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Report: Oregon’s bridges more vulnerable to earthquakes than expected
It’s not shocking that bridges built without thought to earthquakes wouldn’t make it through a big quake unharmed. More surprising, however, is how much damage even a relatively small earthquake would cause to Oregon’s bridges.
In an exhaustive OTREC project, researcher Peter Dusicka looked at the most common bridge types in the Oregon highway system. Those bridges weren’t just fragile, he found—they were even more fragile than other researchers and technical guidelines had suggested.
Dusicka published his preliminary findings in a draft report last year. The final report, “Bridge Damage Models for Seismic Risk Assessment of Oregon Highway Network,” is out now. Click here to download.
Most Oregon highway bridges were built before the 1980s, when designers started to consider seismic activity. Dusicka set out to see what would happen to the most common bridge type, continuous concrete multi-beam or girder, during quakes of varying degrees.
Tags: bridge damage state model, bridge failure, bridges, cascadia subduction zone, fragility curves, hazus, opensees, oregon department of transportation, peter dusicka, seismic risk assessment, transportation modeling
Campus visits kick off new NITC program
Staff from OTREC at Portland State University toured three partner campuses to prepare for the first round of projects under the National Institute for Transportation and Communities program, or NITC. Portland State, the University of Oregon, Oregon Institute of Technology and the University of Utah teamed up for the program, funded with a $3.5 million grant from the U.S. Department of Transportation.
The University of Utah was the first to receive a visit, March 19-20, in Salt Lake City. There, NITC executive committee member Keith Bartholomew hosted tours and meetings. Staff met with student representatives from various disciplines and with potential researchers from across campus before meeting potential community partners at the Utah Transit Authority offices. OTREC finance and communications staff members met with their University of Utah counterparts.
The meetings marked the first connection for much of the Utah faculty and OTREC staff. While the University of Oregon and Oregon Tech were already partners under the original OTREC grant, the NITC program marks Portland State and Utah’s first formal collaboration under the federal University Transportation Centers program.
Tags: jennifer dill, keith bartholomew, marc schlossberg, national institute for transportation and communities, nitc, oregon institute of technology, oregon renewable energy center, roger lindgren, salt lake city, trax, university of oregon, university of utah, university transportation center
China visit shows massive shift to autos
For rapid transportation mode-share changes, it’s hard to beat Kunming, China, where OTREC Director Jennifer Dill is visiting this week. In recent years, car and transit trips have quadrupled. Bicycling, which used to account for more than half of trips, now makes up less than a quarter.
Dill is with a team visiting Kunming as part of the PSU-China Innovations in Urbanization program.The visit is led by professor Connie Ozawa, director of Portland State University's Nohad A. Toulan School of Urban Studies & Planning (TSUSP), and includes: professor Yiping Fang; practitioner-in-residence Gill Kelley, former planning director of the city of Portland; Dean Marriott, city of Portland’s director of environmental services; and Jianhong Ye, a post-doctorate fellow at TSUSP.
The team participated in a workshop with over 50 planners from the region, sharing information on how Portland plans for sustainability. The visit is hosted by the Energy Foundation and the city of Kunming.
Tags: bicycle infrastructure, bicycling, china, city of portland, connie ozawa, cycle tracks, dean marriott, gil kelly, jennifer dill, jianhong ye, kunming, portland, urban planning, yiping fang
Streets as places to stop and stay: lessons from Europe
While the public street system makes up a huge portion of our public space, streets don’t contribute less to public life than they could, Denver Igarta of the Portland Bureau of Transportation told an OTREC seminar April 12 in Portland.
That’s not the case in Europe, said Igarta, a multimodal urban planner and a principal author of the Portland Bicycle Plan. He spent last November on a fellowship in Europe sponsored by the German Marshall Fund, with a week each in Munich, Rotterdam, Copenhagen and Malmö.
While street design manuals in the United States largely consider how directly and smoothly a street moves people along their route and to a destination, many European streets serve another official function, Igarta said: they encourage people to stay and live their public lives. European urban streets fill some of the same roles as American urban parks: attractive places to spend time.
This especially holds for small neighborhood streets, Igarta said, where moving traffic is secondary to fostering public life.
Igarta demonstrated the type of planning that can create livable streets with a comparison between German and American standards. Under Germany’s national street-construction manual, designers first consider whether the street’s highest emphasis should be on moving traffic, creating an attractive public place or parking. Other considerations then follow, Igarta said, including how wide to make the street.
Tags: denver igarta, german marshall fund, livable communities, livable streets, portland bicycle plan, portland bureau of transportation, urban planning
Report: For transportation department fleet decisions, simpler may be better
Although specialized equipment and vehicles make up a large portion of state transportation budgets, an OTREC research report found little consistency in how states decide to replace this equipment.
Researchers David Kim and David Porter of Oregon State University surveyed 25 state departments of transportation to determine how they made replacement decisions. Nearly all consider the age of the vehicle or piece of equipment, with many considering how much use it gets.
Around half use thresholds, such as number of miles or months in service, to identify candidates for replacement. Some consider the equipment’s repair cost or operating cost, while others rely on physical inspections. None explicitly considers greenhouse gas emissions or other environmental concerns in its replacement criteria.
Given the huge range of approaches, Kim and Porter wondered if modeling could lead to better decision-making. They ran various models against the simple approach of using equipment age as a threshold value.
As it turns out, the simple approach isn’t too bad. In fact, it does better than one complicated mathematical model and about the same as a second model.
Click here to learn more about the project and download the report.
That may seem puzzling, but Kim said he wasn’t surprised. Models need good data to produce good results and most states don’t collect and process enough data to feed the most complex models.
Tags: david kim, david porter, fleet replacement, fleet vehicles, fleets, oregon department of transportation, transportation modeling, vehicle fleets
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