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Washington D.C. Data Dashboard Comes to BikePed Portal

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 is a centralized repository that contains biking and walking count data from places all over the United States. It aims to be a one-stop shop for transportation professionals looking for clean, quality-checked, ready-to-use nonmotorized data.

DEVELOPING A DASHBOARD FOR THE DC AREA

The Washington D.C. metro area's dashboard is currently being developed at PSU, co-led by TREC's associate director, Hau Hagedorn, and transportation data program manager Tammy Lee, and should be available for use sometime in the coming year.

Some of D.C.'s data is, in fact, already in BikePed Portal (as the image at the top shows). For a user to see all of it, however, they have to switch between different views. BikePed Portal hosts data from Maryland, Virginia, and D.C., but when a user views D.C., they are not able to see the data from Maryland and Virginia that are in the same metro area. This type of jurisdictional sprawl is common when it comes to nonmotorized data.

"It's really a lot of people that come together at the table to sort of organize, especially in such a very dense location. So we're working with all these stakeholders to put all their data in one centralized repository. Instead of having to say, you know, 'Hey, share your data with us,' or 'Can we share our data with you?' Instead, it's all in one central location where everybody has access to each other's data," Lee said.

Krista Nordback, senior research associate at UNC HSRC, is managing the project on the HRSC's end and says it is one of the "most exciting" she's worked on. She was instrumental in creating BikePed Portal while working as a research associate at PSU, back in 2014 when it was first launched with funding from the National Institute for Transportation and Communities (NITC). So she was already aware of BikePed Portal as a growing resource for nationwide bike counts, when the NPS broached the subject of creating a dashboard for DC. Rather than reinvent the wheel, Nordback suggested bringing PSU into the project.

Arlington County’s bike education and encouragement program, BikeArlington, had originally created its own dashboard showing data from Arlington counters. They hoped to turn it into something more comprehensive, and combining their resources with BikePed Portal seemed like the way to go.

"The point is, there are a lot of counters. They're all owned by different people. They're managed by different people. Sometimes they collaborate. We're trying to help get them better data, and part of that's maintenance. Part of it's quality checking and basic validation. So we're starting to get there. As a user, instead of having to go to three different places in BikePed Portal, I want to have one view where I can see all of it," Nordback said.

As the dashboard is being developed, Virginia Tech students are gaining valuable experience – experiential learning for university students is a top priority of the NPS CESU programs – by testing, maintaining, and quality-checking the bike-ped counters in the area.

DATA VALIDATION AT VIRGINIA TECH

Virginia Tech Professors Ralph Buehler and Steve Hankey are managing several classes of students working on the project in various capacities. In Fall 2021, a graduate planning studio course kicked it off by analyzing 19 NPS counters on four trail systems (Anacostia River Trail, Capital Crescent Trail, C&O Canal, and the Mount Vernon Trail) to identify discrepancies in the data. Their final report provided recommendations for where new counters should be located.

Currently, masters student Shazalal Tushar is conducting physical maintenance on the counters that need attention, and has also set up video cameras at several counter sites. Two undergraduate students, Monica Perez and Maggie Gibbon, are working on validating the counters' data by comparing it with the video feed. The team will then develop correction equations to account for the discrepancies. Soon, a PhD student at Virginia Tech will join the team to conduct research for a dissertation focused around this project.

Cleaning up data from the NPS counters is only part of the story, though. The next part was getting buy-in from the regional partners.

"The National Park Service has trails running through and connecting different parts of the region, and they have placed counters on their trails. So part of the project is to get us to work with their data and validate their counters. And then the hope was that other jurisdictions would sort of start opting in, and also add their own counters to become part of that network. So it's sort of a Federal effort on the local level," Buehler said.

If the effort seems piecemeal, that's because it is. While data on the motorized side has been dialed in for decades – cars are counted via standardized methods, and agencies have less difficulty accessing information about where people are driving – the world of nonmotorized data is evolving rapidly, and unevenly. Part of the challenge lies in the fact that every large metropolitan area has more than one jurisdiction involved. Steven Hankey sees similarities and differences in how each city addresses this difficulty.

"Every place has a different project champion stepping up. And then that entity ends up driving what [data management] looks like for the area. For example, in Minnesota, it ended up being MNDOT, the state agency. And so that became more of a statewide program. This project is part of DC's story, and in many ways I think it's fair to say that the story is still unfolding," Hankey said.

In order to support better bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure, policymakers and planners need accurate data on how many people are biking and walking. BikePed Portal provides a centralized, standard database for public agencies, researchers, educators, and other curious members of the public. The website allows users to explore annual, monthly, daily, and hourly pedestrian and bicycle volumes at over 600 locations across the country (and growing).

