a more bikeable future for Cincinnati reflected in...

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Knowing how many people use walking and bicycling infrastructure is crucial for transportation planning. Active transportation projects can help cities and states achieve multiple climate- and public-health-related targets, and a new project launching in 2024 can help further those goals: California is getting a statewide active transportation count database.

With help from Portland State University (PSU) researcher Sirisha Kothuri, the Safe Transportation Research and Education Center (SafeTREC) at the University of California, Berkeley is leading an effort to create a centralized data repository for the state.

Kothuri, a senior research associate in civil and environmental engineering at PSU, has led multiple research projects aimed at improving the accuracy and scope of nonmotorized data collection efforts. She has experience with using data fusion techniques to estimate bicycle volumes, leveraging crowdsourced data to derive pedestrian counts, and working with this data to make walking and bicycling safer and more comfortable. Her expertise in this area, as well as PSU's experience centralizing transportation data via the university's PORTAL and BikePed Portal, will...

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The need for improving active transportation safety and mobility is clear: Nationally, since 2004, the share of all road user deaths that are pedestrians has risen from just under 11% to nearly 17% in 2020. Cyclists’ share of all fatalities has also increased over the past decade, from 2.1% in 2011 to 2.4% in 2020.. In many cases, solutions are also clear: for example, there are numerous evidence-based approaches to making walking and bicycling safer and more comfortable through improved infrastructure. So if the needs and solutions are clear, why are we not progressing more quickly toward improved road safety and better active transportation options?

In many ways, walking, bicycling, and rolling have not been a top priority for state departments of transportation (DOTs). Changing agency practice is essential: DOTs need research to help them better implement active transportation effectively and seamlessly.

This is the objective of a newly launched project, funded by the National Cooperative Highway Research Program (NCHRP). Over two years, researchers will create an active transportation institutionalization guide to help state DOTs change their culture and processes and integrate active transportation into every stage of their work, from program development and project funding to project delivery, operations and maintenance.

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The trip to and from school is made by nearly every child in Oregon every school day. Bike and walk buses, organized groups of school children, parents, and ride/walk leaders, seek to encourage biking and walking to school. A new research project at Portland State University's Transportation Research and Education Center (TREC) will gather information on bike buses nationwide, inspired by the success of Sam Balto's bike bus initiative at Alameda Elementary School in Portland, Oregon.

Balto, a physical education teacher, catapulted into the limelight in 2022 after establishing a weekly bike bus involving over 100 students commuting to school on two wheels. Its success and popularity prompted a broader initiative to understand and promote the benefits of bike and walk buses across the United States.

Researchers John MacArthur and Nathan McNeil, along with Evan Howington, a student in the Master of Urban and...

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In a big step forward for nonmotorized planning, a dashboard with bike data from the Washington, D.C. metro area is coming to BikePed Portal. Previously, a planner looking to see the latest biking numbers for the nation's capital would have to look at info from several jurisdictions, including Arlington County, the City of Alexandria, the District Department of Transportation, Fairfax County, Montgomery County, and the National Park Service, which manages counters on several trails and natural areas in the greater metro area.

Now, with funding from a National Park Service (NPS) Cooperative Ecosystem Studies Unit (CESU), a unique program that facilitates partnerships between federal and non-federal entities and research institutions, Virginia Tech and the University of North Carolina Highway Safety Research Center (HSRC) are teaming up with data specialists at Portland State University (PSU) to create a new dashboard that will allow users to see all the D.C. bike data together in one place.

Housed at PSU's Transportation Research and Education Center (TREC), BikePed Portal...

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This article is about the 2022 impacts of our IBPI Comprehensive Bikeway Design workshop. See other IBPI trainings, including the faculty workshop "Integrating Bike-Ped Topics Into University Transportation Courses," at our bike/ped training home page.

If you're biking through Cincinnati, Ohio in the next couple of years and find yourself pedaling on a Portland-style neighborhood greenway or two-way protected bike lane, it might be because two engineers from the City of Cincinnati's Department of Transportation & Engineering—Joe Conway and Brian Goubeaux—attended our Comprehensive Bikeway Design Workshop in the summer of 2022 and brought some inspiration home.

The City of Cincinnati is in the process of updating its Bicycle Transportation Plan, adopted in 2010 and due for a refresh. Goubeaux, a senior engineer for the City, said that design strategies and practices he learned during the summer workshop will likely...

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Navigating an unfamiliar place is uniquely challenging for people with disabilities. People with blindness, deafblindness, visual impairment or low vision, as well as those who use wheelchairs, can travel more independently in urban areas with the aid of effective wayfinding technology. A new report from the National Institute for Transportation and Communities (NITC) explores how to leverage low-cost methods to enable people to more easily move through public, urban indoor and outdoor spaces.

The study, led by Martin Swobodzinski and Amy Parker of Portland State University, used focus groups, two case studies, and an in-person structured wayfinding experience on the PSU campus to find the most helpful ways of getting around. Tactile maps were found to be a very useful resource, with an accessible mobile app also showing promise as an orientation and mobility aid.

The researcher will share more details about this project in a free webinar on December 15: Individual Wayfinding in the Context of Visual Impairment, Blindness, and Deafblindness.

WHY IS THIS RESEARCH IMPORTANT?

Environments and...

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Active transportation investments offer many types of benefits related to safety, reduced greenhouse gas emissions, physical activity and the economy. Metro, Oregon’s regional government for the Portland metropolitan area, wants to better understand the role of these investments in building stronger communities in their region, and in implementing the Metro 2040 Growth Concept.

Led by Portland State University in partnership with Metro, the Active Transportation Return on Investment (ATROI) study looked at twelve projects constructed in the greater Portland region between 2001 and 2016. These twelve 2040 Catalyst Projects were evaluated to determine if active transportation investments had significant effects on...

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Interested in active transportation research? What’s been done? What should be done? 

We’re excited to share the release of the Research Roadmap for the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO) Council on Active Transportation (CAT). The Roadmap was created to foster research that will address important active transportation needs at the state DOT level and beyond. 

Funded by the National Cooperative Highway Research Program (NCHRP), a team of researchers from the Transportation Research and Education Center (TREC) at Portland State University (PSU) and Toole Design prepared the Research Roadmap over the past 18 months. They reviewed existing and on-going active transportation research, identified key research needs from a wide range of sources, and held outreach activities with practitioners to refine and prioritize those needs.

The project offers guidance on where active transportation research has been, and where it should go next in developing speed management strategies to improve pedestrian and bicyclist safety on arterial roadways, determining context-driven optimal spacing between marked crosswalks, addressing racial and economic disparities in safety improvements, refining guidance on bicycle signal timing, overcoming barriers to implementing active transportation in planning and engineering practice, and many more research questions:

  • The...
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Principal Investigator: Patrick Singleton, Portland State University
Learn more about this research by viewing the related presentations and the full Final Report on the Project Overview page.

Normally we assume that travel is a means to an end, but the latest NITC report examines other benefits of travel—aspects that aren’t about reaching a destination.

One such benefit is travel-based multitasking. A good example of this is using time on a commuter train to listen to music, relax or get some work done. The simple enjoyment of a walk in the fresh air relates to another benefit, known as subjective well-being, in which the act of travel itself makes a person feel better. These intrinsic benefits can impact travel behavior and mode choice, but our current models don’t have any way to reflect this.

NITC fellow Patrick Singleton investigated the policy and planning implications of this in his dissertation, Exploring The Positive Utility Of Travel And Mode Choice.

"The way we analyze travel behavior assumes people want to get from A to B as quickly as possible. We don’t include the...

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