Fall 2025 classes
Registration for Fall 2025 classes will open this summer. Share your email to stay updated about registration openings and other related opportunities.
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A transportation-themed class with an emphasis on land use, mobility, social justice and racial equity. Previously offered through the City of Portland and Portland State University, the fall 2024 course was conducted in-person at the Metro Regional Center. This class will be offered again through Metro in the fall of 2025. Class time will be used for presentations from guest speakers, activities and class discussion.
This course will focus on equitable traffic and transportation design and planning for our communities and infrastructures across greater Portland. Students will prepare a vision plan or class project, addressing community planning for the transportation systems (e.g., roads, bridges, transit, parks, urban centers, etc.). Students are encouraged to research current design trends in the traffic and transportation industry, including new developments in connectivity, green technologies, and changing populations. Students will be engaged in assignments/project coursework using written and oral communication. This course will be taught using guest speakers and discussion combined with individual and team-centered project-based learning.
Schedule
This class will be offered next in the fall of 2025. Additional schedule details will be available when the application opens in summer 2025. In the past, this class has been offered on Thursdays from 6:40 p.m. to 8:40 p.m. While the classes will be recorded, students should plan to attend in person; this is not an online class.
Course Learning Objectives
- Learn and understand the current challenges and barriers to transportation planning
- Recognize stakeholder perspectives and explore mutually beneficial solutions
- Apply a system thinking approach to central concepts, technologies, and practices of resiliency planning and sustainable systems
- Critique and develop traffic and transportation planning and sustainability metrics
- Communicate and persuade the need for planning and sustainable infrastructure for a nontechnical audience
- Develop skills for continued learning on planning and sustainable infrastructure as the field evolves.
Meet the instructor
Instructor Thuy Tu has over 25 years of experience as a senior transportation planner and civil engineering project manager. She is an innovative collaborator, progressive communicator, educator and believes in people-focused urban design concepts and methods.
She graduated from Benson Polytechnic High School and earned a bachelor's degree in civil engineering from the University of Portland where her studies were focused on traffic and transportation.
Now the principal and founder of her own consulting firm, she has been an adjunct professor at the University of Portland, at the Portland Campus of the University of Oregon’s School of Architecture and Allied Arts, and a mentor of project management and civil engineering for the Portland State University Student Chapter of Engineers without Borders. Thuy has also led a course on master planning for resiliency for the Lents Community and vision planning for 82nd Avenue.
Read more about Thuy Tu at the Portland Business Tribune