News Tagged: Bicycling
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Does driving drop when cycling spikes? TRB 2014
Note: In advance of the Transportation Research Board's annual meeting, the biggest forum on the transportation research calendar, OTREC.us is profiling some of the researchers who will present their work.
The bicycle counts suggested that, on Bike to Work Day, more people did bike to work. But did fewer people drive?
OTREC staff researcher Krista Nordback took up the issue and will present her findings Monday, Jan. 13 at the Transportation Research Board’s annual meeting in Washington, D.C.
The bike count data from sites across Boulder, Colo., certainly impressed Nordback. “Bike to Work Day has this huge spike,” she said. “The bike counts double at a lot of the count sites.
“Wouldn’t it be cool if we could see something similar with the motor vehicle count data?”
In a twist that might only happen in Boulder, with its ample bike counters, Nordback had a harder time tracking down the motor vehicle counts. She lucked out, finding that the city’s red-light cameras had been counting cars alongside their primary job of catching red-light runners.
Those motor vehicle counts showed a consistent drop on Bike-to-Work days compared with average workdays in June and July. It was a small drop, but even finding that was unprecedented: no studies had documented a statistically significant drop in motor vehicle counts during any bike-to-work event.
Tags: bicycle counting, bicycling, bike to work day, krista nordback, transportation research board
Researchers interpret clandestine walking paths
Tags: active transportation, bicycling, nico larco, otrec, university of oregon, walking
PSU offers transportation study abroad opportunity in the Netherlands
Tags: bicycle infrastructure, bicycling, delft, jesse boudart, netherlands, peter koonce, portland state university, robert bertini
Bridges to Baccalaureate student works on Green Lane Project
A student participating in the Portland Bridges to Baccalaureate program completed a summer internship doing research for OTREC this year.
Yasmina Green, a 34 year old non-traditional student attending Portland Community College, was intrigued when she heard about the Bridges program. Green, who eventually hopes to get a master’s in public health at PSU, took advantage of the opportunity to secure a summer internship working in a public health-related field.
“I was a bit confused as to where I was going to go,” Green said. “Public health is so broad. The Green Lane project was something that kind of piqued my interest. I was a bike commuter.”
The Green Lane Project, a project of People For Bikes, has selected six cities to serve as pilot sites for new designs and approaches to creating comfortable, separated bike routes. OTREC researchers are involved in assessing the safety, operations, economic effects, user experience and perceptions of the new protected bikeways.
Tags: bicycle, bicycling, bike lanes, green lane project, people for bikes, psu
‘Straphanger’ author gives his take on transit systems at Oregon Transportation Summit
At age 8, Taras Grescoe decided that his Vancouver, B.C., residential street had too many cars chugging past. So he removed them.
“I completely redesigned our city block and modeled with Monopoly hotels what it would look like without cars,” Grescoe said. “I was this 8-year-old urban planning geek in the making.”
While his career took a different path, those early transportation experiences shaped a worldview Grescoe outlines in his latest book, “Straphanger.” Grescoe will present his observations as the keynote speaker for the Oregon Transportation Summit Sept. 16.
Register for the summit through the following link:
http://theotrec.org/events/subpage/OTS/page1
The author of nonfiction essays and books including “Bottomfeeder: How to Eat Ethically in a World of Vanishing Seafood” Grescoe is a frequent contributor to the New York Times, the Independent and National Geographic Traveler and has written for Gourmet, Salon and Wired.
If moving from a walkable neighborhood in Toronto to a car-dominated one in Vancouver first awakened Grescoe to how transportation shapes our cities, his car-free travels to cities across the world cement the thesis of “Straphanger”: Cars nearly killed our greatest cities but transit can help bring them back.
Grescoe details the loss of urban public space as cities that formed around streetcars and transit lines gradually grew to serve automobiles. “The car, especially in the postwar years, was the thing that really turned North American cities,” he said. “Every time you get in a car, you are turning your back on the public realm.
“You subtly undermine the quality of life in the city when you opt for private transportation.”
Tags: bicycling, bottomfeeder, emissions, montreal, oregon transportation summit, straphanger, taras grescoe, transit, walking
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