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.

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. 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.
    
5. 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, this book club is co-hosted by TREC and PSU’s transportation student group STEP.