The incidence of bus crashes in the US have been trending upwards, with accident, injury and fatality rates increasing 171%, 37.8%, and 5.1% respectively, between 2003 and 2007. Reversing the upward trend is an important objective of both transit providers and the society in general. This study introduces an operator-based safety methodology that utilizes data recovered from transit Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) technologies and related systems to identify and assess factors contributing to bus operations safety incidents at TriMet, the transit provider for the Portland, Oregon metropolitan region. The analysis specifically focuses on collision, non-collision and total incidents, as well as on preventability of incidents that occurred between 2006 and 2009. Regression analysis established that bus operator age, experience, short duration absenteeism from work, operator's work span and variability in daily work span/assignments are empirically correlated with bus safety incidents. In addition, schedule adherence pressures and bus lift operations are also related to safety incidents. The other factors that influence safety performance are operators' responsive action events and customer complaints about unsafe bus operation. These findings make some contributions to the understanding of the factors that are empirically related to the frequency of safety incidents as well as offer insights into operation practices and policies that hold promise for reducing bus safety incidents.

Two years after Dutch émigré Andries Deinum was fired from the University of Southern California in 1955 for refusing to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee, he moved to Portland, Oregon to teach film courses through the Portland Extension Center. By 1969 he had become integral to the local film community and had formed Portland State University's Center for the Moving Image (CMI), where he and Tom Taylor taught film history, criticism, and production for the next thirteen years. Although CMI was eliminated in 1981 as part of PSU's financial exigency, CMI's teachers and students have been a vital part of the thriving film community in Portland since its foundation. A key former student and figure in Portland's film community, Dr. Brooke Jacobson credits Deinum, Taylor, and CMI for laying the foundation for the Northwest Film Center (co-founded by Jacobson in 1971 as the Northwest Film Study Center). Through archival research and oral history methodology, this thesis pieces together Andries Deinum's role in the development of film education in the United States and the mark he left on Portland's cultural landscape, specifically the city's vital and thriving cinematic community.

Green building, as an environmentally responsible and resource-efficient product, has emerged in recent decades. Along with the growing interest in green building design and operating practices, a number of green building certification standards and rating systems have been developed by different organizations worldwide. Those rating systems allow government regulators, building professionals, and consumers to embrace green building with confidence. Many recent studies find that LEED and Energy Star certified commercial buildings gain significant rental and sales price premiums and have higher occupancy rates. However, little research has been conducted to measure the market value of certified multi-family residential buildings, for instance, green condominiums. This study investigates the price effects of LEED certification on condominium real estate assets in a local housing market, in this case Portland, Oregon. The overall dataset is developed by combining information from Metro's Regional Land Information System (RLIS) and LEED certifications by the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC). A hedonic pricing model is employed to measure the effects of certification levels on sales prices. The model results indicate that, compared to non-certified condominiums in Portland, green certified properties have a 5.8 percent sales price premium on average. The result of this study confirms that LEED condominiums exhibit higher sales prices controlling for location- and property-specific factors.

The needs to the sustainable development of electricity, energy efficiency improvement, and environment pollution reduction have favored the development of distributed generation (DG). But the problems come with increasing DG penetration in distribution networks. This thesis presents the Solar Energy Grid Integration System (SEGIS) Stage III project done by Portland General Electric (PGE), Advanced Energy, Sandia National Lab on a PGE selected distribution feeder. The feeder has six monitored commercial solar PV systems connected. The total power output from the PV systems has the potential to reach 30% of the feeder load. The author analyzes the performance of the solar feeder on both generation and voltage effects. As a project report, it introduced a new islanding detection done by other team members to give an islanding solution of future high penetration distribution networks. At last, the author describes micro-grid and grid support concepts in a SEGIS concept paper with some examples.

The city of Portland adopted different policies toward gay bars between 1948 and 1965. Portland's conservative mayors, generally uninterested in changing the city or promoting growth, ignored gay bars. Reform mayors instigated campaigns against gay bars to gain public, political, and business support for their broader economic and social goals. They were able to use crackdowns on gay bars as popular components of their reform initiatives because Portland, in comparison to other cities, professed conservatism and morality and had little economic or cultural incentive to tolerate gay bars. Blaming Portland's vice on outsiders, reform mayors argued that their actions protected Portland's traditional reputability, despite the city's long history of tolerating vice and gay bars. This thesis focuses on the reform mayoral administrations of Dorothy McCullough Lee and Terry Schrunk and their policies toward gay bars and vice. Chapter two discusses Lee's attack on all criminality in Portland, and deals briefly with why the previous administration, under Frank Riley, was rejected as corrupt. Terry Schrunk's later reform, centered in suppressing sexual deviance and promoting economic development downtown, is discussed in chapter four. Chapter three describes growing awareness of queer communities, including changing definitions of queerness and perceived threats. These changes in popular beliefs about queerness, although not the direct cause of actions against gay bars in Portland, influenced the types of vice associated with gay bars, arguments used to justify anti-queer actions, and the level of priority placed on suppressing Portland's queer community. This thesis incorporates primary and secondary sources on gay bars, Portland, and queer history. It relies heavily on city council minutes and newspaper articles, but also draws from sources including City Club Bulletins, letters from Schrunk's constituents, interviews, popular psychological works, and comparisons with articles about other cities, such as Miami, San Francisco, and New York.

