When Kyu Ri Kim was seven years old, she was struck by a car while walking in her neighborhood where there was no separate walkway for pedestrians in Seoul, South Korea.

Kim, who is now an adjunct research associate at Portland State University (PSU), received nerve damage in her legs and had to use a wheelchair for several days after the incident. This experience launched her interest in pedestrian safety, which eventually led to her 2024 doctoral dissertation research project: "The Central Role of Perceived Safety in Connecting Crash Risk Factors and Walking Behavior."

"That was the real starting point, my personal experience. And I'm curious whether other people really do understand the real risk around them. What are the crash risk factors around them and how are they different from individual perceived risk?" Kim said.

Her dissertation, supported by funding from the National Institute for Transportation and Communities (NITC), illuminates the relationship between pedestrian crash risk factors and perceived safety, as well as the relationship between safety attitudes and walking behavior. How the interplay between these factors influences people's behavior...

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Drones, or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), are increasingly being used to deliver medical supplies and other goods. In the U.S., where e-commerce grew by 30% rate in 2020, drone deliveries are expected to become a 7 billion US dollar market by 2027.

Two recent publications by Miguel Figliozzi of Portland State University (PSU) explore different aspects of optimizing and improving upon the use of UAVs for e-commerce deliveries.

Figliozzi is a professor of civil and environmental engineering and a member of the Transportation Research Board on Urban Freight committee, and his main research areas are transportation systems modeling, statistical analysis, and optimization. He has published a number of papers analyzing drone delivery and other areas of freight transportation.

WHAT DO TECHNOLOGICAL IMPROVEMENTS MEAN FOR DELIVERY DRONES?

Though many studies have proposed several different types of models for drones, there is a lack of understanding of the current and future limits of drone technologies for deliveries.

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This year, residents of 37 new apartment buildings in the Portland area are receiving surveys in the mail. The reason? Portland State University researchers are requesting information about how they travel.

Knowing how residents of these high-density affordable and mixed-income housing developments get around town is key to guiding future development in the metropolitan area.

Metro—the regional government of the Portland, Oregon area—strategically invests in transit-oriented development, or TOD, to help more people live in neighborhoods served by high-quality transit. In a partnership going back nearly twenty years, PSU has supported the Metro TOD program by collecting data on residents' travel habits. This latest round of surveys will add to a knowledge base that has been useful for both Metro and PSU, for several reasons.

WHY COLLECT TRAVEL DATA FROM TOD RESIDENTS? 

Using this information, Metro can refine its TOD funding program model to ensure that future developments achieve intended outcomes. 

Patrick McLaughlin, senior development project manager for housing and transit-oriented development at Metro, joined the TOD project in April 2016. Part of his job is to assign gap funding to affordable housing projects...

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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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Jennifer Dill, director of Portland State University's Transportation Research and Education Center (TREC), has been named the inaugural editor-in-chief of the Transportation Research Record (TRR). The TRR—the flagship journal of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s Transportation Research Board (TRB)—is one of the most cited and prolific transportation journals in the world, offering wide coverage of transportation-related topics.

While maintaining her current role as the director of TREC, Dill will begin her duties at TRR on July 15, collaborating with the TRR team and TRB volunteers to enhance the journal’s role in improving the nation's transportation system through high-quality research.

"The Transportation Research Record and TRB have played key roles in my scholarly and professional career. My very first peer-reviewed journal article was published in TRR based on research I did as an undergraduate student with my mentor, Dr. Dan Sperling. That opportunity opened my eyes to the possibility of being a researcher and professor," Dill said.

Prior to entering academia, Dill worked as an environmental and transportation planner at the federal and regional levels. When she first...

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Transportation decision-makers typically use benefit-cost analysis (BCA) to evaluate the tradeoffs of transportation projects. However, it is difficult to produce state-specific measures that are multimodal and can consistently evaluate the full range of public and private benefits and costs for Oregonians.

Supported by a $200,000 grant from the Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT), Jenny Liu of Portland State University will lead a research effort to develop an Oregon-specific, multimodal framework for transportation benefit-cost analysis.

Having a framework specifically tailored to Oregon can help ODOT make informed decisions on infrastructure, policies and support programs based on information about the economic and societal impacts of each transportation mode.

Launched in May 2024, the project, "Mode-Based Benefit-Cost Analysis Calculator" aims to create an easy-to-update Oregon BCA framework to compare transportation benefits and costs for better policy, program, and investment assessments. The research will also develop a methodology that incorporates equity and distributional assessments into the multimodal BCA framework. This will contribute to ODOT’s Strategic...

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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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Shared micromobility (including shared electric scooters and bikes provided by private companies) is one of the newest transportation options that has come to cities in the last several decades. A new report explores the different ways cities charge shared micromobility companies to operate, and how these funds are used.

In the newly released report, John MacArthur of Portland State University, Kevin Fang of Sonoma State University and Calvin Thigpen of Lime examine data from 120 cities in 16 countries around the world. They also conducted a survey of cities’ shared micromobility program managers, with responses representing 33 jurisdictions in North America.

Download the report: "Taxing shared micromobility: assessing the global landscape of fees and taxes and their implications for cities, riders, and operators (PDF)"

"This study builds our understanding of a topic that is near and dear to the hearts of cities, riders, and micromobility operators: how to run a system that is affordable for riders while also remaining financially sustainable for micromobility operators. In the last 6 months alone, the industry has seen substantial upheaval through mergers, bankruptcies, and closures. So as...

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In a new project that's just getting underway, Portland State University researchers will work with researchers at the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill to develop tools and a decision-making process to proactively design and retrofit roadways to make them safer. 

Led by Sirisha Kothuri of the Maseeh College of Engineering & Computer Science and supported by the Washington Department of Transportation (WSDOT), the effort aims to help WSDOT implement a Safe System Approach to prevent dangerous crashes. They intend to implement safe systems in conjunction with another principle embraced by WSDOT and many other transportation agencies, the Complete Streets concept. Complete Streets is a planning and design method that prioritizes safe access for all road users.

"PSU along with UNC is excited to help WSDOT implement the Safe System Approach to road safety within the Complete Streets context. This work aims to reduce crashes for all road users generally, and in particular to eliminate fatal and serious injury crashes," Kothuri said.

WHY THE SAFE SYSTEM APPROACH?

As described by the United States Department of Transportation (U.S. DOT), the Safe System Approach has been embraced by the transportation community as an effective way to address and mitigate the risks inherent in our transportation system. It works...

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Portland State University's Transportation Research and Education Center (TREC) maintains two large, public transportation data lakes: PORTAL and BikePed Portal. The latest round of funding for PORTAL, in the amount of $1.6 million, was awarded in February 2024 and will cover PORTAL's activities through the next five years. BikePed Portal, too, recently received $100K for another year of funding, and both are the focus of some exciting innovations in transportation data.

The two centralized data repositories, unique both in their size and in the fact that they are accessible (PORTAL is freely available to the public, and BikePed Portal has limited public access as well), are supported by multiple federal, state, and regional agencies. Federal funding for PORTAL comes from the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA)'s Surface Transportation Block Grant (STBG) funding, suballocated by Metro’s ...

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