OTREC Newsletter February 2011

TRB: In case you missed it

If you weren’t one of the 10,000 people who attended the Transportation Research Board’s Annual Meeting in January, there are fifty students and twenty faculty for PSU, UO, OSU and OIT who can tell you what they learned there. OTREC's bright yellow lanyards made our presence especially visible! PSU student Brian Davis blogged about his experience, OTREC’s Jon Makler was interviewed in a local newspaper, and the Oregon “delegation” at the conference was covered by both local and national blogs. Team OTREC filed some daily debriefs, highlighting presentations on topics such as federal stimulus investments in Los Angeles and Vermont’s efforts to address their transportation workforce crisis with returning military veterans (as well as the snow storm that affected the conference’s last day).

For first-time attendees, the Transportation Research Board (TRB) can be an overwhelming experience. In his blog entry, Davis described: learning how to navigate the conference’s three hotels; discovering the value of attending committee meetings (rather than poster or lecture sessions); dressing to east coast "standards"; and networking, networking, networking. Read more...

 

8th Annual Region X Student Conference draws 70 to Corvallis

The 8th Annual Region X Student Conference was hosted by Oregon State University in Corvallis on Friday and 70 students attended. Conference organizer Jon Mueller said that a surprising number of students from the materials science and economics departments attended and that a significant number of undergraduates from OSU attended parts of the conference. Read more...

 

Seatbelt safety advertisement wins Portland State team national honors

To students in Don Dickinson’s Advertising Campaigns class, seat belt straps look a little like the hug of a protective parent. That central image helped the class win a National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s student advertising competition geared toward reducing traffic injuries to preteens and young teenagers. Read more...

 

New report shows a better way to track freight over highways
Freight transportation is a vital component of Oregon’s economy, and many expect shipments to nearly double in the next decade. Making informed decisions to better manage the freight transportation system requires monitoring freight movement and freight transportation performance.

Existing methods for tracking individual trucks can require buying expensive new equipment, however, and raise privacy concerns. Christopher Monsere investigated an alternative: Using only existing vehicle sensors, is it feasible to reidentify trucks after they have traveled long distances? Read more...

 

Traffic safety requires better engineering, education and enforcement
Despite some major strides in safety on Portland’s streets, the city has a lot of work remaining to make the city safe for all forms of transportation. At the fifth Transportation Safety Summit, held Feb. 8 at Marshall High School in southeast Portland, speakers stressed the importance of a multipronged approach to safety.

Sponsored by the Portland Bureau of Transportation, or PBOT, the summit also featured speakers from the Portland Police Bureau, the Oregon Department of Transportation, TriMet and Mayor Sam Adams. Read more...

 

Bike lanes and paths only part of the equation, Mia Birk tells UO students
As a bicycle advocate in the early 1990s, Mia Birk was young, idealistic and unaware of the struggles she would face, she told a Eugene audience, with many of those attending in much the same position Birk once found herself in. Birk spoke at the “Movers and Shakers: Connecting People and Places” series presented by LiveMove, the University of Oregon transportation and livability student group. Read more...

 

Conference shows electric vehicles have turned a corner in 2011
If anyone doubted Detroit could produce a reliable electric car that can be charged at home and make several trips without recharging, the proof was parked in the Oregon Convention Center: a 1917 Detroit Electric. Production of that car, which could travel up to 80 miles on a charge, began in 1907.

The Detroit Electric and conceptual descendents, such as the sporty Tesla Roadster and Nissan Leaf, served as backdrop to E.V. Road Map 3, a forum to discuss the benefits of electric vehicles and plan for their future. Read more...