Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Data Driven Approach To Characterize And Forecast The Impact Of Freeway Work Zones On Mobility Using Probe Vehicle Data, Mohsen Kamyab

Wayne State University Dissertations

The presence of work zones on freeways causes traffic congestion and creates hazardous conditions for commuters and construction workers. Traffic congestion resulting from work zones causes negative impacts on traffic mobility (delay), the environment (vehicle emissions), and safety when stopped or slowed vehicles become vulnerable to rear-end collisions. Addressing these concerns, a data-driven approach was utilized to develop methodologies to measure, predict, and characterize the impact work zones have on Michigan interstates. This study used probe vehicle data, collected from GPS devices in vehicles, as the primary source for mobility data. This data was used to fulfill three objectives: develop …

Detroit Food Metrics Report 2018, Alex B. Hill, Amy Kuras

Urban Studies and Planning Faculty Research Publications

This report provides a snapshot of data and information on Detroit’s food system as well as trends over time. The report includes a broad range of programs and initiatives that local organizations, the Detroit Food Policy Council, and the City of Detroit are undertaking to address food insecurity, increase healthy food access and awareness, and support a more sustainable and just food system.

Using Social Media To Assess The Consumer Nutrition Environment: Comparing Yelp Reviews With A Direct Observation Audit Instrument For Grocery Stores, Ying Shen, Philippa Clarke, Iris N. Gomez-Lopez, Alex B. Hill, Daniel M. Romero, Robert Goodspeed, Veronica J. Berrocal, Vg Vinod Vydiswaran, Tiffany C. Veinot

Urban Studies and Planning Faculty Research Publications

Objective
To examine the feasibility of using social media to assess the consumer nutrition environment by comparing sentiment expressed in Yelp reviews with information obtained from a direct observation audit instrument for grocery stores.

Design
Trained raters used the Nutrition Environment Measures Survey in Stores (NEMS-S) in 100 grocery stores from July 2015 to March 2016. Yelp reviews were available for sixty-nine of these stores and were retrieved in February 2017 using the Yelp Application Program Interface. A sentiment analysis was conducted to quantify the perceptions of the consumer nutrition environment in the review text. Pearson correlation coefficients (ρ) were …

The Flint Food Store Survey: Combining Spatial Analysis With A Modified Nutrition Environment Measures Survey In Stores (Nems-S) To Measure The Community And Consumer Nutrition Environments, Erika R. Shaver, Richard C. Sadler, Alex B. Hill, Kendall Bell, Myah Ray, Jennifer Choy-Shin, Joy Lerner, Teresa Soldner, Andrew D. Jones

Urban Studies and Planning Faculty Research Publications

Objective
The goal of the present study was to use a methodology that accurately and reliably describes the availability, price and quality of healthy foods at both the store and community levels using the Nutrition Environment Measures Survey in Stores (NEMS-S), to propose a spatial methodology for integrating these store and community data into measures for defining objective food access.

Setting
Two hundred and sixty-five retail food stores in and within 2 miles (3·2 km) of Flint, Michigan, USA, were mapped using ArcGIS mapping software.

Design
A survey based on the validated NEMS-S was conducted at each retail food store. …

Evaluation Of Milwaukee B And Synchronized As New Service Interchange Designs, Amirarsalan Mehrara Molan

Wayne State University Dissertations

These days, alternative interchanges are attracting the attention of transportation

agencies and designers more than ever. Most of the existing interchanges in the U.S

were built in the 1950s and 1960s when traffic volume was much lower, and the type of

vehicles and driving habits were completely different. Moreover, the knowledge of

highway design and safety is more developed now, and this provides an appropriate

situation to increase the efficiency of interchanges regarding traffic operation and safety

using alternative interchanges.

This research evaluated the performance of two proposed service interchange

designs—the synchronized design which is related to a superstreet intersection …

Detroit Health Department: Lead Report 2016, Abdul El-Sayed, Alex B. Hill, Haifa Haroon

Urban Studies and Planning Faculty Research Publications

The Epidemiology team at the Detroit Health Department rigorously stress- tested Detroit’s lead numbers. The findings suggest a true decline in EBLL levels rather than a decrease in lead testing or a change in the characteristics of the children who are being tested.

