Oregon BEST Researcher Jennifer Dill Looks at Bike Boxes, Bike Boulevards, and How People Choose Transit

Choosing where we live impacts how we’ll travel to and from our homes. Living a block away from a light rail line makes taking transit a snap. But facing a steep uphill bicycle ride to get home at the end of a long day can be daunting, albeit a good cardio workout.

Oregon BEST researcher and Portland State University professor Jennifer Dill explores how people’s decisions to live in certain places impact their commuting patterns and carbon footprints. She also studies how planning, policy, and physical environments play a role in where people choose to live and how they travel.

Dill, who is a professor in PSU’s School of Urban Studies & Planning, just received a $400,000 grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to study how bicycle boulevards influence the physical activity and active transportation choices of residents living along these streets, which have been altered to slow and discourage vehicle traffic while promoting bicycling, walking, and other forms of carbon-free transportation.

Portland, Ore. has more than 30 miles of bicycle boulevards, which are very popular, Dill says. But few studies have been done to see how installing the boulevards impact the health of local residents.

“This is very exciting,” Dill says. “Because bike boulevards have not been studied much, we don’t have a lot of evidence as to how well they work in terms of increasing cycling, walking, and other physical activity.”

Dill and her students will outfit local residents with accelerometers (high-tech pedometers that track physical activity) before and after a bike boulevard is installed to determine how the re-designed street influences both physical activity and transportation patterns of people living nearby. 

Dill also directs one of the most successful transportation research centers in the country. The Oregon Transportation Research and Education Consortium, or OTREC, helps fund transportation related research at PSU, OSU, UO, and OIT. OTREC is part of the University Transportation Center Program (UTC) under the U.S. Dept. of Transportation, and although there are some 60 such centers in the U.S., OTREC is one of only 10 that have received a higher level of funding over the past five years.

“This is a huge honor for us because it means approximately $3 million per year in funding,” says Hau Hagedorn, OTREC’s research program manager who works closely with Dill. The funding helps many Oregon BEST researchers working on integration of transportation and land use, healthy communities, and advanced technologies.

OTREC has funded three electric vehicle (EV) projects to date, including with Oregon BEST researchers Kate Hunter-Zaworski at Oregon State University and John Macarthur at PSU. Other OTREC-funded projects by Oregon BEST researchers include assessing the durability of recycled concrete aggregates for roads by Jason Idecker at OSU, rethinking transportation options and planning in suburban developments by Nico Larco at the University of Oregon, and studying the impacts of alternative transportation availability for schools on student health and academic achievements by Ihab Elzeyadi at the UO.

Some of Dill’s work is highly visible. She and her graduate students are analyzing the effectiveness of the bright green “bike boxes” painted on the pavement at some Portland intersections. The goal of the boxes is to make motorists more aware of bicyclists in traffic. Although the final results aren’t in yet, Dill says preliminary reports show that 80 percent of motorists appear to understand the boxes.

“To me, this is a great example of an OTREC partnership, with the City of Portland providing matching funds and university researchers doing data analysis to make biking safer in our city,” she says.