Transportation Seminars at Portland State University have been a tradition since 2000. Formerly known as the "Friday Transportation Seminar" series, we've opened up the schedule to accommodate more audiences post-pandemic and the seminars are no longer held exclusively on Fridays. With over 450 seminars presented and recorded, we host both visiting and local scholars to share the latest in research, technology, and implementation in transportation. This seminar series is supported by PSU's Toulan School of Urban Studies and Planning and Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, with funding from the National Institute for Transportation and Communities (NITC) program.

WHO CAN ATTEND: This series is free and open to the public.
WHERE: Online or in person at PSU. Check each individual seminar page for location info for that seminar.
ACCESSIBILITY: The Vanport Building (where most seminars are held) has wheelchair-accessible entrances on 4th and 5th Avenue. If you need to request reasonable accommodations, email us at asktrec@pdx.edu.

WATCH ONLINE: Watch online via the registration link on each seminar page
HOW DO I HEAR ABOUT THEM? To get notifications of upcoming seminars and webinars, sign up for our monthly TREC at Portland State newsletter.

Through a competitive application process, the Transportation Undergraduate Research Fellowship (TURF) program is a unique eight-week summer fellowship for undergraduates to get experience in transportation research. Hosted at Portland State University in Portland, Oregon, a hub of transportation innovation and expertise, fellows will work on research projects under the guidance of a research mentor. What can TURF Fellows expect from the program?

• Firsthand exposure to the research process;
• A chance to practice collecting & analyzing data, and other useful tasks;
• A cohort experience with other TURF fellows;
• Experience another university campus in an urban setting with robust multimodal network;
• The opportunity to spend the summer in beautiful Portland, Oregon!

At the end of the program, the students will write a final written reflection describing their research findings and experience of the program.

With an emphasis on learning by doing, PSU students work on real transportation system projects with partners in our community. These partnerships lead to internships and rewarding careers after graduation. PSU students also have a history of collecting prestigious Eisenhower fellowships from the U.S. DOT and other transportation scholarships. Graduate and undergraduate students can find research and funding opportunities including graduate research opportunities, scholarships, other awards that are available through our programs and partners.

An active and engaged student transportation group, the Students in Transportation Engineering & Planning (ITE-STEP), hosts film screenings, tours of transportation agencies in the city, lectures and other activities. Students can take on leadership roles in cultivating community and education around the transportation issues important to them.

Students present their work at national conferences for TRB (Transportation Research Board), ITE (Institute of Transportation Engineers), APA (American Planning Association), as well as locally through TREC and our partners.

Students have the support of PSU's Transportation Research and Education Center (TREC) which is home to one of seven national university transportation centers, the National Institute for Transportation & Communities (NITC), a six-university consortium that receives an average of $4.4 million per year from the U.S. DOT to support transportation research projects and students. 

Our transportation faculty are regarded as national and international experts in their fields. Graduate students have opportunities to collaborate in this research and take the lead on their own papers under faculty guidance. Just a few examples of how PSU faculty and researchers have supported the city of Portland’s transportation leadership:

• In partnership with the City of Portland, PSU has hosted a community transportation academy for 25 years for over 1,200 community members.
• PSU evaluated the first large-scale installation of bike boxes in the US, allowing Portland to use this safety treatment to prevent right hook crashes.
• PSU evaluated the city's first protected bike lane, on SW Broadway through campus, setting the stage for the wider-spread use of such lanes throughout the city.

In 1966 the first transportation studies center was established at PSU. Since then our transportation faculty and staff expertise has grown to worldwide recognition, and expanded to include the multitude of disciplines that inform transportation decision-making: planning, engineering, economics, design, psychology, information technology and more. Our researchers do work locally with the Portland Bureau of Transportation, the Oregon DOT, Metro, TriMet, and more; as well as being tapped to take on national projects.

Explore the decades of transportation research at PSU here, or dig into some of our key research areas in bikeway design; bike share; electric bikes; pedestrian safety; and multimodal transportation data.

Our programs serve a wide variety of transportation education and research needs of our faculty, partners, community members, and future transportation professionals. TREC is home to everything transportation at Portland State University.

1. FRIDAY TRANSPORTATION SEMINARS: Open to the public, our Friday Transportation Seminar series features multiple events each term focused on recent research and practices at the intersection of transportation and equity. We continue to carry this lens into our current and future FTS with a stronger focus on racial equity and featuring speakers from diverse lived experiences. See our YouTube playlist on past events focused on social equity here.
   
    
2. BETTER BLOCK PSU: Adopted by TREC in 2019, the Better Block PSU program exemplifies PSU’s motto of “Let knowledge serve the city.” Integrated into PSU planning and engineering classes as an experiential learning opportunity, every year local community partners submit their project ideas for equitable placemaking, community building, and active transportation advocacy. Applications from organizations that support and/or are led by historically marginalized groups are prioritized.
   
    
3. RACIAL EQUITY IN UNIVERSITY CURRICULUM: In the summer of 2020, transportation scholars Jennifer Dill (PSU), Kendra Levine (UC Berkeley), and Jesus Barajas (UC Davis) created a collaborative, crowd-sourced reading list for university curriculum to elevate anti-racism learning as well as BIPOC academic experts in the field of transportation planning and engineering. In Fall 2021 they updated this resource using community input. New materials include in-depth work on breaking down barriers to bicycling by Charles T. Brown, an Equity Dashboard from Transit Center; a new racial equity addendum to critical issues in transportation developed by the Transportation Research Board, and a UC Davis report that identifies 10 key themes of successful community engagement with historically marginalized communities.
   
    
4. FUNDING NEW UNIVERSITY CURRICULA: Through our U.S DOT funded program, the National Institute for Transportation and Communities (NITC), we are investing in the development of new curricula materials for planning and engineering courses that center on the role of race in transportation. An advisory committee has been convened to provide an external peer review of curriculum proposals.
   
    
5. TRANSPORTATION STEM FOR HIGH SCHOOLERS: Offered annually, our summer high school transportation camps are offered free to Oregon students and dedicate topics focused on transportation justice. We explore these topics through students' own identities and communities, as well as looking into the systems that perpetuate unequal transportation options. They read articles and participate in dialogue about how power, privilege, and oppression impact the ways we move through the world.
   
    
6. EQUITY IN TRANSPORTATION BOOK CLUB AT PSU: Started in the fall of 2021, this book club is centered around mobility justice. The first book we are reading is Bicycle/Race: Transportation, Culture, & Resistance by Adonia Lugo. Open to current PSU students, staff and faculty, click here to join the book club. This book club is co-hosted by TREC and PSU’s transportation student group STEP.

In addition to what we're currently taking action on, we're meeting weekly and developing strategies and next steps to advance our goals detailed above. Transparency is important for this work, and this will be updated periodically.