In addition to hosting data to make it centrally available, the BikePed Portal team at PSU develops applications to help planners and other professionals get the most out of their data, such as an AADNT (average annual daily nonmotorized traffic) count tool, and basic automated quality checks. Currently under development is an annotation function, which will allow users to flag data that's been impacted by events such as marathons that increase bike/ped traffic, weather like big snow snow storms that could decrease bike/ped traffic, known counter malfunctions or vandalism incidents, and trail closures.

SEE RELATED RESEARCH

Portland State University's Transportation Research and Education Center (TREC) is home to the U.S. DOT funded National Institute for Transportation and Communities (NITC), the Initiative for Bicycle and Pedestrian Innovation (IBPI), PORTAL, BikePed Portal and other transportation grants and programs. We produce impactful research and tools for transportation decision makers, expand the diversity and capacity of the workforce, and engage students and professionals through education and participation in research.

Winter 2023 Graduate Courses in Transportation at Portland State

The winter term at Portland State University starts January 9, and registration opens December 19 for non-degree students. (Students who are already enrolled in a PSU degree program can register online now.) Lifelong learning is a guiding principle of PSU, and anyone interested can take transportation courses through the non-degree application process or as a post-baccalaureate student. Taking a course can be a good way to see if one of our graduate degree programs is right for you. Check out the course offerings below to see what's available this coming term.

See PSU’s COVID-19 Student Resources for the latest info on campus health and safety for students and staff. The course delivery methods for each course are listed below (e.g. in-person, hybrid, or attend anywhere).

Civil and Environmental Engineering

Non-degree or non-PSU students should contact the Civil Engineering Academic Program Manager at ceedept@pdx.edu in order to register for a CEE course, as the system requires an approval to process the registration.

588 Public Transportation Systems

Instructor: Miguel Figliozzi

Delivery: In-Person, Tues/Thurs 12:00 PM – 1:50 PM

Prerequisites: CE 351

Performance characteristics of public transportation systems, with emphasis on urban systems. Planning, design, and operational issues related to public transportation systems. Emerging technologies.

563 Transportation Optimization

Instructor: Miguel Figliozzi

Delivery: In-Person, Tues/Thurs 2:00 PM – 3:50 PM

Prerequisites: Graduate standing

Introduces students to mathematical modeling techniques including linear and non-linear programming, duality, Lagrangian, quadratic and geometric models, integer programming, basic network models and their application to transportation and logistics systems/problems. The focus is on model formulation, complexity analysis, and the utilization of software to obtain solutions and analyze system properties. The concepts taught in this course focus on civil engineering systems/ applications with an emphasis on transportation and logistics problems.

Urban Studies and Planning

510 Urban Informatics

Instructor: Liming Wang

Delivery: Attend Anywhere, Mon 1:00 PM - 3:30 PM

In this project-based class, students have an opportunity to develop applications that combine technical skills and domain knowledge and use information processing, analysis, and presentation to support problems solving in cities. It will introduce students to basic coding, data processing and analysis, visualization and mapping. There are no prerequisites, but it requires some tolerance for experimentation, self-directed trial and error, and an interest in learning to write computer code.

544 Urban Transportation Planning

Instructors: Ryan Farncomb and Katie Drennan

Delivery: In-Person, Mon 6:40 PM – 9:00 PM

Prerequisites: USP 535 or equivalent coursework in descriptive and inferential statistics and data presentation

Introduces fundamental concepts and methods used in multi-modal urban transportation planning, including problem identification, alternatives analysis, evaluation and decision making, plan implementation, and program management. Exposes students to processes and analytical methods from multiple disciplines, such as law, politics, engineering, sociology, economics, finance, management and marketing. Emphasis on analysis of moderately complex technical information and its interpretation for communication with decision makers.

583 Transportation Finance

Instructor: Aaron Golub

Delivery: In-Person, Tues 2:00 PM – 4:30 PM

Much of the current funding for roads, transit, and freight comes from fuel taxes; but increasing fuel efficiency of vehicles and the use of alternative energy sources raise questions about the long-term viability of this revenue source. This course will existing transportation finance and examine some of the proposals for alternative financing mechanisms.

Friday Transportation Seminars

Friday Transportation Seminars at PSU are scheduled sporadically throughout the winter, spring and summer terms, and are always open to the public. You can check for upcoming seminars on the TREC website.

Graduate Certificate in Transportation

The two disciplines, planning and engineering, also collaborate to offer a Graduate Certificate in Transportation for established professionals looking for a deeper understanding of transportation disciplines. Increasingly, transportation professionals need multi-disciplinary knowledge and skills to anticipate social, environmental, and technological trends and incorporate them into intelligently-integrated transportation systems. The Graduate Certificate in Transportation will offer you advanced education at the intersection of urban planning and civil engineering for those seeking to build upon their knowledge and credentials to move people and goods safely.

