American Studies Commons^™

Modeling Hurricane Evacuation Vulnerability: A Case Study Of Pinellas County, Florida, Raymond A. Miller Jr.

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Determining where people are most likely to suffer losses and have difficulty in evacuating from a hurricane is important to developing a hurricane response strategy. This thesis proposes a methodology for modeling and assessing evacuation vulnerability to a specific hurricane and applies this method to study Pinellas County, Florida.

The vulnerability of Pinellas County to evacuation problems and the degree of loss that may be suffered from a hurricane is quantified in the Hurricane Evacuation Vulnerability Index. This index is the sum of three indices that represent social, transportation, and geophysical aspects of hazards research. Social vulnerability is assessed with …

Creation, Analysis, And Evaluation Of Remote Sensing Sinkhole Databases For Pinellas County, Florida, Larry D. Seale Jr.

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

A database of likely sinkholes in Pinellas County, Florida, created using airborne laser swath mapping (ALSM a.k.a LIDAR for light detection and ranging), correlates poorly with other databases of likely sinkholes created from modern and historic aerial photographs. Urbanization appears to be the cause of the poor correlation. Buildings obscure much of the ground surface in urban areas, and many man-made depressions can be confused with natural sinkholes. Additionally, the lack of air photos contemporaneous with the ALSM data hinders ALSM analysis in rapidly developing areas.

Selecting a lightly-developed portion of the county for further study reduced the effects of …

A Geographic Information System For Dynamic Ridematching, Sasha Dos-Santos

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The Online Transportation Option System (OTOS) is a Geographic Information System (GIS) that addresses many of the limitations associated with traditional dynamic ridematching applications. The main improvements are in the areas of trip scheduling and match searching. OTOS is unique in its ability to accept trips with schedules that can not be expressed in terms of a regular weekly trip. OTOS also distinguishes itself in its use of spatial analysis techniques to locate matches. Specifically, the use of a shortest path solver enables the ridematching algorithm to perform a search along the path of a user’s trip, in addition to …

Spatial Analysis Of Pedestrian Accidents, Tomoyuki Hashimoto

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Improving traffic safety for pedestrians is an urgent task for the Hillsborough County. The objective of this research is to understand the contributing factors that cause pedestrian accidents in Hillsborough County in the State of Florida. Specifically, this research attempts to determine the effects of demographic, land use, roadway and traffic volume factors on the number of pedestrian accidents. Five hypotheses were proposed to examine these factors. GIS was used to perform spatial analysis. Based on pedestrian accident records from 1999 to 2001, accident density map was created using Kernel density method. The value of the accident density was assigned …