We are committed to making decisions that promote the success and well-being of our campus community. Until further notice, all live events hosted by TREC will be online only.

Friday Transportation Seminars at Portland State University have been a tradition since 2000. You can join us online at 11:30 AM.

PRESENTATION ARCHIVE

THE TOPIC

This seminar discusses how pedestrian race and gender can influence drivers’ behavior in interactions with pedestrians at...

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This webinar is hosted by the University of South Florida's Center for Urban Transportation Research (CUTR). A video recording may be available through CUTR.

This presentation will explore methods used by MPOs to understand the equity effects of regional transportation plans and investments, based on research conducted for the National Institute for Transportation and Communities (NITC). The webinar will examine how MPOs are identifying communities of concern with regard to transportation equity, along with techniques used in evaluating accessibility to jobs and services, modal options, distributional equity of investments, and other equity considerations.

The webinar includes case studies of equity methods being applied in two distinctly different regions that participated in the research effort: 1) Hillsborough County, (Tampa) Florida: a lower density, sprawling, auto dependent area with limited public transportation; and 2) Portland, Oregon: a higher density, compact urban area with a variety of travel options and a strong urban growth management system. The two MPOs are at different stages of addressing transportation equity in their planning and public engagement activities. Transportation planners from each of these MPOs will discuss the development and application of their equity analysis methods and how attention to equity is being integrated into...

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PRESENTATION ARCHIVE

OVERVIEW

Many transit agencies plan to automate their fare collection and limit the use of cash, with the goals of improving boarding and data collection while lowering operating costs. Yet about 10% of adults in the United States lack a bank account or credit card, and many either rely on restrictive cell-phone data plans or don’t have access to internet or a smartphone. 

This webinar will present part of a larger research project exploring these issues in the cities of Denver, Colorado, and Eugene and Portland–Gresham, Oregon. In this part, we explore the tradeoffs between reducing cash acceptance, ridership and the costs of fare collection systems. How much does it save to reduce cash acceptance, verses ridership and equity impacts?

We will also present a cost-effectiveness framework that combines a qualitative and quantitative analysis and use this model to explore case scenarios in our three cities. The model shows that adding a retail network to...

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Breaking Barriers to Bike Share: Insights on Equity

While the number of public bike share systems in the United States grew considerably in recent years, early evidence indicated that many systems were not serving the diverse populations of cities, particularly lower-income residents and people of color. Lack of bike share stations in...

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PRESENTATION ARCHIVE

OVERVIEW

Nonprofit organizations are responsible for providing human services across the United States, often in partnership with government agencies. In this work, they address some of the most pressing social issues – including homelessness, poverty, health care and education. While many of these organizations consider location and accessibility crucial to supporting their clients – often locating services near bus or train stops, for example – little is known about the impact of new technologies, including ride hail services (also called Transportation Network Companies, or TNCs) like Lyft and Uber, on nonprofit accessibility.   

Do these services help fill gaps in client needs? How are nonprofit organizations considering these services in meeting client needs?

This exploratory and qualitative study is among the first of its kind to measure the impact of TNCs and other emerging technologies on community mobility and the accessibility of human services, helping to build stronger communities. This study includes interviews with nonprofit service providers and clients...

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WEBINAR VIDEO

Webinar: Racial Bias in Driver Yielding Behavior at Crosswalks

WEBINAR SLIDES

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WEBINAR SUMMARY

This webinar discusses research exploring how social identity factors (race and gender) influence drivers’...

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PRESENTATION ARCHIVE

OVERVIEW

Equity requirements in shared micromobility programs have become increasingly prevalent in recent years, but our understanding of the scope and breadth of these requirements has been relatively limited. To address this gap in understanding, we collected documentation about 239 shared micromobility programs from the U.S. and have compiled all the data into an online, interactive dashboard. In this webinar, we will discuss the kinds of equity requirements that are most prevalent, the strategies cities/agencies employ to operationalize equity, and the extent to which these programs are monitored and evaluated. We’ll present findings from our review of 239 U.S. programs, supplemented by five case studies.

In addition, we’ll introduce attendees to two practitioner-focused tools we created to accompany this work:

1)...

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Transit-oriented development (TOD) projects in low-income neighborhoods have the potential to provide needed transportation access to a segment of the population that stands to benefit significantly from these large-scale transit infrastructure projects. This research project reveals that large-scale TOD projects have the potential of leading to neighborhood revitalization and equitable outcomes in low-income Latino communities. But these positive outcomes depend on both the process and context of these particular neighborhoods, and how transportation planners incorporate the various forms of political, financial and cultural capital that exist in these communities into the planning and implementation process of TOD projects. This comparative case study analyzed the Fruitvale Transit Village in Oakland and the MacArthur Park METRO TOD in Los Angeles. We...

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As metropolitan area governments and others promote density-promoting “smart growth” policies, finer analysis is needed to quantify the impact of such policies on households' transportation and housing costs. Existing research suggests that households in urban areas trade-off between housing costs and transportation costs, but does not explore how policies to increase urban densities might explicitly impact this balance. Furthermore, the research does not adequately distinguish between the effect of urban area density and the effects of other factors associated with urban area density (e.g metropolitan area size and household incomes) on housing costs. This research uses the 2000 Census Public Use Micro Sample (PUMS) person and household data from 23 of the nation's most densely populated states to identify the impact of increased population density on three housing cost measures: household rents, housing unit values, and monthly mortgage payments. Log linear models were estimated for each housing cost measure using least-squares regression. Dependent variables included household, housing unit, and geographic area characteristics, including population density. The models were found to be very similar to one another in terms of the statistical significance...

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