News: Events
Transportation secretary touts Portland project as national model
In a tent in a parking lot under a freeway bridge, Ray LaHood saw the future of the country’s transportation network Tuesday. The U.S. Secretary of Transportation spoke to reporters, dignitaries and construction workers in the muddy work zone of Southwest Moody Avenue.
Last year, the project to rebuild Moody Avenue received a $23.2 million grant from the federal stimulus package. The project will double the streetcar tracks and add a cycle track and sidewalks. It will also ease connections to a new transit bridge that will carry the Portland-Milwaukie light rail line, the eastside streetcar loop, cyclists and pedestrians.
LaHood, joined by the area's congressional delegation, city and state officials, stressed the jobs the project is creating and the boost for the mix of transportation modes it represents. The project will also reduce congestion, LaHood said, by making transit attractive to current and future residents and employees.
Before construction started along Moody, automobile congestion was virtually nonexistent. However, it’s a heavily trafficked bicycle route connecting Portland’s cycle-friendly downtown bridges with its largest employer, Oregon Health and Science University.
By allowing choices of light-rail train, streetcar, bicycle and shoe leather, the project stands to boost those forms of transportation. If commuters leave their cars at home, that represents a reduction in congestion elsewhere. Of course, the project will also add a third traffic lane, making driving more convenient.
Tags: bicycle, gail achterman, light rail, moody avenue, ohsu, pedestrian, portland streetcar, ray lahood, sam adams, streetcar
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).
Tags: connected vehicles, data, intelligent transportation systems, peter appel, rita, robert bertini, transportation research board
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.
Tags: active traffic management, high speed rail, its, region x, students
Transit stations operate in sweet microenvironment
Even residents of a gingerbread candyland can't get around with holiday magic alone. After all, Santa's elves still need a reliable way to get from their cozy homes to the workshop.
Sadly, transportation planners have turned a frosty shoulder to sugar-based transit systems. Until now.
On Dec. 3, Portland State University's Students in Transportation Engineering and Planning held the first gingerbread transit station competition. Four teams of students pulled their attention away from human transit to focus on the needs of gingerbread people and misfit toys.
Dealing with building materials of unknown structural properties, students field engineered solutions. Licorice sticks stood in for steel rails, candy canes for bicycle racks. For a binding agent, students mixed cream of tartar and egg whites instead of portland cement.
Tags: alkali-silica reaction, students in transportation engineering and planning, transit, travel-time reliability
OTREC well represented at D.C. livability conference
Ten OTREC researchers, staff, and students participated in the Transportation Research Board and University Transportation Center Transportation Systems for Livable Communities Conference last week in Washington, D.C. The conference brought together researchers and practitioners from transportation, housing and public health.
Highlights of the conference included an insightful discussion on defining livability. Despite inconclusive debate on the definition, participants agreed that for the concept to be embraced it can neither be dictated nor prescribed. Performance measures also were a recurring theme of the two-day conference. Concepts explored included: re-evaluating outdated measures such as volume-to-capacity ratio and level of service to better reflect different modes, shifting thinking from mobility to accessibility and proximity, and data standardization and measurement methodologies. To complete the livability picture, the multigenerational and socioeconomic considerations need to be included.
The following four OTREC research projects were highlighted during the conference poster session:
- Implementation of Active Living Policies by Land Use and Transportation Agencies: Jennifer Dill, Oregon Transportation Research and Education Consortium, Portland State University; Deborah Howe, Temple University
- Yes, They Do Walk in Suburbia: Suburban Multifamily Housing and Trips to Strips: Nico Larco, University of Oregon
- “Fix This Tool”: Empowering Citizens to Spatially Assess their Active Transportation Environment: Marc Schlossberg, Ken Kato, Christo Brehm, and Dana Maher, University of Oregon
- Universities as Catalysts for Retrofitting Communities Toward Livability: The Sustainable Cities Initiative: Marc Schlossberg and Nico Larco, Sustainable Cities Initiative
The conference validated much of OTREC's current research and provided further evidence that we are moving livability research in the right direction. OTREC's livability research focuses on tools for decision-making, planning and design, economics and performance measures.
Presentations are posted on the TRB conference Website. Conference tweets are on Twitter at #utclivability.
Tags: christo brehm, dana maher, deborah howe, jennifer dill, ken kato, marc schlossberg, nico larco, research and innovative technology administration, transportation research board
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