Economic and Business Outcomes of Bicycle and Pedestrian Improvements
 

PRESENTATION ARCHIVE

OVERVIEW

The National Street Improvements Study, conducted by PSU in conjunction with PeopleForBikes and consulting firm Bennett Midland, researched the economic effects of bicycle infrastructure on 14 corridors across six cities — Portland, Seattle, San Francisco, Memphis, Minneapolis and Indianapolis. The study found that improvements such as bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure had either positive or non-significant impacts on the local economy as measured through sales and employment. In this webinar, lead researcher Jenny Liu will share the results of the investigation and the unique methodology for investigating these economic outcomes.

THE RESEARCH

This webinar is based on a study funded by the National Institute for Transportation and Communities (NITC) and the Summit Foundation, and conducted at Portland State University. Read more about the research: ...

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The video begins at 1:44.

Oliver Smith (USP PhD) - Peak of the day or the daily grind? Commuting and subjective well-being

To understand the impact of daily travel on personal and societal well-being, measurement techniques that go beyond satisfaction-based measures of travel are used. Such metrics are increasingly important for evaluating transportation and land-use policies. This study examines commute well-being, a multi-item measure of how one feels about the commute to work, and its influences using data from a web-based survey that was distributed to Portland, Oregon, U.S.A. workers. Valid surveys (n=828) were compiled from three roughly equally sized groups based on mode: bike, transit and car users. Average distances between work and home varied significantly among the three groups. Descriptive results show that commute well-being varies widely across the sample. Those who bike to work have significantly higher commute well-being than transit and car commuters. A multiple linear regression model shows that along with travel mode, traffic congestion, travel time, income, health, job satisfaction and residential satisfaction also play important individual roles in shaping commute well-being. While more analysis is needed, these results support findings in previous research that commuting by bike enhances well-being while congestion detracts from well-being. Implications...

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Watch video

View Steven Gehrke's slides

View Kihong Kim's slides

Following the 2015 annual meeting of the Transportation Research Board, this Friday seminar will showcase some of Portland State University's student TRB research. 

Presenters:

Steven Gehrke, GRA in civil and environmental engineering

Toward a Spatial-Temporal Measure of Land Use Mix 

Summary: Urban policies have emphasized the importance of mixing land uses in a neighborhood as an intervention beholding of lasting planning and public health benefits. Transportation planning research has identified the potential of efficiency... Read more

The video begins at 3:22.

Steve Gehrke (CEE PhD) - Application of Geographic Perturbation Methods to Residential Locations in the Oregon Household Activity Survey: Proof of Concept

Travel demand models have advanced from zone-based methods to favor activity-based approaches that require more disaggregate data sources. Household travel surveys gather disaggregate data that may be utilized to better inform advanced travel demand models and also improve the understanding of how nonmotorized travel is influenced by a household’s surrounding built environment. However, the release of these disaggregate data is often limited by a confidentiality pledge between the household participant and survey administrator. Concerns regarding the disclosure risk of survey respondents to household travel surveys must be addressed before these household-level data may be released at their disaggregate geography. In an effort to honor this confidentiality pledge and facilitate the dissemination of valuable travel survey data, this research: (i) reviews geographical perturbation methods that seek to protect respondent confidentiality; (ii) outlines a procedure for implementing one promising practice, referred to as the donut masking technique; and (iii) demonstrates a proof of concept for this technique on ten respondents to a household activity travel survey in the Portland metropolitan region. To examine the balance...

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Watch video

View Patrick Singleton's slides

View Ryan Dann's slides

Following the 2015 annual meeting of the Transportation Research Board, this Friday seminar will showcase some of Portland State University's student TRB research.

Presenters:

Patrick Singleton, GRA in civil and environmental engineering

The theory of travel decision-making: A conceptual framework of active travel behavior

Summary: We present a unifying conceptual framework of active travel behavior called the theory of travel decision-making. It integrates seminal travel-related concepts from economics, geography, and... Read more

Friday Transportation Seminars at Portland State University have been a tradition since 2000. We've opened up PSU Transportation Seminars to other days of the week, but the format is the same: Feel free to bring your lunch! If you can't join us in person, you can always watch online via Zoom.

PRESENTATION ARCHIVE

THE TOPIC 

The transportation system in the U.S. has been shaped by a core set of ideas that are embedded in professional practice. These ideas – freedom, speed, mobility, vehicles, capacity, hierarchy, separation, control, and technology – have produced a system in which most people are dependent on driving, with all the negative consequences that entails. Shifting to a system that offers people choices about their daily travel requires a shift in thinking on the part of the transportation profession. In this talk, I take a critical look at...

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PRESENTATION ARCHIVE

OVERVIEW

Planners and decision makers have increasingly voiced a need for network-wide estimates of bicycling activity. Such volume estimates have for decades informed motorized planning and analysis but have only recently become feasible for non-motorized travel modes.

Recently, new sources of bicycling activity data have emerged such as Strava, Streetlight, and GPS-enabled bike share systems. These emerging data sources have potential advantages as a complement to traditional count data, and have even been proposed as replacements for such data, since they are collected continuously and for larger portions of local bicycle networks. However, the representativeness of these new data sources has been questioned, and their suitability for producing bicycle volume estimates has yet to...

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