The goal of our project is to create an environment and community at Lewis & Clark College that fosters the use of public transportation. To achieve this goal, we improved upon existing systems and developed new systems to educate our community members. Our solution is split into three sections which represent the three main goals of our proposal. The goal of the Education section is to educate the Lewis & Clark community about current public transportation offerings. This will be achieved through educational videos, physical handouts, and improvements to New Student Orientation. The goal of the App section is to develop an app that will more effectively help people use public transportation. The goal of the Carpooling section is to set up a carpooling system at Lewis & Clark. Accomplishing these goals would help to meet our larger goal of reducing the use of single occupancy vehicles by making public transportation more accessible and appealing.
Education
In looking at the existing education for general population of L&C, we found that very little information is provided during New Student Orientation (NSO), an experience that every Freshman goes through. By standardizing the provided information about public transportation during this time, we would make a more educated student body.
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App
The app solution focuses on creating a new version of the existing transportation app used at L&C. This solution will address current app issues and add quality-of-life improvements to make it easier for people without cars to navigate Portland.
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Carpool
The final aspect of our solution focuses on bringing awareness and a new system to encourage people to carpool rather than drive their own cars. There is an existing incentive to carpool, but it's not strong enough to encourage people to use it, so we have created a new system to make that incentive more compelling. In doing this, we hope to reduce the environmental impact of cars.
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At Lewis & Clark, we are seeking to streamline the transportation process from around our school and the city. Some of the problems we see are around the length of trips, ease of use, and difficulties in communication, for both carpooling and the Otterbus. We are hopeful that the problems we see can be fixed by improved usage of the carpool and bus systems. Our proposal has laid out plans of action to work towards fixing these problems. We hope to improve the L&C Shuttle app so that it will better communicate to students how and when the Otterbus runs. We are also looking to create a platform for carpooling to and from Lewis & Clark. This way, students can work together not only to get to their destinations efficiently, but will also be able to meet multiple students' needs in a single trip. Additionally, we hope to educate the population of Lewis & Clark, and the community, about different methods beyond these, such as using the TriMet or biking. We hope that by following these plans we can improve our transportation.