News Tagged: Nico Larco
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Second Sustainable City Year showcases practical, visionary sides in Salem
If the posters lining the wall showed how visionary the Sustainable City Year model can be, the Salem city officials attending the May 20 reception testified how practical it can be as well. The reception recapped the work of the second Sustainable City Year, now drawing to a close.
Sustainable City Year is a program of the Sustainable Cities Initiative, one of three OTREC initiatives. In the program, 500 students on two campuses worked on 16 projects to help Salem meet sustainability goals.
Although work continues in Salem and at the University of Oregon and Portland State University, May 20 was an opportunity to thank the participants and punctuate a second successfully year, following the inaugural efforts in Gresham, Ore. Next year’s Sustainable City Year will focus on Springfield, Ore.
Linda Norris, Salem’s city manager, couldn’t say enough about the contributions the program made to her city. Students in 29 classes on the two campuses put in 80,000 hours of time. Sustainable City Year’s choosing Salem was like magic, Norris said.
Tags: cortney mild, linda norris, nico larco, otrec, robert liberty, salem, springfield, sustainable cities initiative, sustainable city year
Suburban developments can build in walking and cycling
In many cases, living in suburbia means relying on an automobile for most trips, even short trips to nearby stores. If housing developments incorporated better paths and sidewalks, however, would anyone use them?
Researcher Nico Larco found that people who live in well-connected developments are significantly more likely to walk and bicycle than those in developments only accessible by automobile. He details his findings in this OTREC report.
Larco, an assistant professor of architecture at the University of Oregon, found that people who live in well-connected developments walked to their nearby commercial strips nearly twice as often as did people in less-connected developments. In addition, a greater percentage of residents in well-connected developments reported sometimes walking or cycling.
Despite suburbia’s reputation for large single-family homes, more than a quarter of suburban housing units are higher density. In fact, the suburbs are home to more than 9 million multifamily housing units, with 5 million more projected for the last 20 years. Although these units tend to be near commercial centers, a lack of pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure makes trips using these modes difficult.
Tags: cycling, multifamily housing, nico larco, suburbia, university of oregon, walking
OTREC well represented at D.C. livability conference
Ten OTREC researchers, staff, and students participated in the Transportation Research Board and University Transportation Center Transportation Systems for Livable Communities Conference last week in Washington, D.C. The conference brought together researchers and practitioners from transportation, housing and public health.
Highlights of the conference included an insightful discussion on defining livability. Despite inconclusive debate on the definition, participants agreed that for the concept to be embraced it can neither be dictated nor prescribed. Performance measures also were a recurring theme of the two-day conference. Concepts explored included: re-evaluating outdated measures such as volume-to-capacity ratio and level of service to better reflect different modes, shifting thinking from mobility to accessibility and proximity, and data standardization and measurement methodologies. To complete the livability picture, the multigenerational and socioeconomic considerations need to be included.
The following four OTREC research projects were highlighted during the conference poster session:
- Implementation of Active Living Policies by Land Use and Transportation Agencies: Jennifer Dill, Oregon Transportation Research and Education Consortium, Portland State University; Deborah Howe, Temple University
- Yes, They Do Walk in Suburbia: Suburban Multifamily Housing and Trips to Strips: Nico Larco, University of Oregon
- “Fix This Tool”: Empowering Citizens to Spatially Assess their Active Transportation Environment: Marc Schlossberg, Ken Kato, Christo Brehm, and Dana Maher, University of Oregon
- Universities as Catalysts for Retrofitting Communities Toward Livability: The Sustainable Cities Initiative: Marc Schlossberg and Nico Larco, Sustainable Cities Initiative
The conference validated much of OTREC's current research and provided further evidence that we are moving livability research in the right direction. OTREC's livability research focuses on tools for decision-making, planning and design, economics and performance measures.
Presentations are posted on the TRB conference Website. Conference tweets are on Twitter at #utclivability.
Tags: christo brehm, dana maher, deborah howe, jennifer dill, ken kato, marc schlossberg, nico larco, research and innovative technology administration, transportation research board
Video explores suburban walking and biking
Think people who live in suburban developments don't walk and bike? They do, particularly if the development is well-connected. University of Oregon assistant professor Nico Larco has shown this with his OTREC projects.
He explains some of the work himself in this video.
Tags: bicycling, nico larco, overlooked density, overlooked destinations, suburbia, walking
University Students Design a New Bicycle Shelter for Their Community
designBridge is a student-based organization at the University of Oregon that exposes students to real architectural and planning projects in their community. The organization promotes studentsí engagement in their community while providing them with professional experience that will benefit them in their careers. In this OTREC-funded education project, led by Professor Nico Larco, the students of designBridge undertook the design and construction of a new transportation shelter for Roosevelt Middle School in Eugene, Oregon. The project results include not only the completion of the shelter but also the continued development of a service learning program that can effectively address small community transportation-related needs. To learn more about the project, down the final report at: http://otrec.us/project/247
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