Please read the RFP carefully as it contains three different grant opportunities:

1. General RFP. Up to $1,000,000 will be awarded to research, education and technology transfer projects that support NITC’s theme. Another General RFP will be released early 2014.
2. Small starts. Up to $60,000 will be awarded to small research development endeavors.
3. Pooled-fund. Up to $180,000 will be awarded to projects specifically responding to local agency pooled-fund research statements. A separate RFP will be released this Fall.

Successful research proposals will combine advanced research with applied projects that fit the NITC theme, linking to articulated USDOT priorities specifically livability, environmental sustainability and safety. Successful education proposals will enhance, develop, or promote undergraduate or graduate transportation education, with sustained outcomes or support continued education for practitioners. Technology transfer proposals should support the application of transportation research to practice, including dissemination of research results, continuing education, and training. For more information, go to: otrec.us/for_researchers/rfp

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:

1. Policies that restrict car use

2. Policies that improve public transportation

3. Policies that promote bicycling

4. An integration of land use and transportation planning

The seminar was widely attended by students and members of Portland’s transportation planning industry. The conversation continued over a lunch hosted by OTREC, where students and faculty had a chance to engage Buehler in some of their own research findings.

The education resumed in the afternoon, when Portland Bureau of Transportation engineer and bike planner Peter Koonce, along with STEP’s Kirk Paulsen, led Dr. Buehler on a whirlwind bicycle tour of Portland’s best multimodal infrastructure. A few highlights of the ride included the cycle track along Moody Avenue, recent improvements on the I-84 overcrossing at 12^th avenue aimed at improving bike and freight movements, neighborhood greenways, bike/ped signals, and bike counters installed along the bridges. The route, seen here, also offered an opportunity to evaluate intersections where Portland could do better, perhaps taking a page from our German counterparts.

According to Tremoulet, this research began when the Oregon Department of Transportation “sought to understand and document the successful human relocation of homeless families from a longstanding homeless community at the Baldock Rest Area near Wilsonville, OR.” The project expanded to a national scope, resulting in a best practices guide and a case study of the Baldock Restoration Project.  After a chance meeting between Tremoulet and FHWA community planner Sharlene Reed at a workshop last year, an idea for a webinar on the topic took shape. According to the FHWA website, the webinar is designed “to highlight practical approaches for holistically addressing the challenges posed by transient populations residing on or adjacent to public land and transportation facilities.”

More information and registration for the webinar are at https://www.nhi.fhwa.dot.gov/resources/webconference/web_conf_learner_reg.aspx?webconfid=26027

Goddard presented her paper, "Are Bicycling and Walking 'Cool'?: Adolescent Attitutes About Active Travel," in the public health and urban studies session. She'll offer an in-depth take on the same topic at noon May 24 for OTREC's Friday transportation seminar. Click here for more information.

Bell's paper, "Evaluation of Smart Phone Weight-Mile Truck Data for Supporting Freight Modeling, Performance Measures and Planning," details some of her work with civil engineering associate professor Miguel Figliozzi. Click here to download a version of the paper.

Thompson's poster was "A Study of Bicycle-Signal Compliance Employing Video Footage;" Singleton's poster was "A Theory of Travel Decision-Making: Applications for Active Travel;" Smith's was "The Effects of Mode Choice on Subjective Well-Being: Evidence from Portland, Oregon."

The symposium, which organizers expect to become an annual event, featured more than 100 panel presentations and 115 research posters.

These connective plates have come to the attention of the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA), because in 2007 the collapse of the Interstate-35W Bridge in Minneapolis was the result of a failed gusset plate.

After the collapse, which killed 13 people and injured 145, the FHWA issued a set of guidelines for load rating — or determining the weight-bearing capacity — of gusset plates.

Historically, only bridge truss members were considered for load rating during safety inspections. Gusset plates were thought to be reliable based on conservative assumptions employed during their design.

For more details, click here to download the final report or visit the project page.

Roughly 20,000 steel bridges in the United States are classified as non-load-path-redundant, or fracture critical, bridges. This means that the failure of a single truss member or connection could lead to collapse.

The problem, says the project's lead investigator Christopher Higgins, happens when a plate goes out of plane. It’s supposed to be perfectly flat, but with too much load put on it, it can develop a bifurcation and go from stable to unstable.

“It’s like stepping on an aluminum can,” Higgins said. “If you have a perfect aluminum can, you can step on it and it can carry a lot of load, but if there is an imperfection -- like if you’ve pressed on it with your thumb -- it will buckle at a very low load.”