This project returns to the questions that were once at the center of the urban studies debate over social movements. What are urban social movements, and what impacts do they leave on the cities where they occur? Urban protests in Portland, Oregon and Seattle, Washington are used as the foundation for exploring the following research questions: What urban social movements occurred in the Pacific Northwest during 1990s? What goals were these movements struggling for? What impacts did urban social movements have on daily life in Portland and Seattle? While this project has continuity with earlier attempts to identify, describe, and assess the role that urban social movements play in cities, it also represents a significant departure from the established ways of understanding this phenomenon. Manuel Castells' (1983) theory on urban social movements considered local activism ineffectual, if it could not produce serious revolutionary change. A different portrait of urban social movements emerged in this project. Pacific Northwest urban protests challenged existing social relationships in neighborhoods, at work, in public services, in the construction and use of urban space, and in the imagination of the city. These protests grew out of the everyday life experiences of their participants and sought to transform the patterns and relationships of daily life. Since urban social movements arise from everyday life, their impacts will be evident in a community's use of time, construction of space, development of social relationships, and sense of possibility. The ability of urban social movements to radically alter the everyday lives of their participants and communities of interest is, in and of itself, significant. As these changes reverberate beyond the boundaries of these directly impacted communities, they have the potential to create broader citywide changes. It is these transformations that are the building blocks for the active construction of our urban cultures, spaces, and communities.

In December 1978, United Airlines Flight 173 arriving in Portland from Denver with 189 people aboard crash-landed in a suburb at 157th and East Burnside. Ten people were killed and dozens more were injured. The jet ran out of fuel after it had circled for an hour while the crew tried to determine what was wrong with the right main landing gear, which had fallen with a huge double jolt on extension. The investigation that followed the crash placed the blame squarely on the pilot for his negligence in failing to monitor his fuel supply, and secondarily on his crew members, who failed to adequately communicate their concerns about it. The accident was a watershed event in what would become known in the airline industry as crew resource management, a communication model designed to reduce human error by fostering collaborative decision-making and assertiveness training. In the years that have followed the accident, very little has changed in the narrative surrounding it. Articles and docudramas on the plane crash consistently repeat the tale as is, blaming the pilot and shedding no light on the factors that led to the in-flight emergency or on United's role in contributing to the crash. This thesis is a "cold-case" investigation that reveals those contributing factors, which have been so thoroughly ignored. In the words of renowned attorney F. Lee Bailey, "The rule of law requires that all parties who contribute to an accident share in the responsibility for whatever harm has been caused." This is the untold story of all the decisions that brought down United Flight 173, and of the responsibilities heretofore overlooked.

This research explores the events and circumstances that lead to persistence and departure within the sociology master's program at Portland State University. It examines how individual and institutional characteristics interact and influence student decisions to dropout or continue in the master's program. It utilizes Vincent Tinto's (1993) theories of persistence and departure and his concepts of social and academic integration as they apply to sociology master's students. The purpose of the research was to describe how students became socially and academically integrated and how integration influenced patterns of persistence of departure. The aim also was to determine whether background variables such as undergraduate GPA, cumulative master's GPA, enrollment status, and career and educational goals influenced student outcomes.

In 1969, the "President's Committee on Mental Retardation" issued a challenge to all those involved in the care and treatment of the mentally retarded, to integrate institutionalized children into "... normal community living... and enable them to develop their ability and potential to the fullest extent."1 In addition to this mandate the federal government became increasingly aggressive in its campaign to make available to all handicapped children the same rights and privileges as "normal children". One of the major thrusts of this campaign today is to encourage local communities to commit themselves to fulfilling the needs of the handicapped individual within the environment of their community as opposed to the traditional method of institutionalization.

Occupy Wall Street galvanized the country and attracted thousands of participants, who came to New York City in order to protest corporate greed. Occupy Portland, standing in solidarity with Occupy Wall Street, began their encampment less than a month later and attracted more participants on its first day than did Occupy Wall Street. This grounded theory inquiry uncovers the principle reasons why individuals participated in Occupy Portland. The findings revealed that participants were (1) upset about the bank bailouts and corporate irresponsibility; (2) swept up by the size and organization of Occupy; and (3) looking to get some fundamental societal needs met. The findings do not neatly fit collective behavior or resource mobilization theory, paving the way for further scholarship.