PSU students Elizabeth Yates, Evan Howington and Sophia Semensky will share their research
The 104th Annual Meeting of the Transportation Research Board (TRB) will take place in Washington, DC. from January 5–9, 2025. Faculty and students from Portland State University (PSU) will be sharing their research and expertise across multiple sessions at the event, which typically attracts over 13,000 attendees each year, making it one of the largest gatherings of transportation professionals and researchers in the world.
We're proud to have high-caliber students at PSU who are contributing to the discussion and technology transfer at the largest transportation conference in the world. See below for a few highlights from sessions involving PSU faculty and students, and for a complete list of sessions with PSU presenters, see the full PSU at TRB 2025 Program.
Portland State Students Presenting Research at TRB
Evan Howington
Session: Emerging Topics in Bicycling and Micromobility
Evan Howington is a master's student in urban and regional planning. He currently works as a Graduate Research Assistant (GRA) at TREC, supporting faculty advisors John MacArthur and Nathan McNeil.
Evan will be presenting research in a lectern session on January 6. He'll be sharing insights from the project, "Bike Buses: An Evaluation of an Emerging Active Transportation to School Intervention." He also presented this research with MacArthur and McNeil in a PSU Transportation Seminar on October 25.
Bike Buses are a relatively new form of Active Transportation to School (ATS) that have gained popularity in Europe and the United States in recent years. Generally, a bike bus consists of one or more adult supervisors, often parents, who guide a group of students along a defined ‘route’ to one or more schools. Using literature from the last 15 years published on ATS in North America, the research team identify four thematic areas of influence on Bike Buses: school policies, parent and student attitudes and behaviors, the urban environment, and the street environment. They conclude that Bike Buses can be situated within the larger body of literature about ATS and Safe Routes to Schools (SRTS) but deserve research on their own merits for a variety of reasons. The presentation will also include findings from surveys of bike bus coordinators and parents at schools with bike buses in Portland, Oregon.
"Presenting our work to the wider transportation research community is incredibly affirming for the thousands of kids and parents who are changing the status quo of getting to school. The enthusiasm of this community is a much-needed, heartening reminder of the importance of making our roads and communities safer (and more fun!) for everyone," Evan said.
Elizabeth Yates
Sessions: Traffic Signal Control: Toward Safer and More Efficient Operations for Multimodal Users, and How Is the Intermodal Facility Performing?: Methods for Assessing Places Where Bikes, Buses, Trains, Scooters, and People Interact
Elizabeth Yates is a PSU civil engineering master's student. She received a scholarship last year from the National Institute for Transportation and Communities (NITC) scholarship. She was also a member of the PSU team that took second place in the 2024 Oregon ITE Traffic Bowl, held on on November 21st.
Elizbeth was involved in two research projects that will be presented at this year's TRB meeting. The first, "Pedestrian Volumes from Push-Button Traffic Signal Data in Oregon: Estimating Models and Assessing Model Transferability," will be presented in a poster session on January 6.
Many, if not all, active transportation projects rely on pedestrian volumes to measure exposure and need for intervention. A method for determining those volumes from signal data rather than the traditional manual counts will allow agencies to spend more time and money on design and implementation, hopefully leading to greater numbers of completed active transportation projects and a safer system for all users.
The second project, "Evaluation of User Interactions and Preferences of Shared Bicycle and Transit Platforms," will be presented in a lectern session on January 8. Fellow PSU student Jules Mai Plotts, an urban studies graduate student who currently works as a GRA at TREC, also contributed to the research. In a parntership with TriMet, PSU evaluated the design of a new shared-use bus platform that incorporates a sidewalk-level bike lane.
"This project not only looked at the safety of the bus stop design, but also the ease of use for disabled people--particularly blind/low-vision people. Centering this community really drove home the challenges they face in navigating complex environments and accessing public transit. I am excited to take this experience forward into practice," Elizabeth said.
Sophia Semensky
Session: Strategies for Law Enforcement to Advance Traffic Safety
Sophia Semensky is a civil engineering master's student. She currently works as an engineering associate at Kittelson & Associates. Sophia also serves as the VP of Events & Finances for PSU's ITE student chapter, Students in Transportation Engineering and Planning (STEP).
Sophia will be sharing an in-progress research project funded by the Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT), "Best Practices for Automated Speed Enforcement: Results from a Semi-Structured Interview of Agencies in the United States," in a lectern session on January 7.
We're proud to celebrate each of the students who are presenting at TRB, and excited to see the great work being done by the future transportation workforce!
