News: Education
Internships Win-Win for Students and Employers Alike
Internships are vital to connecting students with real-world practitioners and applying what they learn in the classroom. For student Stefan Bussey, this real-world experience was gained through working with the Signals, Street Lighting, and ITS Division at the Portland Bureau of Transportation. His assignment during his internship was to evaluate the pedestrian delay at 47 pedestrian crosswalk signals (also known as half-signals) across the city of Portland.
Tags: iss, students, workforce development
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
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 researcher wins safety award
Chris Monsere, an assistant professor in Portland State University's Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, received the "Engineering Education Advocate" award at the Oregon Transportation Safety Awards luncheon in Salem. The award was presented as part of the annual Oregon Transportation Safety Conference, sponsored by the Alliance for Community Traffic Safety and the Oregon Department of Transportation, or ODOT.
The award recognizes Monsere's teaching, research and service activities that have been geared toward improving the safety of Oregon's transportation system. Monsere has been the primary investigator on 11 OTREC projects, many of them related to safety. He's currently evaluating bike boxes designed to improve safety for cyclists. His other projects have focused on building a knowledge-based clearinghouse of safety-related data in Oregon and evaluating the effectiveness of ODOT's Safety Investment Program.
Tags: alliance for community traffic safety, bike boxes, chris monsere, odot, oregon transportation safety conference
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