Resident-Led Urban Agriculture And The Hegemony Of Neoliberal Community Development: Eco-Gentrification In A Detroit Neighborhood, Theodore Pride

Wayne State University Dissertations

This dissertation employs a Gramscian framework as an alternative approach to understand the utilization of neoliberal community-based development—which advocates free-market schemes to development, and a refocus from institutional and structural causes of poverty to endogenous community forces (social capital and community capacity building)—by low-income residents in hyper-abandoned and disinvested urban neighborhoods. Using a case study of resident-led neighborhood development in the low-income neighborhood of Brightmoor in Detroit, Michigan, I show how “everyday discourse” of urban decline in Detroit and the possible rehabilitation of the city shape the “common sense” understanding of the “problem-and-solution equation” associated with the process of neighborhood …

"Treat Everybody Right:" Multidimensional Foodways In Detroit, Alex B. Hill

Wayne State University Theses

Detroit is assumed to be a “food desert” even with contradicting evidence. With fruits and vegetables available at each of Detroit’s 70+ independent grocery stores, there remains a lack of understanding in consumer preference and perception of nutritional access. It was reported in 2010 that upwards of $200 million in grocery spending leaves the City of Detroit. Throughout the months of July to September 2014, 73 Detroit residents participated in focus groups and group interviews to discuss food purchasing habits and perceptions of food access. Of the 73 participants, 51 completed a Food Purchasing and Eating Patterns (FPEP) survey which …

Analysis Of Queue Characteristics At Signalized Intersections Near Highway-Railroad Grade Crossing, Amna Chaudhry

Wayne State University Dissertations

Analysis of traffic queues at signalized intersections which are in close proximity to highway- railroad grade crossings is of primary importance for determining if the normal signal operation needs to be preempted for railroad operations by providing a special signal mode for safe clearance of the queued vehicles from the tracks before the train arrival, and prohibiting any conflicting traffic movements towards the crossing. Such queuing analysis becomes even more critical where direct observations of traffic queues are not possible or where the assessment is needed for a future location. Inadequate estimation of queues from signalized intersections to the nearby …

Home Foreclosures And Neighborhood Crime Dynamics, Sonya Williams, George Galster, Nandita Verma

Urban Studies and Planning Faculty Research Publications

We advance scholarship related to home foreclosures and neighborhood crime by employing Granger causality tests and multilevel growth modeling with annual data from Chicago neighborhoods over the 1998-2009 period. We find that completed foreclosures temporally lead property crime and not vice versa. More completed foreclosures during a year both increase the level of property crime and slow its decline subsequently. This relationship is strongest in higher-income, predominantly renter-occupied neighborhoods, contrary to the conventional wisdom. We did not find unambiguous, uni-directional causation in the case of violent crime and when filed foreclosures were analyzed.

Neighbourhood Ethnic Composition And Employment Effects On Immigrant Incomes, Roger Andersson, Sako Musterd, George C. Galster

Urban Studies and Planning Faculty Research Publications

Currently in many Western countries there are concerns that clustering of ethnic minorities in certain parts of cities will negatively affect integration processes. Scholarly theory and evidence on this point is mixed, however. We use Swedish data and conduct a panel analysis quantifying the degree to which the ethnic composition of the neighbourhood affects the subsequent labour income of individuals for the 1991 to 2006 period. We employ a fixed effects model to reduce the potential bias arising from unmeasured individual characteristics leading to neighbourhood selection. We also control for a range of individual demographic and socio-economic attributes. Based on …

Evolving United States Metropolitan Land Use Patterns, Andrea Sarzynski, George Galster, Lisa Stack

Urban Studies and Planning Faculty Research Publications

We investigate spatial patterns of residential and non- residential land use for 257 U.S. metropolitan areas in 1990 and 2000, measured with 14 empirical indices. We find that metropolitan areas became denser during the 1990s but developed in more sprawl-like patterns across all other dimensions, on average. By far the largest changes in our land use metrics occurred in the realm of employment, which became more prevalent per unit of geographic area, but less spatially concentrated and further from the historical urban core, on average. Our exploratory factor analyses reveal that four factors summarize land use patterns in both years, …

Investigating The Housing Market For Student Tenants Surrounding An Urban University, Olivia M. Dobbs Ms.

Honors College Theses

The private housing market for students around Wayne State University, an urban campus in Detroit, Michigan, stands in a fast-changing period. The area has grown economically from institutional and medical center investment in the past few years, causing occupancy and rents to rise. This follows years of disinvestment that allowed rent rates to fall to comfortable rates for students. The University has published its interest in developing the “campus life” including more off-campus private market housing for students, while developers see potential for even higher rents for young professionals. This study assesses the current perceptions of a sample of rental …

The Disparate Neighborhood Impacts Of The Great Recession: Evidence From Chicago, Sonya Williams, George C. Galster, Nandita Verma

Urban Studies and Planning Faculty Research Publications

We advance scholarship about how macroeconomic forces differentially manifest themselves across local spaces by developing a holistic conceptual framework and empirical analyses involving multilevel change modeling. Unlike prior work, we examine differential rates of change in neighborhood indicators. We illustrate our approach with Chicago data measuring the crime, housing, and economic domains of neighborhood quality- of-life over the 2000-2009 period. We find that the local dynamic manifestations of macroeconomic cycles were far more nuanced than have been previously observed. Neighborhood indicators moved along distinct trajectories, sometimes but not necessarily tracking each other or the overall business cycle, and they changed …