Photo courtesy of Portland State University

Assessing The Perception Of E-Scooters As A Practical And Equitable First-Mile/Last-Mile Solution

Portland State University graduate Mike McQueen, who earned his masters in civil engineering in 2020 and now works at ICF as a transportation data specialist and engineer, has published an article in the November 2022 issue of Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice.

The article, "Assessing the perception of E-scooters as a practical and equitable first-mile/last-mile solution," is a revised version of McQueen's masters thesis, "Comparing the Promise and Reality of E-Scooters: a Critical Assessment of Equity Improvements and Mode-Shift," which is available for download on PDX Scholar. The article updates the statistical model used to a mixed multinomial (MMNL) regression model, which allows for better control of random variations in taste among respondents, and makes findings about the influence of travel time and cost on mode choice more robust. McQueen presented this research during a poster session at the TRB Conference on Advancing Transportation Equity (CATE) conference in September 2021.

"This research shows that e-scooter systems in their current form are not organically leading to substantial mode shift from automobile travel at a regional scale, nor are they leading to increased gender or racial transportation equity," McQueen said.

E-scooters have disrupted and altered the urban mobility landscape. During their introductory period, they have been commonly touted as part of a larger micromobility solution that erases equity barriers and solves the first-mile/last-mile problem. However, few studies in the nascent e-scooter literature have considered these claims. In this study, McQueen designed and administered a stated choice experiment to 1,968 students at Portland State University. Results indicated that e-scooters were lackluster in bringing racial and gender equity in transportation. A few highlights from the findings:

There was no place in the study area where combining an e-scooter and light rail to travel to the downtown university campus was more utilitarian than biking or private car at current travel times and prices.
Black students were 15% less likely than white students to choose e-scooter and light rail instead of car in the stated choice experiment.
Female students were 59% less likely than male students to choose e-scooter and light rail instead of car in the stated choice experiment.
Transit travel time was the strongest direct elasticity to changing the e-scooter and light rail choice probability.
Parking cost was the strongest car mode cross elasticity to changing the e-scooter and light rail choice probability.

"It is important to not leave our transit system behind when incorporating micromobility into a region – in fact, the variable with the largest impact on e-scooter + light rail mode choice preference was the travel time for the light rail portion of the trip. Decreasing travel time led to a significant increase in preference," McQueen said.

He suggests that E-scooter services that incentivize a more targeted use case for replacing automobile travel, such as connecting a suburban area to a light rail station, could be more influential in reducing urban automobile travel to downtown, especially if travel times and prices are competitive. One way to achieve this use case could be price incentives or discounts to encourage this multimodal behavior in specific areas near stations.

During his time at PSU, McQueen worked with TREC Sustainable Transportation Program Manager John MacArthur on a number of micromobility and e-bike studies, including the development of an electric vehicle cost and impact tool and the expansion of e-bike incentive programs. He received various scholarships and awards including two Eisenhower Fellowships, and his work on bike share and first mile/last mile travel behavior led to a YPT national Streetlight graduate fellowship. Now at ICF, Mike is working to make cities more equitable, sustainable and multimodal through data-driven policy and design.

Connect with Mike on LinkedIn.

PSU Masters Student Cameron Bennett Receives Second Eisenhower Fellowship

We are proud to acknowledge Portland State University engineering masters student Cameron Bennett, who has been awarded a Dwight David Eisenhower Transportation Fellowship for the second year in a row. Bennett, who won his first Eisenhower Fellowship last year, will receive another presented by the U.S. Department of Transportation at this year's annual meeting of the Transportation Research Board (TRB). He is also being honored as the National Institute for Transportation and Communities (NITC) Masters Student of the Year.

Connect with Cameron on LinkedIn.

During his master's program, Cameron has served two terms as President of the Institute of Transportation Engineers student chapter at Portland State, ITE-STEP (Students in Transportation Engineering and Planning). In 2022, the student group won the ITE Student Chapter Momentum Award. He has also received a National Institute for Transportation and Communities (NITC) scholarship and a 2021 Walter H. Kramer Fellowship.

"I am very grateful to the Dwight David Eisenhower Transportation Fellowship Program for providing a second year of support while I work towards a Masters degree. The funding has made it possible for my fiancée and myself to live in Portland as full time students, and has provided flexibility on graduate research assistantship project work through tuition support," Cameron said.

In the coming year, Cameron will be working with the Portland Bureau of Transportation (PBOT) on evaluating newly-installed Advisory Bike Lanes (ABLs). He will be helping with data evaluation as the Bureau assesses the treatment as part of the FHWA Request to Experiment process, and determines whether ABLs should become part of Portland's standard toolkit for urban bikeway development.

