OTREC Newsletter January 2011

OTREC January 2011 Newsletter
 
Capital BusesFaculty and students from OTREC universities will be featured at more than 35 sessions at the Transportation Research Board’s annual meeting Jan. 23 to 27 in Washington D.C. The meeting offers a forum to show OTREC’s research and programs to approximately 10,000 transportation professionals representing various disciplines and countries. Download OTREC’s guide to TRB. Among these sessions, a highlight is the presentation of work that has emerged from OTREC’s collaborations with other members of the Region X Consortium, which includes the Departments of Transportation and University Transportation Centers from Alaska, Idaho, Oregon, Washington and Montana.

This year, two poster presentations stem from a Region X-sponsored project: Climate Change Impact Assessment for Surface Transportation in the Pacific Northwest and Alaska The project addresses the potential impacts of climate change, and associated opportunities for adaptation, throughout the region.

“Most plans for the region deal with mitigation, that is, the amount of carbon going into the atmosphere from transportation,” said John MacArthur, the project’s principal investigator and a presenting author of two papers at the TRB meeting. “Few (agencies) have dealt with adaptation to climate change in their planning.” Read more.
 
OTREC is pleased to announce the posting of the 2011-2012 Request for Proposals (RFP). The total funding available under this RFP is approximately $2 million, and OTREC expects to fund as many high quality proposals as possible to support relevant work that relates to the theme, research emphasis area and supports national transportation priorities, initiatives and needs. Read more.
 
A new OTREC research report examines the consequences for American urban areas if all freeway expansion stopped. Titled “No More Freeways,” the report concludes that investing in arterial streets instead of expanding freeways provides the greatest social benefit for the cost. Doing so distributes roadway capacity throughout the area instead of concentrating it on freeway corridors. Read more or download the research report.
 
Use of small electric vehicles is spreading from gated communities and college campuses onto city streets and even state highways. But should these vehicles share the road with heavier, faster ones? In many situations, concluded Oregon State University researcher Kate Hunter-Zaworski, the answer is “no.” Read more or download the research report.
 
Heidi Beierle, a community and regional planning master’s student at the University of Oregon, shared stories from her solo cross-country bicycle ride at Eugene’s downtown Public Library. Beierle rode her bicycle from Eugene to Washington, D.C., where she presented preliminary findings of her research on the connections among historic roadways, bicycle tourism and rural economic development. Read more.
 
The University of Oregon's Sustainable Cities Initiative has hired Metro Councilor Robert Liberty as the program's executive director. The Sustainable Cities Initiative is a multi-disciplinary effort to transform higher education with community engagement, interdisciplinary collaboration and sustainability study to influence public policy. The initiative is one of three OTREC-supported initiatives for 2011. Read more.
 
Bridging the gap between engineers and planners starts with asking the right questions, Portland State University associate professor Kelly Clifton told University of Oregon planning students. But it can’t stop there. In Eugene for the LiveMove student group’s Movers and Shakers Speaker Series, Clifton stressed the importance of planners and engineers educating themselves in both disciplines. Read more.