Does The Endowment Effect Influence Outcomes In Takings Cases? An Exploratory Look At Some Important Cases And Suggestions For Additional Research, Rayman Mohamed

Urban Studies and Planning Faculty Research Publications

The endowment effect predicts that people value losses more than gains. I examine whether the effect sheds light on courts’ takings decisions. My findings include the following: (1) regulations that emphasize losses rather than gains are more likely to survive judicial review; (2) endowments can include comprehensive plans, development plans, permits, etc; (3) both governments and landowners can acquire endowments to sway courts in their favor; (4) occupying land creates a strong endowment; and (5) implementing plans helps to cement endowments. I suggest research that examines more cases, hypotheses that emerge from my analyses, and characteristics of the effect related …

Public Housing Transformation And Crime: Making The Case For Responsible Relocation, Susan J. Popkin, Michael J. Rich, Leah Hendey, Chris Hayes, Joe Parilla, George C. Galster

Urban Studies and Planning Faculty Research Publications

The research in this article examines the effect on crime rates of public housing transformation in Atlanta and Chicago, focusing on the neighborhoods receiving households relocated with housing vouchers. Modeling the complex relationship between voucher holder locations and crime, using quarterly data, our analysis found that crime rates fell substantially in neighborhoods with public housing demolition, whereas destination neighborhoods experienced a much lesser effect than popular accounts imply. Nevertheless, on average, negative effects emerge for some neighborhoods with modest or high densities of relocated households compared with conditions in areas without relocated households. Overall, we estimate small net decreases citywide …

An Integrated Framework For Freight Forwarders:Exploitation Of Dynamic Information For Multimodal Transportation, Farshid Azadian

Wayne State University Dissertations

Advent of real-time information broadcasting technologies, growth in demand for air-cargo, and increased congestion and variability on air-road network, are the main forces compelling today's air-freight forwarders to improve their operational decision-making to be more competitive and responsive to needs of customers. This research studies the air-cargo transportation on both road (short-haul) and air (long haul) network from the perspective of a mid-size freight forwarder.

We develop a routing algorithm for congestion avoidance on air-network based on historical data and introduce an innovative approach to incorporate real-time information to enable dynamic routing of cargo on a stochastic air-network. In the …

A Needs Assessment Of Knowledge, Skills, And Values For Urban Planning Professionals Based On Competencies Set Forth By Professional Planning Organizations, Chade Saghir

Wayne State University Dissertations

Continuing education and training is pivotal in today's fast-paced technology driven society. A profession is defined by the theories and techniques that competent practitioners utilize in their everyday work. Therefore, determining the competencies that practitioners must possess for any given profession is a prerequisite for a respected profession. Most professions are bounded by competencies that are dictated by professional organizations and education programs, yet the real test is how practitioners view these competencies as they relate to their job. For a profession to reach the ultimate goal of improving society the first step is to align professional organization, education, and …

Building Sustainable, Just Food Systems In Detroit: Reflections From Seed Wayne, A Campus-Community Collaborative, Kameshwari Pothukuchi

Urban Studies and Planning Faculty Research Publications

This article describes a campus-community collaborative, SEED Wayne, which was developed to build sustainable food systems on Wayne State University’s campus and in Detroit neighborhoods. The discussion traces the nature of SEED Wayne’s partnerships and reflects on the program’s past three years of existence, including experiences within the university, practical challenges associated with defining sustainability uniformly across diverse campus and community activities, gaining consistent student involvement, and the mutual benefits of the university-community partnership.

The Detroit Food System Report 2009-2010, Kameshwari Pothukuchi

Urban Studies and Planning Faculty Research Publications

Assesses the state of the city’s food system, including activities in production, distribution, consumption, waste generation and composting, nutrition and food assistance program participation and innovative food system programs.

Evaluating The Use Of Steady Burn Warning Lights On Drums For Workzone Safety, Prasad Nannapaneni

Wayne State University Dissertations

Abstract

EVALUATING THE USE OF

STEADY BURN WARNING LIGHTS ON DRUMS

FOR WORK ZONE SAFETY

by

PRASAD LAKSHMI VARA NANNAPANENI

May 2011

Advisor: Dr. Timothy Gates

Major: Civil Engineering

Degree: Doctor of Philosophy

Roadway maintenance and repair has become increasingly commonplace in the United States over the past several decades as our roadway infrastructure has continued to age and deteriorate. Maintenance and repair work on an existing roadway often presents the challenge of maintaining traffic on the existing roadway while work is being performed, thereby necessitating the use of what is commonly referred to as a roadway "work zone". One …

Characteristics And Causal Factors Of Claims In Michigan Highway Construction Projects, Abel K. Sahlool

Wayne State University Dissertations

The US highway system is the largest road network system in the world. MDOT administers about 9,722 route-miles, (28,000 lane-miles) of roadway networks in Michigan. Every year, hundreds of projects worth millions of dollars are let by the State Transportation Agency (STA).

