Portland State University

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...

In order to make sure bicyclists' needs are considered when improving a transportation system, planners and engineers need to know how many people are biking, and where. 

Traditional bicycle counters can provide data for limited sections of the bike network; often these counters are installed at important locations like trails or bridges. While limited in location, they count everyone who bikes by. Meanwhile, GPS & mobile data cover the entire transportation network, but that data only represents those travelers who are using smartphones or GPS. Combining the traditional location-based data sources with this new, crowdsourced data could offer better accuracy than any could provide alone. 

"Knowing how many people are bicycling on a street is really important for a number of reasons. As just a few examples, bicycle volumes give you a way to understand safety data and determine crash rates. They provide insight into where and how bicycle trips are taking place, which can help plan for new or improved facilities," said Nathan McNeil of Portland State University.

Supported by a pooled fund grant administered by the National Institute for Transportation and Communities (NITC), Dr. Sirisha Kothuri of Portland State University led a research project aimed at fusing traditional and...

Jolene Liu, a senior from Westview High School in Beaverton, completed a successful internship with TREC this year. The internship was funded by IBM through the Saturday Academy's Apprenticeships in Science and Engineering (ASE) program.

Liu worked under the tutelage of TREC researcher Krista Nordback for two months, stringing up an impressive list of accopmlishments over that time. She worked to help create the online non-motorized traffic count archive, a centralized database for bicycling and walking count data. Liu tested the database structure, summarized data formats and wrote help text for future users. She also processed manual counts of pedestrians and cyclists from intersections in Bend, Eugene, Portland and throughout Oregon.

For an IBPI professional development course, Liu also calibrated pedestrian counting equipment and demonstrated the equipment for course participants.

Perhaps most impressively, Liu co-authored a paper accepted for presentation at the annual meeting of the Transportation Research Board this coming January: "Creating a National Non-motorized Traffic Count Archive: Process and Progress," Paper 15-5310.

"She was amazing," Nordback said. "She took on tasks most undergrads wouldn't have been able to handle, plus she took amazing notes at our (Technical Advisory Committee) meeting in Salem.

"She got to watch...

The Initiative for Bicycle and Pedestrian Innovation hosted its first Webinar Feb. 27, with OTREC researcher Krista Nordback providing an overview of bicycle and pedestrian count programs for the 250-plus registered participants.

The Webinar marks an expansion of IBPI’s professional development offerings, which now also include a sustainable transportation study-abroad program and a wider selection of workshops geared toward transportation professionals and university instructors. Webinar participants were eligible to receive continuing education credits, new this year for IBPI live Webinars and in-person workshops.

While the title of the Webinar, “We are Traffic: Creating Robust Bicycle and Pedestrian Count Programs,” asserts a place for walking and bicycling in traffic discussions, Nordback began with a question: If we really believe that bicycling and walking are modes of traffic, how is that going to change how we measure those modes?

Nordback outlined the Federal Highway Administration’s Traffic Monitoring Guide, published last year. She covered why counting and understanding bicycle and pedestrian...