Current Projects:

1)Sustaining Multimodal Choices: Examining Travel Behavior for Non-work Trips Beyond COVID-19 – With Yizhao Yang (National Institute for Transportation and Communities) 

Travel by sustainable modes such as public transit, biking, and walking provides positive outcomes for urban residents for the environment and health. Integrating these mode choices into regular travel trips has been challenging for many Americans. The low adoption of sustainable travel modes has been attributed to environmental factors, and to attitudinal and habitual tendencies rooted in an individual’s beliefs and experiences. The proposed project focuses on understanding the decision-making process of travel mode choices for non-commuting trips. It addresses the policy issue of how to increase usage of sustainable travel modes for those trips through environmental and psychological approaches. At the center of this study are two research questions: 1. What are the barriers to urban residents’ adoption of sustainable travel modes for non-commuting trips? 2. What are the factors and processes that help mitigate those barriers’ influences on individuals’ choice of a sustainable travel mode? We build on a survey deployed during the COVID-19 lockdown in the Eugene-Springfield, Oregon region to implement a mixed-method, longitudinal study. We treat the significant transportation disruption induced by the COVID-19 lockdown as an intervention. We examine: 1. changes in people’s travel mode choices as a reaction to the intervention; 2. changes in cognitive/psychological status in relation to the travel behavior change and the intervention; and 3. the combined effects of environmental and cognitive/psychological factors on people’s desire and reasons to maintain or suspend those behavior changes post intervention. Knowledge and insights gained from this project will contribute to our ability to understand and estimate future sustainable travel behavior, as well as inform infrastructure investment decisions and transportation demand management programming that deploy interventions related to both environmental and psychological dimensions.

2) Barriers to Housing Construction – with Robert Parker (Oregon Department of Land Conservation and Development) 

This project will focus on documenting the barriers to constructing housing in Oregon and how the state could remove impediments to construction at a local level. IPRE will build on previous work on barriers to housing construction, and will work with ECONorthwest, DLCD, and OHCS to produce a white paper.

The white paper will describe local impediments to housing production, with special attention to affordable housing production, that could be addressed through reform of Oregon’s current housing planning systems. Impediments could be in the following categories:

• State and local regulatory constraints;
• Land supply constraints, including the approach to measuring and characterizing land supply through Goal 9, 10, and 14;
• Infrastructure availability and funding mechanisms;
• Housing funding or finance constraints;
• State or local administrative capacity constraints to permit, regulate, and plan for housing and affordable housing production;
• Manufactured homes;
• The structure of Oregon’s housing industry; and
• Others, based on IPRE’s research.

The research will include specific examples of how each impediment slows housing production in Oregon communities. For each impediment identified, the white paper will provide implications for needed reform, focused on understanding variation by city size and region.

3)Metropolitan Cooperation to Combat Climate Change through Transportation and Housing (Finrow Award – UO College of Design)

To address the climate crisis, we need to redesign our cities to create housing in cities that is accessible by inexpensive, low-carbon modes of transportation. Sweden offers an innovative model for addressing the concurrent housing and climate crises. This policy offers universal promise in directly addressing key challenges in providing housing and redesigning the transportation network on a massive scale to address the climate crisis. In this research project, I will examine the policy adoption, implementation, and results of the “National Negotiation on Housing and Infrastructure” to provide recommendations for translating design and policy to the U.S.

Under the “National Negotiation on Housing and Infrastructure,” the national government builds cycling and transit infrastructure in exchange for the local government building housing to accommodate population growth within the major cities of Malmö, Stockholm, and Gothenburg. This policy is innovative and collaborative by trading massive infrastructure investment needed to support climate targets for dense housing needed to support bicycling and transit.  The Swedish policy resulted from a negotiation between the cities and the national government to simultaneously address housing, economic, and climate issues.

Examining the adoption, governance, and implementation of the “National Negotiation on Housing and Infrastructure” will offer important lessons for the United States and countries around the globe facing housing affordability and homelessness, transportation congestion, and the effects of climate change. Sweden offers hope for providing livable, sustainable, affordable cities that are resilient to a changing climate.

Objectives

1) To understand the political context and policy adoption process for the National Negotiation on Housing and Infrastructure, including how land use regulations and transportation finance changed.

2) To learn where the policy has influenced local decision making and urban form and where the policy has diverged from original conception to actual implementation locally; and

3) To apply lessons learned to inform policy formulation and implementation at a local, state, and federal level in the United States.