Transportation Research and Education Center

The U.S. Department of Transportation awarded Portland State University $3.5 million for research and education on sustainable transportation topics, the department announced today. The Oregon Transportation Research and Education Consortium (OTREC), the university transportation center based at PSU, will administer the grant.

OTREC, a partnership between PSU, the University of Oregon and the Oregon Institute of Technology, will join with the University of Utah to carry out the grant. This award reaffirms OTREC’s evolution into one of the nation’s leading transportation livability research centers and provides the resources to address national problems strategically.

Research and educational programs under the grant will focus on the following topics:

• Improving health and safety for all users
• Increasing the efficiency and understanding of cycling, walking and transit
• Making the best use of data, performance measures and analytical tools
• Integrating multimodal transportation with land use
• Taking long-term action on transportation emissions and climate change.

PSU was one of 63 applicants for 22 grants. The grant competition challenged university transportation center leaders to demonstrate the ability and experience to produce the country’s best transportation research and educational programs. “In five years, OTREC has advanced the state of research on topics such as the connections between transportation...

PRESENTATION ARCHIVE

Miss the webinar or want a look back?

• Watch the recorded video
• View the presentation slides

OVERVIEW

This webinar will present an open-source socio-transportation analytic toolbox (STAT) for public transit system planning. This webinar will consist of a demonstration of the STAT toolbox, for the primary purpose of getting feedback from transit agencies on the tool's usefulness. We are especially interested in hearing about any improvements that would aid transit agencies in implementing it.

The STAT toolbox was created in an effort to integrate social media and general transit feed specification (GTFS) data for transit agencies, to aid in evaluating and enhancing the performance of public transit systems. The toolbox enables the integration, analysis, and visualization of two major new open transportation data sources—social media and GTFS data—to support transit decision making. In this webinar, we will introduce how we...

For fifteen years, scholars have claimed that accessibility-based transportation planning is at the brink of becoming a new paradigm. In contrast with traditional mobility-based planning methods, which focus on the cost of transportation per mile, accessibility-based planning methods place more importance on people's ability to reach various destinations and their access to transit systems. Its use may trail behind traditional planning methods nationally, due to vague definitions, momentum of traditional performance measures, and other factors. However, this webinar argues that accessibility-based planning is demonstrably necessary in shrinking cities across the U.S., and especially among minority populations in those cities.

As shrinking cities’ need for accessibility-based planning is distinct, the challenges to accomplishing it are also distinct and rather severe. Again, this is especially true when planning for minority populations, for whom there is often a level of mistrust in the policy process itself which must be overcome. After presenting evidence of both the especial need for and the challenges inherent in accessibility-based planning in shrinking cities (and especially among minority populations), this presentation proposes potential strategies for implementation and for applying this method in those scenarios in which it is most needed.

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PRESENTATION ARCHIVE

• Video
• Presentation Slides
• PDH Certificate

OVERVIEW

Transportation and land use planning, as a field, is shifting away from segregated uses connected by highways and streets to more compact, mixed-use developments connected by high-quality transit. This new paradigm has brought special attention to transit-oriented developments (TOD), which are sometimes touted as being among the most affordable, efficient places to live. But how affordable are they, and who has the power to effect change? This study examines housing costs for households living in TODs.

KEY LEARNING OUTCOMES

• Learn how many TODs there are currently in the U.S. and what methodology was used to identify them.
• Learn what share of housing in TODs is affordable, what are the relative shares of designated versus naturally occurring affordable units and whether the level of affordability is the same for families of different sizes.
• Learn ...