News: Presentations
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
Embrace engineering, speaker tells planning students
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 Nov. 18 for the LiveMove student group’s Movers and Shakers Speaker Series, Clifton stressed the importance of student planners and engineers educating themselves in both disciplines. Doing so gives planners technical skills and engineers understanding of the broader implications of transportation systems.
Engineers are problem solvers, Clifton said. Asked to move as many vehicles as possible through an area, they’ll figure out a solution. But the question should be reframed: What’s the best way for people, not just vehicles, to get around? That includes walking, cycling and transit.
Planners don’t need to become engineers themselves, Clifton said, but they’ll get farther by understanding how engineers bring transportation planning concepts to life. “Don’t be afraid of math,” she said.
Tags: kelly clifton, livemove
Visiting scholar wants zero traffic fatalities
When engineers focus on transportation systems, they often produce brilliant solutions. Sometimes, however, they focus in the wrong place.
“Engineers are really good; if you tell them, ‘This is what we want to accomplish,’ they’ll do it,” said Peter Jacobsen, himself an engineer and a public health consultant. “But traffic safety hasn’t had a good scientific, evidence-based approach that we have in, say, nuclear-power-plant design.”
Jacobsen, Portland State University’s first visiting scholar this school year, will present the Vision Zero concept at Friday’s transportation seminar. Vision Zero resets the goal of transportation systems from reducing total crashes to eliminating fatalities.
“The way engineers currently look at the road system is to look at crashes,” Jacobsen said. “Vision Zero folks say to look at health: not to have fatalities or permanent disabling injuries.”
Designing for health means respecting the limits of the human body. If crossing into oncoming traffic could produce head-on collisions with a greater force than people could survive, then Vision Zero says to separate that traffic. Roundabouts reduce the likelihood of dangerous side-impact collisions.
Vision Zero could have the largest effect closer to home. Jacobsen has pushed for colleagues to consider traffic from a child’s perspective. A residential street that might be perfectly safe for adults could pose many dangers to a child.
Children have trouble identifying the source of a sound, have a narrower field of vision and don’t understand perspective, increasing the likelihood they’ll put themselves in danger, Jacobsen said. “We’re not born at birth with all that stuff hooked up,” he said.
That puts the burden on transportation engineers. “We cannot adapt children to traffic,” he said. “Society needs to adapt traffic to the needs of children.”
Tags: peter jacobsen, roundabouts, safety, vision zero, visiting scholar
Video explores suburban walking and biking
Think people who live in suburban developments don't walk and bike? They do, particularly if the development is well-connected. University of Oregon assistant professor Nico Larco has shown this with his OTREC projects.
He explains some of the work himself in this video.
Tags: bicycling, nico larco, overlooked density, overlooked destinations, suburbia, walking
OTREC welcomes transportation professionals from China
On Monday, OTREC faculty and students met with transportation scholars and practitioners from China. Professor Haixiao Pan from Tongji University in Shanghai presented his research on transit-oriented development titled "From TOD to 5D in a Fast Growth City with High Density." His look at Chinese cities indicates that levels of walking and bicycling are key to reducing vehicle miles traveled, perhaps even more so than transit use.
Liyuan Gong, deputy director of the Jinan Public Transport Development Institute, and Wenhong Wang, department head of the Beijing Urban Engineering Design and Research Institute Co., gave overviews of bus rapid transit systems in several Chinese cities.
Professor Connie Ozawa, director of the School of Urban Studies and Planning, welcomed the group to Portland State University. OTREC Director Jennifer Dill presented her research on travel behavior of TOD residents and John Gliebe, OTREC researcher and urban studies assistant professor, presented on dynamic travel demand modeling. Arlie Adkins, an urban studies doctoral student, presented "Getting the Parking Right for Suburban TODs."
The forum gave students and faculty opportunities to exchange ideas about integrating transportation and land use in China and the United States. In both countries, some transit-oriented developments have fallen short of transit-use goals for similar reasons, such as convenience and time. Reliability of transit service often plays a greater role in determining ridership than than cost. Adkins and fellow doctoral student Hongwei Dong also took the group on a tour of transit-oriented developments in the Portland area.
Participants included Sun Yonghai, department head and senior engineer at Shenzen Urban Planning and Research Centre; Li Zexin, associate professor at the College of Architecture and Urban Planning at Chongqing University; Jian Haiyun, deputy director of the Kunming Urban Planning and Design Institute; Ding Ming, chief engineer of the Xiamen Urban Planning and Design Institute; and Yang Fan, director of the City Construction Leaders Training Center at the College of Architecture and Urban Planning. The Energy Foundation, in part, sponsored the group.
Tags: arlie adkins, china, connie ozawa, haixiao pan, jennifer dill, john gliebe, transit-oriented development
Archives
Categories
Filter By University
- Portland State University
- University of Oregon
- Oregon State University
- Oregon Institute of Technology
OTREC's Most Used Tags
active transportation alex bigazzi bicycle bicycle infrastructure bicycling chris monsere cutc design e-bikes electric vehicles emissions hau hagedorn hiring ibpi institute of transportation engineers jennifer dill john macarthur karen dixon kelly clifton livability livemove marc schlossberg metro miguel figliozzi nico larco nitc oregon department of transportation oregon institute of technology oregon transportation summit otrec portland state university proposals psu public transportation region x research rfp rita robert bertini step sustainable cities initiative transit transportation modeling transportation research board trb trimet university of oregon university of utah visiting scholars program walking