Portland State University Faculty Presenting Research at TRB 2025
Data Showcase: PORTAL and BikePed Portal
PORTAL and BikePed Portal will both be featured in a lectern session on January 8 at 3:45 PM- 5:30 PM: Visualization in Transportation Lightning Talks.
Portland State University's Transportation Research and Education Center (TREC) maintains two large, public transportation data lakes: PORTAL and BikePed Portal. Our transportation data program manager, Tammy Lee, will be sharing the latest from the two Portals in a series of lightning talks focused on data visualization.
These two centralized data repositories, unique both in their size and in the fact that they are accessible (PORTAL is freely available to the public, and BikePed Portal has limited public access as well), are supported by multiple federal, state, and regional agencies. PORTAL is a centralized, electronic database that facilitates the collection, archiving, and sharing of transportation data and information for public agencies. PORTAL’s data supports Metro’s Regional Transportation Plan and the production of regional performance measures.
BikePed Portal is an invaluable resource for cities and transportation agencies: it serves as a comprehensive non-motorized data management system. Agencies who count non-motorized transportation users may have counters from different vendors, or use more than one platform to manage data. Bike-Ped Portal is able to accept data in multiple formats and convert them into a standardized format. Quality control tools are available, along with custom analytical tools.
Regional dashboads are a key feature: the National Capital Region dashboard allows users to see all the bike data from the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area together in one place. The latest feature to be added to BikePed Portal is a similar dashboard for the Portland, OR and Vancouver, WA metro area.
Stop by the session on Wednesday afternoon to hear from Lee and discover what the Portals are capable of.
January 6, Lectern Session: Equity and Pedestrian Injuries
1:30 PM- 3:15 PM: Addressing Socioeconomic and Racial Disparities in Urban Pedestrian Environments
Jason Anderson of the Maseeh College of Engineering and Computer Science (MCECS), Nathan McNeil of TREC, and Josh Roll of the Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT) will present research on "Urban Intersections and the Analysis of Pedestrian Injuries with Built-Environment and Equity Considerations."
Although income is not recorded in most crash data, numerous studies have found that areas with lower incomes and higher poverty rates are associated with increased injury and fatality risk. Black or African American pedestrians and American Indian or Alaska Native pedestrians are more likely to be struck and killed while walking than the overall U.S rate. National data shows that lower-income and BIPOC households have fewer transportation options and are more reliant on walking and transit, modes that put them at greater risk of pedestrian crashes. For example, data from the 2017 National Household Transportation Survey shows that lower-income households and households with a Black primary household respondent were particularly likely to not have a car. There is also evidence that lower-income areas have fewer pedestrian facilities to help people navigate traffic threats. It is important to recognize these disparities and understand the underlying conditions that create them so that targeted and effective action can be taken. This research explores the relationship between the built environment, pedestrian safety, and socioeconomic factors with the aim of identifying strategies to make urban intersections safer for all road users.
January 7, Poster Session: Bike Models with Crowdsourced Data
6:00 PM- 7:30 PM, New Insights from Bicycle Transportation Research
Joseph Broach of the Nohad A. Toulan School of Urban Studies & Planning, Sirisha Kothuri of MCECS and Nathan McNeil of TREC, along with Md Ashraful Imran and Kate Hyun of the University of Texas at Arlington, will present a poster titled "Transferability of Bicycle Volume Models Built with Crowdsourced Data: Applications to Statewide Prediction and Corridor Analysis Before and After COVID-19."
The research underpinning this project integrated and evaluated emerging user data sources (Strava Metro, StreetLight, and hybrid docked/dockless bike share) of bicycle activity data with conventional "static: demand determinants (land use, built environment, sociodemographics) and measures (permanent and short-duration counts) to estimate annual average daily bicycle traffic (AADBT). Static variables, Strava, and StreetLight complemented one another, with each additional data source tending to improve the model performance. The findings from this study indicate that rather than replacing conventional bike data sources and count programs, old "small" data sources will likely be very important for big data sources like Strava and StreetLight to achieve their potential for predicting AADBT. In this poster, the researchers will apply these findings to statewide prediction of volumes, and key corridor analysis, with a comparison of data before and after the COVID-19 pandemic and its associated changes in transportation volumes and behavior.