At this year's TRB annual meeting, Cameron will be presenting a poster on e-bike incentive programs in Poster Session 3096, Dwight David Eisenhower Transportation Fellowship Program Poster (Session 2), on Tuesday, January 10. His presentation will include an update of the policy scan, an overview of the white paper content, and a short preview of the findings from a recent stated preference survey aimed at identifying the "tipping point" where an incentive successfully induces someone to buy an ebike.

The Dwight David Eisenhower Transportation Fellowship Program advances the transportation workforce by helping to attract the nation's brightest minds to the field of transportation, encouraging future transportation professionals to seek advanced degrees, and helping to retain top talent in the U.S. transportation industry.

See other past PSU recipients of various transportation scholarships on our scholars page.

Sangwan Lee of Portland State University Investigates Transportation Mode Choice in the Era of Autonomous Vehicles

New mobility technologies, such as shared mobility services and autonomous vehicles (AVs), continue to evolve. How do travelers decide whether to adopt new transportation modes or continue to use conventional modes? "Transportation Mode Choice Behavior in the Era of Autonomous Vehicles: The Application of Discrete Choice Modeling and Machine Learning" is a 2022 dissertation by Sangwan Lee of Portland State University which uses machine learning to examine this question.

Lee, who earned his PhD from the Nohad A. Toulan School of Urban Studies and Planning in 2022 working with faculty advisor Liming Wang, is now a research associate working in employment research at LX Spatial Information Research Institute, Korea Land and Geospatial Informatix Corporation in Jeonju, South Korea. He is currently working on several research topics, including autonomous logistics.

"I'm excited about the next chapter of my work in employment research because I am joining research projects about autonomous vehicles," Lee said.

Lee's dissertation consists of three papers. The first examines future market shares of each available mode of transportation in the era of AVs, factors influencing mode choice behaviors, and their marginal effects using a mixed logit model (MXL). The second uses interpretable machine learning (ML) to investigate the optimal algorithm (i.e., stochastic gradient boosting decision tree model) in greater depth, including feature importance and non-linear marginal effects. Focusing on methodology, the final paper assesses the limitations of ML when applied to transportation mode choice modeling and suggests future research directions for methodological improvements by comparing ML to discrete choice modeling (DCM).

This research contributes to three major elements of the current understanding of transportation mode choice behavior in the era of AVs and choice modeling as follows:

First, consumers in the AV era could choose from a variety of transportation modes likely to coexist, including private AVs, shared mobility services, and conventional transportation modes. This dissertation thus makes a significant contribution by examining more comprehensive transportation mode choice behaviors and expanding demand-side discussions.
Second, since current transportation planning efforts have relied on estimates and expectations, this dissertation contributes to the decision-making process by offering crucial underlying knowledge not currently available.
Third, this dissertation assesses the limitations of ML for transportation mode choice modeling and suggests potential future avenues for methodological improvement.

Learn more about Sangwan Lee's background and works by visiting his ORCID profile.

Photo by CHUTTERSNAP on Unsplash

Portland State University Transportation Research Highlights at TRB 2023

The 102nd annual meeting of the Transportation Research Board (TRB) will be held January 8–12, 2023 in Washington, D.C., and ten of Portland State University's core transportation faculty and researchers will be sharing their expertise at the largest transportation conference in the world. The TRB annual meeting attracts thousands of transportation professionals from around the globe to address transportation policy, practice, and plans for the future.

The spotlight theme for the 2023 meeting is Rejuvenation Out of Disruption: Envisioning a Transportation System for a Dynamic Future.

VIEW THE ONLINE GUIDE TO PSU AT TRB 2023

A Few Session Highlights to Watch For:

Monday, Jan 9, 10:15 AM - 12:00 PM, Analyzing the Impacts of Intersection Treatments and Traffic Characteristics on Bicyclist Safety: Development of Data-Driven Guidance on the Application of Bike Boxes, Mixing Zones, and Bicycle Signals – Senior Research Associate Sirisha Kothuri of PSU's Maseeh College of Engineering will present in a lectern session alongside Brendan Russo of Northern Arizona University, Edward Smaglik of Northern Arizona University, and David Hurwitz of Oregon State University.

Kothuri’s primary research interests are in the areas of multimodal traffic operations, bicycle and pedestrian counting, and safety. See more transportation research projects she has worked on at PSU.

Monday, Jan 9, 3:45 PM - 5:30 PM, Driver and Bicyclist Comprehension of Blue Light Detection Confirmation Systems – PSU's Associate Dean of Academic Affairs and civil engineering professor Chris Monsere will present with Sirisha Kothuri in a poster session alongside Douglas Cobb of Burgess & Niple and David Hurwitz and Hisham Jashami of Oregon State University.

