In practice, the design of bus routes and stop placement involves calculated trade-offs between service frequency, quality, and access. Increased stop density improves access but contributes to slow operating speeds and increased operating costs. In this thesis, a optimized bus stop spacing model is applied using the high resolution archived stop-level bus performance data from the Bus Dispatch System (BDS) provided by TriMet, the regional transit provider for the Portland metropolitan area. Two cost components are considered in the stop spacing model including passenger access cost and in-vehicle passenger stopping cost, and are combined and optimized to minimize total cost. A case-study is presented using one year's stop-level data from one bus route 19 in Portland, Oregon. The analysis considered both inbound and outbound stop spacing and determined the optimal average stop spacing based on an all-day, peak and off-peak time periods. Based on the analysis considering inbound trips over the entire day, the theoretical optimized bus stop spacing was about 1,200 feet, as compared to the current value of 890 feet. This paper also builds on the all day analysis and focuses on inbound and outbound trips during peak periods, resulting in optimized spacing of about 1,300 feet. The peak hour demand has a significant impact on the transit operation. A bus stop consolidation scheme is proposed for the analyzed bus route considering the peak hour transit demand. Finally, the thesis discusses trade-offs and presents an estimate of transit operating cost savings based on the optimized spacing. Given the growing availability of high-resolution archived data, the thesis illustrates that this modeling tool can be applied in a routine way across multiple routes as part of an ongoing service planning and performance measurement process.

This study is intended to provide information about the situation of first-generation Vietnamese women to the IRCO Parent and Child Program Department in Portland, Oregon. Nutrition intervention and food assistance currently offered to Vietnamese women enrolled in this program is the focus of the study. The women interviewed characterize themselves and their eating patterns as Vietnamese, though many changes in practice and concept reflect those of American culture. The study reveals several categories of food acculturation that act both separately and influence the development of each other. These categories are diet, taste, solutions, and concepts. Recommendations are made according to the categories and process of acculturation demonstrated by the participating women and the effects of this process on the health of the women and their families. / Graduation date: 2004

In 1990, the Clean Air Act (CAA) Amendments authorized the regulation of 188 hazardous air pollutants (HAP). Exposure to HAPs at sufficient concentrations and durations can increase both cancer and serious adverse non-carcinogenic effects. The purpose of this study was to conduct a human health risk assessment using data of 43 HAPs from five monitor sites in Portland, Oregon during July 1999-August 2000. HAP concentrations were compared to carcinogenic and non-carcinogenic (health) benchmark concentrations; and emission sources were determined for HAPs that exceeded health benchmark concentrations. Additionally, cancer risks were determined for subpopulations and compared to cancer risks generated for the general population. Results of this study indicate that 20 HAPs exceeded carcinogenic benchmark concentrations (corresponding to a risk level of 1 x 10������) in at least one location. Chromium compounds posed the highest cancer risk (3.5 x 10������). Seventeen HAPs exceeded carcinogenic benchmark concentrations at all five sites. Seventy-five percent (%) of the total cumulative cancer risk was contributed by chromium compounds, 1,3-butadiene, formaldehyde and 1,1,2,2-tetrachloroethane. Three HAPs, chromium compounds, acrolein, and formaldehyde, exceeded non-carcinogenic hazard ratios of 1.0. Releases from area sources accounted for the largest percentage of HAPs that exceeded health benchmark concentrations. With respect to subpopulations, asthmatics teenagers (age 11-16) and asthmatic adults (age 18-50), had slightly elevated cancer risks of 1.4 x 10������ and 1.2 x 10������. respectively, compared to the general population risk level of 1 x 10������. Results of this study indicate that several HAPs pose a potential human health concern in Portland and that efforts should be made to reduce their emissions. Additional studies are warranted to further assess potential human health risks and the extent of HAPs in Portland, Oregon. / Graduation date: 2003

This mixed-methods study combined pragmatism, sociocultural perspectives, and systems thinking concepts to investigate students' engagement, thinking, and learning in science in an urban, K-8 arts, science, and technology magnet school. A grant-funded school-university partnership supported the implementation of an inquiry-based science curriculum, contextualized in the local environment through field experiences. The researcher worked as co-teacher of 3 sixth-grade science classes and was deeply involved in the daily routines of the school.The purposes of the study were to build a deeper understanding of the complex interactions that take place in an urban science classroom, including challenges related to implementing culturally-relevant instruction; and to offer insight into the role educational systems play in supporting teaching and learning. The central hypothesis was that connecting learning to meaningful experiences in the local environment can provide culturally accessible points of engagement from which to build science learning.Descriptive measures provided an assessment of students' engagement in science activities, as well as their levels of thinking and learning throughout the school year. Combined with analyses of students' work files and focus group responses, these findings provided strong evidence of engagement attributable to the inquiry-based curriculum. In some instances, degree of engagement was found to be affected by student "reluctance" and "resistance," terms defined but needing further examination. A confounding result showed marked increases in thinking levels coupled with stasis or decrease in learning. Congruent with past studies, data indicated the presence of tension between the diverse cultures of students and the mainstream cultures of school and science.Findings were synthesized with existing literature to generate the study's principal product, a grounded theory model representing the complex, interacting factors involved in teaching and learning. The model shows that to support learning and to overcome cultural tensions, there must be alignment among three main forces or "causal factors": students, teaching, and school climate. Conclusions emphasize system-level changes to support science learning, including individualized support for students in the form of differentiated instruction; focus on excellence in teaching, particularly through career-spanning professional support for teachers; and attention to identifying key leverage points for implementing effective change.

