Graduate Research Fellowship

The University of Oregon’s Architecture Department (Professor John Rowell along with PPPM Professor Schlossberg) is seeking applications for a GRF to assist in a collaborative team effort to develop an evidence based design manual on how to transform streets into complete streets. This is a major, national project that seeks to significantly assist communities across the country to adopt new street designs that make conditions feel safer for pedestrians and cyclists, while still allowing vehicular throughput. 

Project overview:

This technology transfer project is to document a variety of existing and implemented examples of Complete Street improvements from around the country, visually document their design and context, and compare actual throughput in order to create a design toolbox for transportation planners and traffic engineers across the country.  The result will be a print and web-based reference guide for transportation planners and traffic engineers to use to determine the best designs for retrofitting streets based on differing right of ways and desired ADT.  Complete Streets policies are being adopted all across the country, but local officials have few documented guidebooks to help them think about how to retrofit streets based on best practices.  This technology transfer project intends to fill this gap.

The GRF will be involved in

1. Identifying existing state, national, and international design manuals that inform street design for multimodal use

2. Helping to identify actual completed projects using various professional networks that could potentially be included in the design manual

3. Evaluate potential case study site and help organize street types into appropriate schema

4. Helping acquire and manipulate data from appropriate agencies related to the case study sites, including GIS, aerial photos, ADT, safety data, and other data pertaining to the street design before and after the complete street intervention

5. Assist in developing integrated display of and logical organization of relevant data for each site

6. Assist in writing and layout of case studies

7. Selected travel to ground truth the case study sites