Monsere's primary research interests are in design and operation of multimodal transportation facilities including user behavior, comprehension, preferences, and the overall safety effectiveness of transportation improvements. See related research projects.

Tuesday, 10:15 AM - 12:00 PM, Evaluation of Red Colored Pavement Markings for Transit Lanes – Urban Studies & Planning Professor Jennifer Dill, director of TREC and the National Institute for Transportation and Communities (NITC), will present in a lectern session along with Chris Monsere and TREC Research Associate Nathan McNeil, who conducts research on impacts of active transportation and transit equity.

PSU researchers are working with the City of Portland and TriMet to improve mobility and transit access under the Enhanced Transit Corridors Plan and Rose Lanes Project. Learn more by watching a May 2022 presentation on this project.

Wednesday, 8:00 AM - 9:45 AM, Explore Regional Variation in the Effects of Built Environment on Driving With High Resolution U.S. Nation-Wide Data – Liming Wang, associate professor in the Nohad A. Toulan School of Urban Studies and Planning, will present in a lectern session on reproducible research in traffic flow theory.

Wang's research takes a data-driven approach to address challenging issues in planning, in particular those intersecting land use and transportation. See more of his transportation research projects.

Wednesday, 8:00 AM - 9:45 AM, Evaluating the Potential of Crowdsourced Data to Estimate Network-Wide Bicycle Volumes – Sirisha Kothuri and Nathan McNeil will present in a lectern session with TREC research associate Joe Broach, who is an instructor in the School of Urban Studies and Planning and a Senior Researcher and Modeler at Metro (MPO), along with Md Mintu Miah, University of California, Berkeley; Kate Hyun and Stephen Mattingly, University of Texas, Arlington; Krista Nordback, UNC Highway Safety Research Center; and Frank Proulx, Frank Proulx Consulting.

Supported by a pooled fund grant administered by the National Institute for Transportation and Communities (NITC), Sirisha Kothuri led this research project aimed at fusing traditional and emerging data sources together, to derive bicycle volumes for an entire transportation network. Read more about the project or watch the video overview: Data Fusion Techniques to Estimate Network-Wide Bicycle Volumes.

2023 Eisenhower Fellow

[[{"fid":"6160","view_mode":"default","fields":{"format":"default"},"type":"media","field_deltas":{"1":{"format":"default"}},"attributes":{"height":"214","width":"180","style":"float: left; margin-right: 15px;","class":"media-element file-default","data-delta":"1"}}]]We are proud to acknowledge Portland State University engineering masters student Cameron Bennett, who has been awarded a Dwight David Eisenhower Transportation Fellowship for the second year. Bennett, who won his first Eisenhower Fellowship last year, will receive another presented by the U.S. Department of Transportation at this year's annual meeting of the Transportation Research Board (TRB). Read more about Cameron.

Cameron's primary research focus is on facilitating the use of active transportation, and promoting mode shift away from single-occupancy vehicles. Working with TREC's Sustainable Transportation Program Manager, John MacArthur, he helped to develop an online tool to track e-bike incentive programs in North America. He presented a poster on this work at last year's TRB annual meeting: How E-Bike Incentive Programs Are Used to Expand the Market (PDF). This year, Cameron will be presenting a poster on e-bike incentive programs in Poster Session 3096, Dwight David Eisenhower Transportation Fellowship Program Poster (Session 2), on Tuesday, January 10.

NITC Reception at TRB 2023

The National Institute for Transportation and Communities (NITC) invites partners and members of our research consortium of six NITC universities (Portland State University, University of Oregon, Oregon Institute of Technology, University of Utah, University of Arizona and University of Texas at Arlington) to a reception at the Crown & Crow on Tuesday, January 10 for a night of networking, fun, and transportation bingo. RSVP to the NITC reception!

Dissertation Fellow To Explore How Gender Expression Influences Travel Behavior Decisions

The National Institute for Transportation and Communities (NITC) is proud to introduce our newest Dissertation Fellow, Nicholas Puczkowskyj of Portland State University, who was awarded $15,000 for his doctoral research project: Expanding Transmobilities: An Art-Informed Methodology For Genderdiverse Travel Behavior.

"My dissertation focuses on understanding how genderdiverse individuals' gender identity influences their travel behavior and travel decisions. I use an art-based methodology by operationalizing collage and mental maps to delicately capture these data. I believe this work will support mobility justice research and the greater social justice movement by further solidifying the field of transmobilities. Additionally, this research seeks to push the boundaries of transportation research by illustrating the power of art as a modality for travel behavior research," Puczkowskyj said.

There is a significant gendered travel behavior research gap in the transportation literature. A plethora of transportation literature identifying and contrasting cisgender disparities exists, but more inclusive approaches to genderdiverse identities remain scarce. The burgeoning field of transmobilities investigates transgender mobility and evolved from the nexus of mobility justice and gender studies by studying transgender experiences on public transit.