This study aims to explore the relationship between the objective (actual) environment and people's perceptions of the environment, and their relative effects on active travel behavior, particularly bicycling behavior. This is an important research gap in the current literature linking the built environment and active travel. Better understanding this relationship will help to explore the mechanism underlying the built environment- behavior relationship and identify potential interventions to promote active travel. Relying on the data from Portland, OR, this study investigated the following four research questions: (1) How does the objectively measured environment correspond to the perceived environment? And what factors contribute to the mismatch between the objective and perceived environment? (2) What are the different effects of the perceived and objective environment on active travel behavior? (3) Do perceptions mediate the effects of the objective environment on active travel behavior? (4) Do changes in the built environment change perceptions, and in turn change travel behavior? Through various statistical methods, this study found that there was a mismatch between perceptions and objectively measured environment, and such factors as socio-demographics, attitudes, social environment, and behavior could contribute to this mismatch. This study also found the perceived environment and objective environment had independent effects on bicycling. Further, this study found the objectively measured bicycling environment had only an indirect effect on bicycling behavior through influencing one's perceptions of the environment. Finally, this study found changes in the actual built environment may change the perceptions of the walking environment, but not the perceptions of the bicycling environment, at least in the short term.

A Thirst for Moretakes the reader on a journey into self-development culture around Portland, Oregon. The author attends events devoted to personal growth to try to understand how this culture shapes our lives and the way we think. Along the way, she encounters psychics, mystics, an alleged cult leader, and seekers and self-reinventors of all stripes. As participants in this culture work to build their own philosophies and define their own spirituality, they also create their own communities--intentionally and otherwise. These communities form the heart of this exploration. Chapters 1 and 2 explore the spontaneous communities that arise during afternoon events in which participants pay for goods, services, and information pertaining to personal growth and spirituality. Chapter 3 delves into a sacred art and music festival in which participants gather outdoors for a handful of days in the hopes of connecting with each other and transforming themselves--and society--in the process. The final chapters explore the lives of two communities. In Chapter 4, a woman devotes her life to starting up an eco-village in the foothills of Mt. Hood. In Chapter 5, the author visits a 41-year-old commune in which residents and visitors have abandoned former lives in their search for meaning, fulfillment, belonging, and a place to call home. As the author questions others about their beliefs, she begins to question her own. Why do we believe what we believe?

There are extensive empirical studies on the impacts and effectiveness of Smart Growth policies; however, very few of them consider the perspective of individual decision makers and, to this author's knowledge, none have studied developers as location-aware decision-making agents. This study tries to fill this gap partially by assessing the impacts of Portland's smart growth policies on developers' location choice behavior with developer-based location choice models. The dissertation has two purposes. By assessing the impacts of Smart Growth policies on individual home developer's location choice, it provides a micro- and behavioral foundation for the understanding of Smart Growth policies. As a bi-state metropolitan area located on the border between Oregon and Washington, the Portland region provides a unique environment that allows my research to examine whether home developers react to Smart Growth policies differently in the two states with different land use policy systems. The dissertation also aims to create a developer-based land development forecast model, which can be used as a scenario analysis tool for the Portland region's long-term land use and transportation planning. Besides the developer location choice model mentioned above, the components of this comprehensive developer-based land development model also include a time series regression model that predicts annual new housing supply in the region and a model that synthesizes housing projects in a forecast year. The study shows that home developers in the Portland metropolitan area are sensitive to most Smart Growth policies that have been implemented in the region, but they react to them differently across the border between Oregon and Washington. Single-family home (SFH) and multi-family home (MFH) developers show different preferences for location attributes. The most significant predictors of where a developer will choose to locate a project are the locations of previous projects. After controlling for all of the other factors discussed above, there remains a strong preference for developing SFH units outside of the UGB in both Oregon and Washington sides of the Portland metropolitan area. Latent class models have been developed to detect taste variations among home developers in the SFH and MFH markets separately. Estimation results show clear taste variations across developers and housing projects with respect to site attributes in their location choice. With other variables in the segmentation model being the same, project size provides a better fit to the data than developer size, indicating that developers have taste variations among their different projects. Large size SFH projects developed by contractor-owners are more likely to be within the UGB and their locations tend to have higher residential density, housing diversity, transportation accessibility, road density, and land price. With most MFH projects within the UGB, estimation results show that large size MFH projects prefer the locations with higher residential density, housing diversity, mixed use, road density, land price, average household income, and proportion of young and middle age households. The three-step new housing supply and location choice forecast model seem to be able to capture the basic trend of housing market and land development in the Portland region. Three different aggregate housing supply forecast models, an conditional time series regressive model, a unconditional time series regression model, and an auto-regression integrated moving average (ARIMA) model were tested and their advantages and disadvantages were discussed. Both the SFH and MFH project synthesis models can simulate housing projects well for a forecast year. Three location choice models were developed to allocate synthesized housing projects into space. The three models are characterized separately as: (1) assumed market homogeneity and atomization of development projects; (2) deterministic market segmentation and synthesis of projects by size; and (3) probabilistic market segmentation and synthesis of projects by size, using a latent class approach. Examination of forecast results shows that all three models can successfully capture the basic spatial pattern of housing development in the region; however, the spatial distribution of MFH development is lumpier and more unpredictable. While Models 2 and 3 are more sophisticated and make more sense from a theoretical perspective, they do not return better forecast results than Model 1 due to some practical issues. Models 2 and 3 would be expected to perform better when those practical issues are solved, at least partially, in future research.

