Portland State University

To look at how buses, light rail, street cars, and bicycling have all become prominent modes in Portland, you need to trace back to important land use decisions made three decades ago. In 1974, Oregon adopted statewide land use planning goals. These goals shifted planning efforts away from freeway-building, toward investment in alternative forms of transportation. Since then, Oregon has been a leader in pushing back against car-centric landscapes and lifestyles. In this OTREC project, Professor Carl Abbott and Sam Lowry of Portland State University traced the history of land use planning in Oregon from 1890-1974. One of the projectís aims is to make transportation planning relevant and compelling to a broad audience. To do so, Abbott and Lowry gathered stories and information from a wide range of sources who enthusiastically shared their knowledge of transportation history. You can download the report to read more: https://ppms.trec.pdx.edu/media/project_files/OTREC-TT-10-01.pdf

This OTREC educational project took students at Portland State University beyond the lecture hall and the library. Dr. Lynn Weigand expanded the bicycle and pedestrian design curriculum at PSU by turning an existing three-credit course into a five-credit course with an applied lab. The new course gave students the opportunity to apply the knowledge they gained in class to real projects in their community. Working in teams, the students developed projects that focused on improving bicycle and pedestrian connections to the PSU campus. The course received excellent reviews from the students, and the department recognized the courseís value by offering it again the following year. The report can be downloaded at: https://ppms.trec.pdx.edu/media/project_files/OTREC-ED-10-01.pdf.

Portland State University faculty and students presented their work at the National Urban Freight Conference (NUFC) in Long Beach, CA October 21-23, 2009. Dr. Miguel Figliozzi presented "Emissions & Energy Minimization Vehicle Routing Problem" and "A Study of Transportation Disruption Causes and Cost in Containerized Maritime Transportation." Also, graduate research assistants Ryan Conrad and Nikki Wheeler presented research projects sponsored by OTREC. Ryan presented "Algorithms and Methodologies to Analyze and Quantify the Impacts of Congestion on Urban Distribution Systems Using Real-world Urban Network Data" and Nikki presented "Analysis of the Impacts of Congestion on Freight Movements in the Portland Metropolitan Area." NUFC brings together researchers and practitioners in the public and private sectors from many disciplines within freight transportation. This conference is the only one of its kind in the US, and brought attendees and presenters from across the US, Canada and Europe.

The proliferation of information technology in the transportation field has opened up opportunities for communication and analysis of the performance of transportation facilities. The Highway Capacity Manual relies on rules of thumb and small data samples to generate levels of service to assess performance, but modern detection technology gives us the opportunity to better capture the dynamism of these systems and examine their performance from many perspectives. Travelers, operations staff, and researchers can benefit from measurements that provide information such as travel time, effectiveness of signal coordination, and traffic density. In particular, inductive loop detectors show promise as a tool to collect the data necessary to generate such information. But while their use for this purpose on restricted‐access facilities is well understood, a great many challenges remain in using loop detectors to measure the performance of surface streets.

This thesis proposes 6 methods for estimating arterial travel time. Estimates are compared to simulated data visually, with input/output diagrams; and statistically, with travel times. Methods for estimating travel time are applied to aggregated data and to varying detector densities and evaluated as above. Conclusions are drawn about which method provides the best estimates, what levels of data aggregation can still provide useful information, and what the effects of detector density are on the quality of estimates....