Nick's dissertation expands transmobilities to include all modes of transportation and experiences involving genderdiverse identities. Using subjective wellbeing as a unit of measure, an art-informed methodology gathers firsthand experiences and narratives of genderdiverse participants in an effort to understand how their gender expression influences their travel behavior decisions. During an interview, 25 participants use collage materials to create art and mental maps reflecting on their experiences making trips through Portland, Oregon. This research hypothesizes gender identity and gender presentation significantly influences a genderdiverse person’s subjective wellbeing and travel decisions.

Nick Puczkowskyj is a graduate research and teaching assistant at Portland State University's College of Urban and Public Affairs. He has also worked as a teaching assistant and research assistant at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Nick's research specializes in transportation equity, focusing on mobility justice, transgender mobility, queer mobility, gender disparities, and marginalized communities. He earned his master's degree in community and regional planning from the University of New Orleans. Learn more about Nick in a July 2022 Student Spotlight article, or learn more about NITC dissertation fellowships.

Header Photo by Lacey Friedly

The National Institute for Transportation and Communities (NITC) is one of seven U.S. Department of Transportation national university transportation centers. NITC is a program of the Transportation Research and Education Center (TREC) at Portland State University. This PSU-led research partnership also includes the Oregon Institute of Technology, University of Arizona, University of Oregon, University of Texas at Arlington and University of Utah. We pursue our theme — improving mobility of people and goods to build strong communities — through research, education and technology transfer.

Portland Bikeway Design Workshop Expands its Impact Across the Country

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 find their way into the plan.

"We've been looking at implementing a neighborhood greenway. We've always had neighborhood greenways as a tool in the toolbox; it's always been listed on paper, but nothing has ever fully been implemented. So now as we're updating our bike plan, over the next six months or so, we're looking to include that as a priority for implementation in future years," Goubeaux said.

Fellow Cincinnati engineer Joe Conway agrees. "The bike infrastructure solutions we explored during the workshop will certainly be seriously considered as investments to the infrastructure in our city going forward," Conway said. Other ideas that may be a good fit for Cincinnati's bike plan and upcoming infrastructure projects include bicycle signal detection feedback and strategies for converting a one-way bike lane to a two-way bike facility on the same side of a street.

Offered through the Initiative for Bicycle and Pedestrian Innovation (IBPI) since 2009, the Comprehensive Bikeway Design workshop has taught nearly 300 professionals from 30 U.S. states. Ohio isn't the first state (and won't be the last) to import bikeway design ideas. Another 2022 attendee, transportation engineer Akmal Durrani of the Washington State Department of Transportation, also expects to put some of the designs covered in the course to use.

"We are completing a street design project now, with some modifications to our roadway design to include a path for bike users. Definitely in the near future we will be implementing some things from the workshop," Durrani said.

Senior Transportation Planner Emily Benoit hopes to put some of the design principles she learned this summer into practice for the City of Vancouver, Washington.

"The most valuable thing I learned is that it’s really possible to build great multimodal roads even in the extremely suburban context. The suburban environment is going to be seeing drastic changes in the near future, so some of the things I’ll be looking to address in my own work are around slower shared roads, education on commuting by bike, and collaborative design processes to make the 'safest' design choices for bike users," Benoit said.

Goubeaux, who came away from the workshop "energized and excited," believes that the on-the-ground learning method is key to successful bikeway training.

"This format of doing part in the classroom, part in the field – where you get to feel and see and ride and experience what you are talking about – I think that is indispensable. You can learn about roadway sections and traffic counts and all that stuff on a presentation or a video, but without actually seeing and experiencing it, I think it's that missing link to actually getting it. I think that experiential piece is absolutely necessary."

Several agencies have sent multiple representatives over the years, to try their wheels in Portland and learn from our instructors. Kendra Nelson of the Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission,who attended this year, found out about the workshop from colleagues who had attended in previous years.

Nelson, who is currently working on a bicycle and pedestrian plan as well as a signal retiming effort, said that the IBPI workshop "was the perfect segue into the work that we do in our team." She expects to use insights provided by IBPI instructor Peter Koonce, who manages the City of Portland Bureau of Transportation's Signals, Street Lighting, & ITS Division, to advocate for restructuring signal timing around the bike rather than thinking strictly in terms of level-of-service (LOS).

"I think that anybody who's doing any kind of transportation planning, whether you're a bicycle planner, a pedestrian or transit planner, or just doing a lot of planning for single occupancy vehicles: You should be taking this course. I think that it's a necessary perspective shift, and given the state of climate change and inequality, it's just something that we should be looking at more to provide a range of diverse options for folks," Nelson said.