The various methods for evaluating gusset plate buckling capacity all have room for improvement. They’re generally based around a set of rule-of-thumb guidelines developed in the 1950s, and more refined techniques are desirable for conducting high-fidelity capacity evaluations on existing bridge connections.

Inclusion of gusset plate connections in load ratings poses a significant challenge to bridge owners. One bridge can have hundreds of gusset plate connections, each in a different position with different forces acting on it. It would take specialized methods to evaluate the capacity of each individual connection.

Higgins and co-investigators Peter Dusicka and Michael Scott set out to develop some of these methods, and to assess the effectiveness of the current guidelines using finite element analysis.

In this research, the experimental work was conducted at Oregon State University under the direction of Christopher Higgins, and the finite element analysis studies were conducted at Portland State University under the direction of Peter Dusika.

The research team conducted six large-scale experiments with a laboratory setup intended, by reinforcing the other bridge elements, to make sure failure occurred in the gusset plates.

They tested the contribution of factors like out-of-plane imperfection and plate thickness to predict the plate’s buckling capacity, then compared their experimental results to existing load-rating techniques and the FHWA Guide to determine their effectiveness.

Their experimental setup was inspired by connection U10 from the I-35W Bridge in Minnesota, shown in the image. This is the connection reported to have failed and which prompted the professional community’s interest in gusset plate performance and this research program.

Conceived as part of the curriculum for the Oregon Leadership in Sustainability (OLIS) program at U of O, the course, titled Sustainable Transportation, will be a permanent part of the OLIS class roster and will be open to all graduate students at the university.

The class this winter, led by instructors Ann Scheerer and Larisa Varela, taught applied research in a real-world setting. Students worked on planning projects for the university and for its home community, the City of Eugene, Ore.

On March 20, 2013, U of O's Transportation and Livability Student Group, LiveMove, hosted a public event where students were invited to present their research and interested community members were invited to attend.

The day of the presentations in Eugene was exciting; the “icing on the cake” for Scheerer. Marc Schlossberg, OTREC/NITC executive committee member at U of O and faculty advisor for LiveMove, was there, and so were some professors from the planning department, staff from the sustainability office, and quite a few local transportation advocates.

Scheerer, a PhD candidate at the University of Colorado in Denver, came to Oregon to teach the course in January. Her background is in sustainable urban infrastructure, and her passion is to do applied research with students.

At the beginning of the course, students were given the opportunity to choose from a list of possible topics for their research. The six topics were: Reduction in Eugene Gas & Diesel Consumption, Impacts of Bicycling on the Eugene Economy, Eugene Development Requirements for Parking, University of Oregon Transportation Strategies and Goals, Bike Sharing Expansion Feasibility Study, and Pay-As-You-Drive Car Insurance.

U of O professor Vicki Elmer had made contacts with the university, the City of Eugene and the Lane Transit District to establish these research topics.

“Once the general topic was identified through Vicki, we met at the outset with the client to determine the exact scope of the work. It had to be something that could be done in ten weeks,” said Scheerer. “The bike sharing in Eugene, and doing the bike economy study, these were things that these agencies had on their list to check out, but they didn’t have the resources to take on this research. So it was kind of a win-win. The students did the research free of charge. Part of our training was to get the students to think about how to work with clients. We took a practical business approach.”

Clay Stillwell, a graduate student at UO, took the class and worked on the parking project which was eventually titled “Multi-family Residential Parking Requirements in the University Neighborhood.” He said that for him, the strongest feature of the class was how it let him connect with the people he'd be doing research for. "It was a chance for us to interface with our clients. The city wanted something usable, and we met with them... it was definitely more connected," Stillwell said.

Kacey Messier, who also took the class, agrees. "The biggest takeaway was the hands-on experience," she said, adding that the public presentations were also a positive experience. 

The project Messier was a part of, "Bikes Mean Business to the Silicon Shire," went over so well that at the end of the presentation they were asked if they wanted to present their data to a larger audience of city officials in Eugene.

All of the projects were aimed at creating sustainable urban infrastructures, in line with Oregon's larger initiative of reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

“The Sustainability office at U of O has a Climate Action Plan, and the projects we pursued relate very much back to that plan,” said Scheerer.

