Six graduate students from the Master of Urban and Regional Planning program at Portland State University have been awarded a national prize by the American Planning Association.

The research team, working under the name Celilo Planning Studio, won the 2013 APA student award for Application of the Planning Process.

Team members Danielle Fuchs, Michael Ahillen, Ellen Dorsey, Chloe Ritter, Sara Morrissey and Sarah Bronstein were honored for excellence in the way they carried out their project plan.

Ritter, Morrissey and Bronstein accepted the award on behalf of the group at the APA national conference this month in Chicago.

“We were very excited to attend APA and receive the award,” said Morrissey, the team’s communications director. “The conference is great to learn about what other cities are working on and get a feel of what’s going on.”

Morrissey and other members of the planning team have OTREC connections. She and Chloe Ritter worked with PSU professor Kelly Clifton on a consumer spending project, with a focus on cyclists and pedestrians. Sarah Bronstein has also worked on...

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It’s a common occurrence: a digital signboard over the freeway tells you to expect a 15-minute trip, but traffic clears and you arrive in 10 minutes. Or, worse, you hit a clog and arrive in 30 minutes.

Sometimes those signboards, called dynamic message signs, are way off, Portland State University researcher Kristin Tufte found. But sometimes that doesn’t matter.

Tufte examined the signboards, called dynamic message signs, along Portland-area freeways in an OTREC project. Drivers typically reach their destinations earlier or later than the signs told them to expect when a so-called “shock wave” forms or dissipates; that is, when traffic suddenly bunches or clears up.

Currently, only three of the 30 or so message signs in the Portland metro area display travel times. Detectors at freeway onramps feed those signs. As a result, large swaths of freeway without onramps also have no data. To be most useful, new message signs would require more detectors in certain areas.

Take the busy Marquam Bridge in Portland, where busy freeways merge and there is no signboard. “There’s no detection for the whole length of the bridge,” Tufte said. “If you really want to have accurate travel times, you have to have detection there.”

As expected, Tufte found that traffic bunching or clearing in blind zones can throw off the accuracy of travel times displayed. Surprisingly, that inaccurate information is...

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Summary: In this seminar, Tara Weidner will discuss changes in the works to the State Analysis Procedures Manual (APM) to include three graduated levels of bike planning methods for use in Oregon communities, based on community size, data needs, and planning stage.  These include the Bike Level of Traffic Stress (BLTS), a sketch tool used to assess bike network connectivity, the data-heavy Highway Capacity Manual Multi-modal Level of Service (MMLOS) procedures, and a simplified MMLOS developed by the same researchers. 

Bio: Tara Weidner is an Integrated Transportation Analysis Engineer in ODOT’s Transportation Planning Analysis Unit (TPAU).  She has over 20 years of experience in modeling and analysis of multi-modal transportation systems. Her work focuses on arming Oregon’s communities with tools to plan for the future, including being the lead on ODOT’s GreenSTEP Greenhouse Gas model and coordinating other multi-modal transportation and land use tools and analysis. She joined TPAU about a year ago after working as a Senior Planner for Parsons Brinkerhoff (PB), where she was the consultant lead for the ODOT StateWide Integrated Model (SWIM) and worked with the FHWA on Mega-Regions modeling tools and managed a webinar series on "Climate Change Planning for MPOs.