IBPI is a program of the Transportation Research and Education Center (TREC) at Portland State University. The week-long IBPI workshop draws professionals from all over the globe. Check out our album of photos from the 2022 workshop here. A second IBPI workshop, Integrating Bike-Ped Topics into University Transportation Courses, is aimed at helping university faculty make their transportation curriculum more inclusive of active transportation modes.

Both workshops are taught by experts from local agencies and Portland State University, a national leader in active transportation. Research by PSU transportation faculty has informed NACTO’s Urban Bikeway Design Guide, FHWA’s Bikeway Selection Guide, the FTA’s Manual on Bicycle and Pedestrian Connections to Transit, the FHWA’s Strategic Agenda for Pedestrian and Bicycle Transportation and many other design guidebooks.

If you'd like to be notified when workshop registration opens for 2023, add your email address here and we'll email you as soon as dates are confirmed.

Navigating Urban Spaces: Indoor & Outdoor Wayfinding Technology for Vision-Impaired People

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 wayfinding tools that support safe, confident mobility have been linked with improved employment outcomes, more access to higher education, and better quality of life. The results from this study improve our understanding of how people with visual impairment and blindness find their way through the world. Researchers are hopeful that the insights from the study will support the development of standards and innovation in mobile wayfinding as it relates to the integration of indoor and outdoor wayfinding, and routing for visually impaired, blind, and deafblind pedestrian travelers.

Despite the proliferation of wayfinding apps that are meant to benefit travelers, the effectiveness of such tools remains limited. This study gave voice to the experience of diverse travelers who use wayfinding technologies to accomplish important life tasks. In addition to the findings discussed below, researchers hope the analysis of the remaining data will drive forward a better understanding of the information needs of visually impaired, blind, and deafblind pedestrian travelers.

RESEARCH METHODS

The project sought answers to three questions:

What are the preference structures, information needs, and expectations of individuals with visual-impairment, blindness, and deafblindness towards wayfinding in public indoor/outdoor spaces?
How can low-cost wayfinding technology (e.g., digital maps, spatial data, personal telecommunication devices, and low-energy beacons) be leveraged best to allow for the seamless wayfinding of pedestrian travelers with functional disabilities in public urban indoor/outdoor spaces?
Which wayfinding technologies, data products, and technology platforms afford a sustainable, scalable deployment in a large academic institution?

College campuses are notoriously complex to navigate, particularly for travelers with visual impairments. One of the key barriers for culturally and linguistically diverse people in accessing higher education is seeing themselves as full members of a college campus community. As a public university situated in the heart of downtown Portland, the PSU campus was an ideal setting for this experiment as it affords realistic wayfinding scenarios and mobility challenges in a public urban environment. In addition, PSU’s commitment to community service, equity, and inclusivity align with the project's goals of promoting community participation and access.

The researchers began with a review of the existing literature on the topic: Wayfinding tools for people with visual impairments in real-world settings: A literature review of recent studies.

TWO CASE STUDIES

The team conducted an initial pilot case study with a single participant, an adult who is deafblind. Complete findings from that case study were published in Frontiers in Education: Seamless wayfinding by a deafblind adult on an urban college campus: A case study on wayfinding performance, information preferences, and technology requirements. The participant completed three routes on the PSU campus using either a mobile app, verbal directions, or a tactile map. For this participant, confidence and wayfinding performance were lowest for the mobile app, while the tactile map afforded the highest wayfinding performance, confidence and satisfaction, and the fastest completion time.

A second case study involved a traveler with combined vision and hearing loss, who also had professional experience as an O&M specialist serving those with visual impairments across multiple states. This participant’s occupational and personal experiences were helpful to the research team in further refining their testing protocol. The original goal of the project had been to compare three methods of wayfinding assistance: tactile maps, verbal directions, and "GoodMaps," an accessible navigation app for iPhone and Android. In accordance with the insights from this participant, the researchers eliminated verbal directions from the next phase of the experiment.

WAYFINDING EXPERIMENT

In a larger experiment, participants were invited to partake in a series of wayfinding tasks, navigating three short routes on campus with both indoor and outdoor elements. Accompanied by an experimenter with professional experience in Orientation and Mobility, participants were asked to travel two different routes while using one of two possible wayfinding supports: a tactile map for one route, and the GoodMaps mobile app for the other.

A total of 28 people participated in the main data collection phase of the study and completed the experiment: 21 adolescents (between the ages of 14 and 18) and seven adults. Participants included people of color, LGBTQIA+ individuals, and people with varying levels of visual impairments. The immediate next step for the research team is consolidating individual-level data for each of the 28 participants, and coding and assessing their observed wayfinding behavior and performance. While data analysis is still in progress for the 28 participants, early findings from the two case studies indicate that the tactile map afforded the most effective wayfinding support.