January 8, Lectern Session: Trimet's Shared FX2 Platform
8:00 AM- 9:45 AM, How Is the Intermodal Facility Performing?: Methods for Assessing Places Where Bikes, Buses, Trains, Scooters, and People Interact
In this lectern session, Nathan McNeil of TREC will be presenting, "Evaluation of User Interactions and Preferences of Shared Bicycle and Transit Platforms," a research project he worked on with TREC's Jennifer Dill, Sirisha Kothuri and Chris Monsere of MCECS, and graduate students Elizabeth Yates and Julia Plotts.
PSU researchers partnered with TriMet to evaluate the design of a new shared-use bus platform that incorporates a sidewalk-level bike lane. The project, FX2 Shared Bicycle & Pedestrian Platform Evaluation, assessed how well the new design is working for transit riders and other road users along Portland's Southeast Division Street. The most common bus and bike lane design typically has a bike lane directly adjacent to the right side of the bus lane with no physical barrier. This presents several safety concerns. In this scenario, a bike behind a bus would have to wait behind or pass the bus by riding into traffic. As vulnerable road users, these conflicts pose a potentially serious risk to bicyclists. To accommodate passing bicyclists and transit riders accessing the new FX2 line, TriMet worked with the City of Portland and a broad group of stakeholders and partners to create a design that would allow bikes to stay separated from automobile traffic, with the bikeway passing through the platform area next to where people wait for the bus. In addition to analyzing hours of video collected in the field, the research process also included surveys and interviews with people with low vision to see how well the shared platform was working.
January 8, Poster Session: Safety Performance & Analysis
10:15 AM- 12:00 PM, Safety Performance and Analysis with Crash Predictions
Tanmoy Bhowmik of MCECs, together with Dewan Ashraful Parvez of SRF Consulting Group and Naveen Eluru of the University of Central Florida, will present "A Joint Count and Generalized Ordered Fractional Split Approach for Addressing Temporal Instability in Road Safety Analysis."
This study addresses temporal instability in multivariate crash frequency models using data from the Greater Orlando Region (2011-2019). The researchers compare the performance of the Joint Negative Binomial-Generalized Ordered Probit Fractional Split (NB-GOPFS) Model with the performance of the Mixed Negative Binomial Model with a specific emphasis on parameter temporal variability. The dataset includes four injury severity categories: no injury, minor injury, non-incapacitating injury, and serious injury. The independent variables considered include sociodemographic, land use, and transportation infrastructure variables. Performance assessments using root mean square error (RMSE) values show that the NB-GOPFS model consistently outperforms the Mixed Negative Binomial model in accuracy and parsimony. The NB-GOPFS approach enhances prediction accuracy and model simplicity, making it effective for crash frequency modeling with temporal instability in exogenous variables.
This study supports the integration of advanced multivariate models in transportation safety analysis to improve intervention strategies and policymaking. Stop by the poster session for more details on how this analysis works.
January 8, Poster Session: Air Quality and Greenhouse Gases
3:45 PM- 5:30 PM, Current Issues in Air Quality and Greenhouse Gas Mitigation
TREC's John MacArthur, Sameer Aryal and Chris Cherry of the University of Tennessee, Luke Jones of Valdosta State University, and Cameron Bennett of Kittelson & Associates will present "Maximizing CO2 Emissions Reduction through E-Bike Incentives: Analyzing Adoption Patterns and Travel Substitution Potential."
Electric bicycles (e-bikes) offer a more affordable alternative to car travel and also provide increased physical activity. Riders with limited physical ability find that e-bikes extend their overall mobility, and research shows that e-bikes encourage users to cycle farther and more often than conventional bicycles. Most importantly to local and regional U.S. governments, e-bikes are a useful tool to address our current climate crisis by reducing transportation greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. This research demonstrates how e-bike incentive programs can reduce CO2 emissions and lower Vehicle Miles Traveled (VMT) by encouraging the widespread use and adoption of e-bikes. The poster will offer indepth analysis of how e-bike adoption can affect greenhouse gas emissions, and which types of incentive programs are most effective at achieving these goals.
Portland State University's Transportation Research and Education Center (TREC) is a multidisciplinary hub for all things transportation. We are home to the Initiative for Bicycle and Pedestrian Innovation (IBPI), the data programs PORTAL and BikePed Portal, the Better Block PSU program, and PSU's membership in PacTrans, the Pacific Northwest Transportation Consortium. Our continuing goal is to produce impactful research and tools for transportation decision makers, expand the diversity and capacity of the workforce, and engage students and professionals through education, seminars, and participation in research. To get updates about what's happening at TREC, sign up for our monthly newsletter or follow us at the links below.
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