Street layout and design, once established, are then not easily changed. Urban form affects community development, livability, sustainability, and traffic safety. There has been an assumed relationship between urban form and traffic safety that favors designs with less through streets to improve safety. An empirical study to test this assumed relationship was carried out for crash data for Portland, Oregon. This thesis presents an empirical methodology for analyzing the relationship between urban form and traffic safety utilizing a uniform grid for the spatial unit. Crashes in the Portland, Oregon city limits from 2005-2007 were analyzed and modeled using negative binomial regression to study the effect of urban form and street layout through factors on exposure, connectivity, transit accessibility, demographic factors, and origins and destinations. These relationships were modeled separately by mode: vehicle crashes, pedestrian and bicycle crashes. Models were also developed separately by crash type and by crash injury severity. The models found that urban form factors of street connectivity and intersection density were not significant at 95% confidence for vehicle and pedestrian crash rates, nor for different crash severity levels, indicating that high connectivity grid street layout may have comparable safety to loops and lollipops, in contrast to results in earlier studies. Elasticity for all models was dominated by VMT increases. Business density, population and transit stops were also significant factors in many models, underlining the importance not only of street layout design, but also planning to direct development to influence where businesses, employment, and housing will grow and handle traffic volumes safely.

The continued increase in homelessness in Portland, Oregon is in part a result of the systemic restructuring of the welfare state as well as a shift in local governance purviews. Primarily this has eradicated the affordable housing stock in the city which is compounded by the limited availability of emergency shelter spaces. These and other financial constraints have left a depleted service support system to cover a rising homelessness problem. In response to this, contemporary social movements have been focusing attention on economically marginalized groups such as the homeless, calling for rights to access resources in cities such as housing. This approach critiques the neoliberal policies that have bolstered entrepreneurial approaches to urban growth. Neoliberal policies result in a failure to maintain financial support for the well-being of the homeless and connected support services. This research examines one alternative to the traditional approach to sheltering the homeless. It focuses on a self-organized homeless tent city in downtown Portland, Right 2 Dream Too, which has become a critical resource in homeless emergency service provisioning. The rest site's success as an emergency service is primarily predicated on its geographic proximity to a nexus of social services in the Old Town neighborhood. Drawing on ethnographic work and archival data, I analyze the multiple spatialities of this self-managed site to better understand homeless individuals' experience with this place and other related spaces, as a means to understand its value as an emergency service for the homeless in Portland, and other cities with similar constraints. I argue this perspective is essential for mitigating homelessness in Portland and informing the decision-making surrounding its relocation.

Art is often used as a catalyst to stimulate redevelopment and neighborhood change. This often occurs inadvertently as the presence of artists in certain communities can attract both public and private investment to revalorize economically depressed areas. Marginal neighborhoods in inner-urban areas offer inspiration and diversity to artists seeking lower-cost housing. Their presence effectively makes these marginal communities "safe" for middle-class residents looking to live in a funky, urban neighborhood. Ultimately, however, artists are eventually priced out of the communities they helped to create. The Alberta district in northeast Portland, Oregon has used art to create an identity that distinguished it from other redeveloped neighborhoods throughout the city, having become known as the Alberta Arts District. The research presented in this thesis traces the history of the Alberta district from its roots as a thriving streetcar community through its years as a dilapidated, crime-ridden neighborhood, and into its current state as a vibrant arts district. I show how the commercial corridor along Alberta Street has evolved to reflect the changing demographic composition of the surrounding neighborhood. Additionally, housing in the surrounding residential neighborhood has experienced a dramatic increase in average sale price and an upfiltering of aesthetic appearance. Many are attracted to the Alberta district for its vibrancy and diversity, the people and businesses that contribute to the diverse atmosphere may disappear as real estate becomes increasingly more expensive.