A more humane way to plan.
(Photo: J. Maus/BikePortland)

When it comes to planning a city, trips matter. Estimates about the amount of trips generated by a transportation project or new development are what dictate not just what our redesigned streets will look like, but also how we pay for them.

One of the ways the City of Portland pays for infrastructure is by charging developers a fee based on the impact their new building will have on the transportation system. These fees — known as Transportation System Development Charges, or just TSDCs for short — are based on a model that estimates how many trips a new development will generate.

There’s just one small problem: The methodology is centered almost exclusively around cars. The Portland Bureau of Transportation wants to change that.

At City Council today commissioners unanimously passed an ordinance (PDF) allowing PBOT to use a methodology that uses “person trips” – meaning trips made not just by people in cars and trucks but also foot, by bike and in transit vehicles.
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It turns out when people have route options, they choose healthier ones.
(Photo: J.Maus/BikePortland)

Last week’s news that a glass factory on SE 21st Street seems to have been emitting “alarming” levels of arsenic and cadmium has many Portlanders who bike through the area worried.
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Slide from a recent PSU grad’s study of people’s comfort preferences. An “A” score represents the most comfortable biking.
(Image: TREC at PSU)

What’s the best way to separate bike and auto traffic?

Portland hasn’t built many protected bike lanes yet, but the ones it has include dabbles in every major separation method, from the mountable curbs on Northeast Cully to the plastic posts on the Hawthorne Bridge viaduct to the thick fence on the Morrison Bridge to the big round planters on Northeast Multnomah to the parked cars on Southwest Broadway.

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Who doesn’t like trophies?
(Photos © J. Maus/BikePortland)

Portland’s friendly annual competition among workplaces to see who can log the most and longest bike trips and who can recruit the most commuters starts today. And an excellent new academic paper shows exactly why you should be signing up and nudging your co-workers to do the same.

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Would you stop?
(Photo: J.Maus/BikePortland)

It might be peer pressure. It might be geometry. It’s almost certainly some of each.

But following up on a study that found that (as we reported last year) 94 percent of observed bike users in Oregon stopped for red lights, a Portland State University civil engineering student has also found that every additional person waiting next to you on a bike makes you 78 percent less likely to run the light on your own bike.

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(Infographic by Portland State Transportation Research and Education Center)

A new poster summarizing research from a Portland State University scholar has some interesting factoids about electric bike users, but it doesn’t answer what’s becoming one of the biggest mysteries in American biking: why haven’t e-bikes taken off yet in the United States?

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Screen grab from the study’s video analysis.

A new study released today, which is being touted by its funders as “groundbreaking,” shows that a sampling of protected bike lanes in American cities have been a resounding success.

The facilities included in the sample — hand-picked bikeways from Austin, Washington D.C., San Francisco, Chicago and Portland — showed a massive increase in bike traffic, received high marks for improving safety of all road users, and have won over the hearts and minds of people whether they use them or not.

Lessons from the Green Lanes: Evaluating Protected Bike Lanes in the U.S. (PDF) was funded in part by People for Bikes and the research was completed at Portland State University’s National Institute of Transportation and Communities (here’s more background on the study). [Read more…]

New research delves into the Williams
project process and why it turned into such a controversy.
(Photo © J. Maus/BikePortland)

It’s been over two years now since the issue of racism and gentrification became part of PBOT’s North Williams Avenue traffic safety project. As the public process for that project morphed into a citywide dialogue about these volatile topics, the project transcended PBOT and became a case study that has been investigated, analyzed, and debated by people all over the country.

Now the work of two Portland State University professors has been published in the peer-reviewed academic journal, Environmental Justice. The article, Contesting Sustainability: Bikes, Race, and Politics in Portlandia, (published in the August 2013 issue) was written by Dr. Amy Lubitow, an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology at Portland State University and Dr. Thaddeus Miller, an assistant professor at the Nohad A. Toulan School of Urban Studies and Planning, College of Urban and Public Affairs, at PSU.[Read more…]

The Oregon Transportation Research and Education Consortium (OTREC) at Portland State University continued to raise its national profile with today’s announcement of a $2.83 million grant from the U.S. Department of Transportation. This grant comes on the heels of a $3.5 million federal grant awarded in January 2012 that solidified PSU’s role as one of the premier university transportation centers (UTCs) in the country. The competition for this grant was very stiff with 142 universities vying for just 32 grants.

With this latest grant, OTREC at PSU is now the USDOT’s go-to institution when it comes to “livable communities” research. For this round of grants, the USDOT awarded just five national university transportation centers. Each center was pegged to focus its research on one of the agency’s five categories: economic competitiveness, environmental sustainability, safety, state of good repair, and livable communities.
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Newsflash: Cars are highly toxic
and bike riders suck it all in.
(Photo © J. Maus/BikePortland)

The Portland Tribune published an article yesterday with a scary headline: “Car exhaust proves unseen road hazard.” The story chronicled the efforts of transportation researcher Alex Bigazzi, who rides around Portland with special equipment attached to his bike in order to measure air quality.

Bigazzi is a doctoral student at Portland State University who’s no stranger to this topic. In 2010, we wrote about research he worked on that pointed to the air quality and health benefits of streets that have cycle paths separated from auto traffic. Bigazzi’s latest work, as highlighted in the Tribune, are sure to raise some eyebrows. Here’s one of the opening paragraphs:

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