FOCUS GROUPS

The research team conducted two focus groups, one with eight blind or visually impaired adults who did not have any hearing loss, and another with nine deafblind participants who use Tactile American Sign Language or close-range visual American Sign Language. Collective themes from the two focus groups included both the hope and promise of wayfinding apps for offering greater environmental literacy during real-world travel, and the limitations of using such apps.

Both groups expressed the need for apps to be designed in collaboration with travelers with visual impairments, because of the apps’ unique limitations in dynamic travel conditions. A specific theme that emerged amongst visually impaired travelers was that they have to use multiple apps to complete a single route, because each app is useful for a subset of wayfinding tasks.

Further description of the findings from the focus group with deafblind participants is provided in the open-access Frontiers in Education article: The use of wayfinding apps by deafblind travelers in an urban environment: Insights from focus groups.

COLLABORATION ACROSS DISCIPLINES

This study is a product of several innovative partnerships. The lead researcher on the project, Martin Swobodzinski, is an associate professor of geography at PSU specializing in human wayfinding, spatial knowledge acquisition, accessibility, and human-computer interaction. In 2017 he and Amy Parker of PSU's Special Education Department began this work by collaborating on a NITC Small Starts project: Electronic Wayfinding for Visually Impaired Travelers: Limitations and Opportunities. The current project expands upon that research.

Parker is the coordinator of PSU's Orientation and Mobility Program, a program for preparing orientation and mobility (O&M) specialists which launched in 2017. The program has spearheaded several initiatives including interactive O&M workshops in partnership with TriMet and a new conference in Portland, the Mobility Matters Summit, held for its fifth year in 2022.

The collaborative research team included Swobodzinski, Parker, and graduate students in Geography and Special Education, as well as Elizabeth Schaller and Denise Snow of the American Printing House for the Blind. GoodMaps, the mobile wayfinding app used in the study, was created by the American Printing House for the Blind. GoodMaps engaged with developers at Intel to refine the accuracy of spatial information.

In May 2021, the GoodMaps team began scanning PSU's Smith Memorial Student Union onsite using Lidar equipment. In November of that year, GoodMaps collaborated with PSU's Disability Resource Center to host interested students and staff with visual impairments to informally evaluate the technology installation within SMSU. In December 2021, the refined version of the GoodMaps installation was ready for research participants to evaluate.

The Digital City Testbed Center (DCTC) at Portland State University works towards establishing a network of campuses in the Pacific Northwest where smart city technologies can be tested before being deployed in communities at large. DCTC’s support of this project allowed the hiring of a graduate research assistant, Julie Wright, who contributed to the achievement of project milestones and the creation of project deliverables.

This research was funded by the National Institute for Transportation and Communities, with additional support from Portland State University, the PSU Digital City Testbed Center, and the American Printing House for the Blind.

ABOUT THE PROJECT

Pedestrian Wayfinding Under Consideration of Visual Impairment, Blindness, and Deafblindness: A Mixed-Method Investigation Into Individual Experiences and Supporting Elements

Martin Swobodzinski and Amy Parker, Portland State University

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Harassment of Low-Income Women on Transit: A Photovoice Project in Oregon and Utah

Researchers Ivis Garcia, Sadika Maheruma Khan, and Kevin Fagundo-Ojeda of the University of Utah with Miriam Abelson and Nicholas Puczkowskyj of Portland State University have published a new article in the November 2022 issue of Transportation Research Part D: Transport and Environment.

Scholarship on gendered mobilities has shown that women experience transit differently than men do, particularly regarding personal safety. The article, "Harassment of low-income women on transit: A photovoice project in Oregon and Utah," makes a unique contribution to this body of literature because it shows that women feel targeted also based on their racial or ethnic identity and not only their gender. The article discusses women’s actions every day to increase their sense of safety.

Research has shown that low-income women who are transit-dependent experience unique disadvantages while riding, waiting, or trying to access public transit. In response to harassment, women might increase car dependency, which has negative environmental and public health impacts.

Given the importance of women feeling safe when using public transit to quality of life, public health, and ecological and economic sustainability, this research has implications for the planning and administration of public transit systems. Highlights from the findings include:

Past policies like redlining result in unsafe spaces today.
Truly safe spaces must account for experiences of low-income women of color.
The research participants suggest some societal and transit agency changes to improve safety, including police, monitors next to businesses, additional lighting and safety booths with phones at light rail stops.

The paper is based on the in-progress project Marginalized Populations’ Access to Transit: Journeys from Home and Work to Transit, led by Marisa Zapata of Portland State University and funded by the National Institute for Transportation and Communities (NITC). The research employs a photovoice methodology which includes in-depth interviews and phone texting with 22 low-income women of color who ride transit at least a few times a month in Oregon and Utah.