News Tagged: Miguel Figliozzi
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Report: Climate change adds $20,000 or more to annual flooding costs along urban creeks
Note: This article is the first in a series on OTREC reports that examining the intersection of climate change and transportation. We’ll continue with articles on other topics, including a regionwide impact assessment of climate change effects on transportation and a narrow focus on the effects on public transit.
Of all effects of the climate on transportation, the most costly results from flooding in cities. Flooding disrupts urban life, causing expensive repairs, delays and hazards to address. In the Pacific Northwest, these effects are projected to worsen as human-caused global warming brings wetter weather and higher water tables.
Despite these projections, little research had focused on the effects of increased flooding on the transportation system and how those effects could be lessened. OTREC opened the door to this area of research with a project called Future Flooding Impacts on Transportation Infrastructure and Traffic Patterns Resulting from Climate Change. The final report is available to download here.
The project brought together scholars from Portland State University in the disciplines of geography, civil and environmental engineering, and urban studies and planning with officials from regional government Metro. The researchers also included regional stakeholders invested in their communities and watersheds to guide the project.
Tags: cllimate change, cost analysis, david ruelas, deena platman, fanno creek, flooding, global warming, heejun chang, il-won jung, johnson creek, martin lafrenz, metro, miguel figliozzi, otrec, portland, rolando melgoza, urban flooding
Photo set: OTREC at TRB
The Transportation Research Board's annual meeting lets OTREC resesarchers share their work with the rest of the country, network and learn from research conducted elsewhere. OTREC faculty, staff and students, with their ubiquitous yellow lanyards, hit Washington, D.C. for research presentations, poster sessions and committee meetings Jan. 21 to 26.
Tags: brian davis, carl olson, cortney mild, geoff rose, hau hagedorn, john macarthur, keith bartholomew, kelly clifton, kristi currans, marc schlossberg, miguel figliozzi, nathan mcneil, roger chen, roger lindgren, transportation research board, trb
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
Innovative research from OTREC faculty, students on TRB conference agenda
Students and faculty researchers from OTREC universities will present 45 papers at the Transportation Research Board’s annual meeting Jan. 22 to 26 in Washington, D.C.
The papers, to be presented at 37 separate sessions and poster sessions, stem from transportation research at Portland State University, the University of Oregon and Oregon State University. The three universities will send 43 students to the conference.
Alex Bigazzi, a PSU engineering doctoral student, will present his work on topics including congestion and emissions at the conference. Some of that work stems from his master’s thesis, “Roadway Congestion Impacts on Emissions, Air Quality, and Exposure,” with adviser Miguel Figliozzi at PSU. The thesis won this year’s Milton Pikarsky Memorial Award, which will be presented Jan. 21 at the Council of University Transportation Centers awards banquet.
Bigazzi will present another paper, which he wrote with PSU’s Kelly Clifton and Brian Gregor of the Oregon Department of Transportation, that looks at fuel economy for alternative-fuel vehicles in congestion. Titled “Advanced Vehicle Fuel-Speed Curves for Regional Greenhouse Gas Scenario Analysis,” the paper helps Oregon DOT incorporate hybrid, electric and fuel-cell vehicles into its emissions planning model.
While traditional vehicles lose fuel efficiency during congested driving, advanced vehicles don’t suffer from the same effects, according to the paper. Some even do better in congestion than at higher speeds.
Tags: alex bigazzi, chris monsere, david hurwitz, greenhouse gas, kelly clifton, miguel figliozzi, transportation research board
OTREC Research Shows Business, Environmental Impacts of Congestion
Every day, trucks travel in, out and through Portland delivering the goods that make the city and region’s economy thrive. But urban freight traffic in the Portland metro area has become increasingly congested and unreliable, leading to longer travel times, fewer goods being distributed and more greenhouse gases being emitted. OTREC researchers have worked with commercial vehicle GPS data and freeway traffic sensor data to understand the impact of urban congestion on commercial vehicle fleets and what can be done to reduce congestion.
In “Algorithms to Quantify the Impacts of Congestion on Time-Dependent Real-World Urban Freight Distribution Networks” (Read Paper Here) and “The Impacts of Congestion on Time-definitive Urban Freight Distribution Networks CO2 Emission Levels” (Read Paper Here), OTREC researcher Miguel Figliozzi and his team attempted to quantify and measure the impacts of congestion on freight from a business, as well as environmental perspective. The project team combined time-dependent algorithms, real-world traffic data, and open source software Google Maps to analyze how congestion can delay freight traffic.
The results showed the dramatic effect congestion can have on fleet size, distances traveled by fleets and business costs. The combined use of time-dependent algorithms, real-world traffic data, and open source software Google Maps provide a more accurate methodology to measure congestion impacts than was previously available.
Tags: congestion research, miguel figliozzi, otrec, transportation research
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