News Tagged: Transit
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OTREC researchers develop livability metrics for public transit
The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development has identified some “livability principles” which include healthy, safe and walkable neighborhoods and safe, reliable and economical transportation choices.
Transit agencies and local governments routinely use metrics to evaluate the performance of transit systems, but a uniform standard of transit data collection does not exist outside of the reporting requirements of the National Transit Database (NTD). Because of the types of data collected for the NTD, the focus of performance measurements is often on ridership and financial performance, leaving aside the question of livability.
In a new project sponsored by OTREC, Principal Investigator Marc Schlossberg, associate professor in the department of planning, public policy and management at the University of Oregon, along with co-investigators Jennifer Dill of Portland State University and Nico Larco, also of the University of Oregon, set out to create a set of tested and refined performance indicators that transit agencies across the nation can use to evaluate and improve their system performance in relation to livability goals.
Tags: bus, livability, pedshed, performance metrics, transit, trimet
OTREC research looks into bus safety performance monitoring and analysis
Tags: bus, metrics, otrec, performance, psu, safety, strathman, transit, trimet
‘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
OTREC research looks into effects of traffic signal optimization
An OTREC project recently took an in-depth look at the travel-time and health-related effects of a new implementation of a state of the art adaptive traffic system.
Southeast Powell Boulevard is a multimodal urban corridor connecting highway US-26 through Portland, Oregon. The corridor is highly congested during morning and evening peak traffic hours. In October 2011, an adaptive traffic system called SCATS was deployed.
The primary function of SCATS, or Sydney Coordinated Adaptive Traffic System, is to mitigate traffic congestion. Using sensors (usually inductive loops) at each traffic signal, the system tries to find the best cycle time and phasing along the corridor as traffic demand patterns change.
In this integrated multimodal study, OTREC researchers looked at the corridor’s traffic speed and transit reliability, before and after the implementation of SCATS. In addition, a novel contribution of this study was to study the link between signal timing and air quality.
Tags: congestion, emissions, figliozzi, mitigation, otrec, psu, scats, transit, trimet, tsp
Seminar explores bicycle-and-transit trips
OTREC at Portland State University welcomed Eva Heinen of the University of Groningen, The Netherlands, for a special seminar June 18. Around 40 people attended the presentation, held at the Intelligent Transportation Systems Laboratory and titled “Cycling in the Netherlands and Multi-Modality.”
Eva Heinen is assistant professor of infrastructure planning and mobility at the Department of Spatial Planning and Environment, Faculty of Spatial Sciences, University of Groningen. She earned a Ph.D. from Delft University of Technology in 2011 focusing on bicycle commuting.
Many people in Groningen and The Netherlands as a whole combine transit and bicycling for trips. A typical configuration involves cycling from home to a train station and then renting another bicycle to reach the final destination, Heinen said.
Few people take bicycles on transit, Heinen said, and buses don’t offer bike racks or other accommodations. Folding bikes, whose compact size allows for portability, are one exception, Heinen said. Electric-assist bikes are also popular, particularly with older people.
Tags: bicycling, e-bikes, eva heinen, groningen, multimodal, seminar, the netherlands, transit
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