News Tagged: Bicycling
18 Entries Tagged
Visiting scholar: bike routes as stressful as their weakest link
When Peter Furth returned from a sabbatical in the Netherlands inspired to make his home country as bike-friendly, he knew he’d encounter bicycle skeptics. What surprised him was the resistance he got from bicycle supporters.
Furth , a professor at Northeastern University and an OTREC visiting scholar, shared some of his research on low-stress bicycle networks in a talk May 4 at Portland State University. Click here for more information.
Even in recent years, bicycling advocacy organizations were dominated by followers John Forester’s concept of “vehicular cycling,” Furth said, and opposed to separated bicycle facilities. Cyclists should use the road, and be treated, like any other vehicle operators, according to this reasoning.
“People get an idea of what utopia is,” Furth said, “and their idea is just bikes operating like any other vehicle. The crazy thing is, it’s an experiment that has been lived out every day for the last 50 years. You can go out and do it today. It just doesn’t work. It’s just nutty.”
Tags: bicycle, bicycle infrastructure, bicycling, john forester, low-stress bicycle network, northeastern university, peter furth, san jose, vehicular cycling, visiting scholar
Photo set: PSU’s Urban Olympics draws most competitors yet
Students in Transportation Engineering and Planning, the OTREC-funded transportation student group at Portland State University, held its biggest-ever Urban Olympics, the annual celebration of Portland’s quirks and oddities. The 2012 games, held in April, featured participation from planning, engineering and public health departments.
Teams competed in games such as Urban NASCAR, which included slow-biking and gummy worm-eating components, and the noncopyright-infringing “Astonishing Rush” scavenger hunt. The first-year master of urban and regional planning, or MURP, students took the participation award, with 16 competitors, while the best department award went to the second-year MURPs.
The best team award went to Team Jellis, composed of Jamie Jones and Scotty Ellis. More awards are at the STEP website.
Photos are after the jump.
Tags: bicycling, master of urban and regional planning, portland state university, step, transportation, urban olympics
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
Research explores how parents decide on children’s transportation to school
Faced with fewer children walking or bicycling to school, governments and other groups have sought to reverse this decline. Even when there's money to address the issue, however, local governments and school districts don’t know how best to spend it to get more children on foot or bicycle.
OTREC researchers Lynn Weigand and Noreen McDonald stepped into this void with their project, “Evaluation of Safe Routes to School Programs: Qualitative and Quantitative Analysis of Parental Decision-Making.” Their final report is now available.
Existing research only scratches the surface of how parents decide which mode their grade school-aged children take to school. Weigand and McDonald explored the decision-making process with focus groups and tested a new Web-based survey to supplement the limited information gained from existing paper surveys.
Focus groups, in particular, can explain motivations more richly than can survey questions, Weigand said. Parents might select a single survey response, for example, to mean drastically different things.
“Parents cite ‘convenience,’ but that means different things to different parents,” Weigand said. “For some, it means it’s more convenient to plop the kid in the car and drive to school.
Tags: bicycling, safe routes to school, walking
Bike riding in the rain: Portland takes center stage at TRB annual meeting
When people talk about Portland, they talk about weather and bicycling. Judging by the Transportation Research Board annual meeting in Washington, D.C., researchers are looking into the same two things.
Bikes, of course, draw more interest at a transportation conference than in other circles. Here, Portland continues to draw attention: A single day’s poster session featured no less than seven papers that use Portland as a bicycle research laboratory.
The examination of bicycling and weather drew research looks from around the continent. A paper with authors from OTREC and the Institute of Transport Studies at Monash University, Australia, looked at how well different factors, including weather, affect bicycling in Portland, Ore., and Brisbane, Australia.
Light rain, for example, had little effect on bicycling in Portland, said Portland State University’s Miguel Figliozzi, one of the paper’s authors. The drop in ridership was four times as great in Brisbane on drizzly days.
“We’re used to light rain, so the difference is very small in Portland,” Figliozzi said. “In Australia, maybe they are not used to that.”
Geoffrey Rose of Monash University, another author on the paper, said the paper could help transportation decision makers understand and respond to effects of weather on active transportation, particularly as they deal with climate change. “This helps to understand the effects (of weather) on cycling today and what we can do to perhaps insulate people from those effects,” Rose said.
Tags: australia, bicycling, geoffrey rose, kelly clifton, mcgill university, miguel figliozzi, monash university, portland, roger chen, transportation research board
Archives
Categories
Filter By University
- Portland State University
- University of Oregon
- Oregon State University
- Oregon Institute of Technology
OTREC's Most Used Tags
alex bigazzi bicycle bicycle infrastructure bicycling chris monsere cutc design electric vehicles hau hagedorn hiring ibpi its lab jennifer dill john macarthur karen dixon kelly clifton kristin tufte livability livemove marc schlossberg meeting miguel figliozzi newsletter nico larco oregon department of transportation oregon transportation summit otrec peter dusicka portland portland state university proposals public transportation region x region x consortium rfp rita robert bertini roger lindgren sam adams step sustainable cities initiative transit transportation modeling transportation research board trb trimet utc visiting scholar program visiting scholars program walking