News Tagged: Bicycle
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Portland State University takes Seattle bike symposium by storm
Portland, Oregon is known for being a bike city, even called America's Best Bike City by Bicycling Magazine, so it's no surprise at all that Portland State University is full of bike enthusiasts.
Tags: active transportation, bicycle, bicycle infrastructure, bicycling, livability, otrec, portland state university
Visiting scholar Ralph Buehler offers insight into explaining mode shares
What makes Americans’ travel behaviors so different from that of their West European counterparts? Longer trip distances? Higher rates of licenses and auto-ownership? A culture and economy that depends on the automobile industry? According to visiting scholar Ralph Buehler, none of these explain the differences in mode splits.
In partnership with Students in Transportation Engineering and Planning (STEP), Portland State University recently hosted visiting scholar Ralph Buehler at the Friday Transportation Seminar series. Dr. Buehler traveled west from Washington, D.C. where he is an Assistant Professor in Urban Affairs and Planning at Virginia Tech’s Metropolitan Institute. Dr. Beuhler’s research and expertise is in multimodal planning and travel behaviors, with a focus on Western Europe and North America.
Click here to view the webcast.
Dr. Buehler’s presentation, titled “Making Urban Transport Sustainable: Comparison of Germany and the US,” poked holes in many of the common theories explaining why Americans are more likely to use their cars for all their travel needs. Instead, he noted that, “transport policies have to explain the difference [in mode shares] over time, including the changes that have happened in Germany and those that have not happened in the US. ” His research has led him to identify four major policy areas that have contributed to Germany’s success in shifting mode shares:
Tags: bicycle, bicycle infrastructure, bicycling, mode shares, otrec, psu, visiting scholar
Graduate students win national planning award
Six graduate students from the Master of Urban and Regional Planning program at Portland State University have been awarded a national prize by the American Planning Association.
The research team, working under the name Celilo Planning Studio, won the 2013 APA student award for Application of the Planning Process.
Team members Danielle Fuchs, Michael Ahillen, Ellen Dorsey, Chloe Ritter, Sara Morrissey and Sarah Bronstein were honored for excellence in the way they carried out their project plan.
Ritter, Morrissey and Bronstein accepted the award on behalf of the group at the APA national conference this month in Chicago.
“We were very excited to attend APA and receive the award,” said Morrissey, the team’s communications director. “The conference is great to learn about what other cities are working on and get a feel of what’s going on.”
Tags: bicycle, bicycle infrastructure, bicycling, kelly clifton, oregon department of transportation, otrec
Metro grant will assist OTREC researcher in evaluating the use of e-bikes
OTREC research associate John MacArthur, in partnership with Drive Oregon, has been awarded a grant from Metro.
The grant is part of a $2.1 million effort by Metro to improve air quality and community health.
With the Metro grant, Drive Oregon and MacArthur plan to conduct a study of consumer perception and use of electric bicycles, pedal-bikes that provide extra propulsion from a rechargeable battery.
The idea is to see whether having the use of an e-bike will persuade non-bicycle-commuters to use a bike for the “first and last mile” of their daily commute; for example, to get from their workplace to the nearest MAX light rail station.
The e-bikes provided in the study will be foldable for convenient carrying onto the train. Ultimately, the partners of this study hope to increase the percentage of people who commute by bicycle and light rail, thus contributing to overall community health by reducing automobile emissions.
Tags: bicycle, bicycling, drive oregon, electric vehicles, emissions, livability, metro, otrec
OTREC welcomes Research Associate Krista Nordback
OTREC extends a warm welcome to Research Associate Krista Nordback, Ph.D., P.E., the newest member of the team. She just moved to Portland, Oregon after finishing up her Ph.D. in Denver, Colorado, to continue working on her favorite research focus: urban bicycle safety.
Nordback has been riding bikes since before she was old enough to remember. Together with her husband, Kurt, she continues to enjoy it as a form of both recreation and transportation. When the pair moved to Portland in February of this year, one of their first actions was to bike the Springwater Corridor, the Portland metro area’s 21-mile bike trail, all the way from Portland to Boring on their semi-recumbent tandem.
As a bicycle commuter, safety is one of Nordback’s top priorities, and it’s also the primary goal of her civil engineering research. In her PhD thesis, “Estimating Annual Average Daily Bicyclists and Analyzing Cyclist Safety at Urban Intersections,” she came up with methods for determining the average number of cyclists passing through a given intersection on a daily basis. In order to increase bicycle safety measures in urban areas, one of the first steps is simple yet essential: count the bikes. Having an understanding of the numbers of bicycles that traffic through an area is the starting point for coming up with effective safety measures. Cars have been counted for decades in virtually every city in America, via automated technology such as induction loops. It’s time, Nordback says, to apply that same universal precision to counting bikes.
Tags: bicycle, bicycle infrastructure, bicycle safety, bicycling, krista nordback, otrec
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