The community organizations in Eugene that engaged with the students are: City of Eugene (Transportation Planning, Economic and Community Development, Building and Development); Lane Transit District Point2Point Program; Eugene Safe Routes to School; UO LiveMove; UO Bike Program, and the UO Sustainability Office (responsible for UO Climate Planning).

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.”

Morrissey and other members of the planning team have OTREC connections. She and Chloe Ritter worked with PSU professor Kelly Clifton on a consumer spending project, with a focus on cyclists and pedestrians. Sarah Bronstein has also worked on transportation research with Clifton, sponsored by Active Living Research.

The winning project, “Connect Cascade Locks: A Recreational Trails Plan for Economic Development,” was conceived to increase the economic prospects of a small Oregon town, Cascade Locks, through a regionally integrated recreational trails network. The students worked in partnership with the Port of Cascade Locks.

While in progress, the project received attention from BikePortland, OregonLive, Hood River News and the Portland State University Vanguard.

The students surveyed more than 1,200 outdoor recreationists about their use of trails in the Columbia River Gorge, and 51 members of the Cascade Locks community about their ideas and concerns for recreational tourism and economic development.

Over a five-month period, they held local workshops and an open house in Cascade Locks, put together case studies about trail-based tourism in six other cities, mapped out the existing and planned trails in the area, studied past planning efforts, researched opportunities for partnerships with regional and state organizations, interviewed business owners and potential trail users, and came up with a comprehensive final plan.

The APA’s awards criteria state that winning projects must be innovative, transferable, comprehensive, outstanding in analysis and presentation, and effectively carried out. It was the research team's outstanding implementation of the planning process that led to the Cascade Locks project being selected for the award.

Their plan to help Cascade Locks connect the trail network, online here, has been adopted by the city's Planning Commission, the City Council, and the local Tourism Committee.

ODOT is currently working on making a connection to link the Historic Columbia River Highway State Trail. When the trails are fully connected, says Morrissey, “You’ll be able to ride from Troutdale to Cascade Locks without getting on I-84.”

The new ODOT trail was already in the works before Celilo started their plan, but, says ODOT coordinator Kristen Stallman, the planning team's research contributed to the trail's positive reception by members of the Cascade Locks community. 

There will be an opening celebration Sept. 14-15 in Cascade Locks, to celebrate the completion of the ODOT trail.

This August, the annual Policymaker’s Ride — an invite-only bike event aimed at finding room for improvement in the Portland area’s bicycling infrastructure — will be held in the Gorge, along the Historic Columbia River Highway to Cascade Locks.

Two OTREC universities sent students to attend, and OTREC staff member Jon Makler attended the Intelligent Cities "Unconference," which was held on Wednesday, April 17.

In addition to Portland State University graduate student research group Celillo Planning Studio, which won the APA student award for Application of the Planning Process, there were other PSU students who attended just to soak up the conference. Two students from the University of Oregon also attended and created a research poster for the conference.

This year's APA gave some focus to transportation. In addition to Monday, April 15 being themed "Transportation Day: Transforming Cities Through Transportation," there were also a handful of other transportation events including workshops titled "Sustainability Implications for Urban Transportation" and "Transportation Planning in a Changing Climate."

Makler, OTREC’s Education and Technology Transfer Program Manager, said that one of this year's highlights for him was the Unconference: a facilitated, participant-driven meeting which encouraged attendees to explore the ideas they were most interested in talking about. OTREC was one of about 25 organizations to take part in the Unconference.

After a welcome and orientation session, the meeting kicked off with a series of “Ignite Talks,” which were similar to Ted Talks: short, inspiring speeches designed to provoke thought about various topics.

Then the roomful of about 40 people collaborated to decide what to talk about that day. After voting on ten topics, they split up into groups and commenced sharing ideas.

“The best part of coming to any conference, for most people, is getting to talk with their colleagues,” Makler said. “Instead of going to an hour-long presentation followed by a Q & A, we could turn to each other and say, ‘Ok, what are your big ideas?’”

The ideas this year were not shy of being big. Makler said that the topics discussed at the Unconference were all incredibly interesting: one group considered the option of “crowdsourcing” urban projects, stemming from the success of a Kickstarter campaign to build a statue of Robocop in Detroit.

Another group, including representatives from "Textizen," talked about creating an open civic dialogue using text messaging technology.

The morning session that Makler joined put forth a word of caution about such exciting possibilities, exploring the problem of tech equity. The use of new technology in planning, which offers to include members of the public in a way they've never been included before, can also be exclusive. Every resident may not have access to high-speed Internet connections and large screens for displaying maps, PDF's and other materials that planners routinely share online.

Everyone had a different perspective on the problem of tech equity, which Makler said contributed to an exciting discussion. The tables were covered in large white sheets of butcher paper, and many of the participants were taking notes on it; so when one group vacated an area, the next group could see hints of what they'd been talking about.

The sessions were run democratically, a hallmark of the Unconference or “Open Meeting” format, which invites everyone to contribute to the conversation. 

Selected data from the Portland Oregon Regional Transportation Archive Listing (PORTAL) will be part of a new national data sharing platform.

The US Department of Transportation has released the first version of this platform, called the Research Data Exchange, which collects and publishes archived and real-time transportation data from multiple sources.

In the language of their home page, the Research Data Exchange (called the RDE for short) was primarily developed to “support the development, testing, and demonstration of multi-modal transportation mobility applications being pursued under the USDOT ITS Dynamic Mobility Applications (DMA) Program and other connected vehicle research activities.”

In other words, USDOT created this database so they could use it. But – in the spirit of collaboration common to those with an interest in collecting and managing vast amounts of information – they’re sharing it.

The RDE is free and open to the public. Registered users can make comments and ask questions about the content, and recognized contributors are able to submit new research projects. It is hoped that the ongoing growth of the database will contribute to its usefulness for everyone involved.

As of now, there are nine data environments in the RDE, and one of them is from PORTAL.

Two months of freeway and arterial data from Portland, Ore, taken from PORTAL, was chosen for inclusion. The Portland region was one of three regions in the US to be selected, along with Seattle, and Pasadena, Calif.

PORTAL is a robust archive containing transportation data for the Portland-Vancouver metropolitan region. It was developed at Portland State University and supported in part by grants from OTREC.

In order to create a “system of systems” of interlocking data environments, USDOT intends to acquire data for the RDE from multiple archives like PORTAL.

All data included is first assessed for quality, then thoroughly catalogued and described in metadata for easy searchability.

In later releases of the RDE, as the platform becomes more thoroughly developed, there are plans to include a Data Forum. Contributors of data will then have the right to go in and respond to content in the Forum that identifies anomalies, inconsistencies or other potential errors in the use or application of their contributed materials.

In this way, researchers working in similar fields could have real-time conversations in which they update their own and each other’s work, finding errors and connecting the missing information.

The PORTAL archive was put together by students and faculty in the Intelligent Transportation Systems Laboratory, under the guidance of PSU professors Kristin Tufte and Chris Monsere. It was founded by PSU professor Robert Bertini, who started the archive in 2004, and developed in close cooperation with OTREC, the Oregon Department of Transportation, Metro, the City of Portland, TriMet, the Southwest Washington Regional Transportation Council and other regional transportation partners.

In addition to OTREC funding, work on PORTAL is supported by grants from Metro and by the Southwest Washingtion Regional Transportation Council , the National Science Foundation, and the Federal Highway Administration.

The RDE can be found online here.

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.

30 e-bikes will be loaned to 180 employees of Kaiser Permanente, at three designated work locations. Each participant will have the free use of an e-bike for one month, bookended by surveys about their expectations and perceptions of the experience.

MacArthur is conducting some overlapping research into e-bike use in a related OTREC project, “Evaluation of Electric Bike Use in Portland Metro Region.” This research explores the potential new market segments for e-bikes and the economic, operational, safety, and transportation issues surrounding the use of this alternative bicycle.

Drive Oregon’s mission is to promote, support, and grow the electric vehicle industry in Oregon. As part of this mission they try to keep people informed about electric vehicle alternatives. Metro, the elected regional government for the Portland metropolitan area, has an ongoing commitment to providing clean air, clean water, and good transportation choices for residents of Multnomah, Washington, and Clackamas counties.

Currently there is a relatively high perentage of bicycle commuters, compared to drivers, in the Portland area. According to MacArthur, there has been some discussion among bicycle proponents as to whether that percentage has reached a plateau.

Certain demographics, including senior citizens and those with physical disabilities, might help “fill in the gap” of the bicycle mode share, if they considered the use of e-bikes a viable alternative to cars. Similarly, people who are physically able to ride a bicycle comfortably for short distances may shy away from commuting to work on a daily basis, if their commute is a longer distance than they feel able to tackle. The extra boost of battery-powered assistance may help convince these reluctant commuters to take the final step, and go by bike.