Majority of these projects are successfully completed within the original scope of work, budget, schedule, and without litigation. However; some projects end up in litigation and disputes costing tax payers a great amount of money and the STA a great amount of resources. The number and cost of these construction claims has been substantially increasing in recent years. …

Dynamic Routing On Stochastic Time-Dependent Networks Using Real-Time Information, Ali R. Guner

Wayne State University Dissertations

In just-in-time (JIT) manufacturing environments, on-time delivery is one of the key performance measures for dispatching and routing of freight vehicles. Both the travel time delay and its variability impact the efficiency of JIT logistics operations, that are becoming more and more common in many industries, and in particular, the automotive industry. In this dissertation, we first propose a framework for dynamic routing of a single vehicle on a stochastic time dependent transportation network using real-time information from Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). Then, we consider milk-run deliveries with several pickup and delivery destinations subject to time windows under same network …

Examination Of Factors Affecting The Frequency, Response Time, And Clearance Time Of Incidents On Freeways, Indrajit Ghosh

Wayne State University Dissertations

Traffic incidents are the primary cause of non-recurrent congestion in urban areas, resulting in reductions in roadway capacity and significant safety hazards to other motorists, as well as first responders. Many communities have initiated incident management programs that detect and respond to incidents and restore freeways to full capacity by clearing the incident scene as soon as possible. In the Detroit metro area, the Michigan Department of Transportation (MDOT) operates a Freeway Courtesy Patrol (FCP) program as part of its larger freeway incident management program from the Michigan Intelligent Transportation Systems (MITS) Center in downtown Detroit. The MITS Center maintains …

Choices In Regional Governance Structures: Special Districts As Collaboration Mechanisms, Jayce L. Farmer

Working Group on Interlocal Services Cooperation

This paper uses contextual explanations of regional governance to explore how the limitations to voluntary regionalism can lead to the more centralized, more regulated method of using regional special districts. An ICA perspective is used to discuss the range of choices in institutional arrangements available to jurisdictions. Motivations that jurisdictions may have to use more versus less autonomous methods of ICA are outlined to frame how regional districts fall within this spectrum. A rational choice perspective is also employed to identify the collective and selective benefits that motivate local actors to cooperate, as well as identify the potential transaction cost …

Sustainable Food Systems: Perspectives On Transportation Policy, Kameshwari Pothukuchi, Richard Wallace

Urban Studies and Planning Faculty Research Publications

Global agri-food and transportation systems have dramatically expanded food production and distribution worldwide. This integration, however, also adversely affects human health. The negative effects arise from unequal access to healthy food, unequal access to transportation for agri-food workers, increasing geospatial and economic concentration in the agri-food industry, and an emerging competition between food and fuel. Because the health of individuals is inextricably tied to the health of communities, regions, and ecological systems, health and transportation professionals need to act to both mitigate current disparities and enhance the future viability and sustainability of these systems. This paper offers numerous, specific recommendations …

A New Index For Comparing The Diversity Of Population Inflows And Population Stocks, George Galster, Tatiana Homonoff

Urban Studies and Planning Faculty Research Publications

The paper introduces a new “diversification index” (DIV), which compares the composition of the current or recent population inflow and the composition of pre-existing population stock, with positive (negative) values signifying a process generating more (less) diversity in the stock. Higher absolute values for DIV signify larger differences in the composition of the inflows and the pre-existing stocks of population. DIV is easy to compute and interpret, adaptable to handle population inflows or outflows, and widely applicable to a variety of phenomena.

The paper defines DIV, discusses its properties, and calculates it for several hypothetical cases as a way of …

Confronting Fiscal Stress In Municipal Governments: Support By Michigan Residents For Eight Common Strategies, Jered Carr

Working Group on Interlocal Services Cooperation

This report discusses findings from a survey of 660 randomly selected Michigan residents in winter 2007. The survey examined attitudes of Michigan residents toward eight strategies to resolving situations where current revenues are inadequate to support local services at past levels. The strategies examined fall into two broad categories. The first set (tax increases, state and federal aid) seeks to increase local revenues available to support services at previously existing levels and quality. The second set of strategies focus on reducing the costs of providing services with the objective of maintaining previous levels at a lower cost. This set includes …

Governance By Agreements: Why Do Local Governments Enter Into Multilateral Agreements?, Simon Andrew

Working Group on Interlocal Services Cooperation

While much can be learned about the roles of interjurisdictional agreements between two jurisdictions, little is known about the range and scope of multilateral agreements (MLAs) in the provision of collective goods. Based on the theory of institutional collective action, this paper explores two characteristics of agreements: restrictive and adaptive, and seeks to understand why local governments enter into one arrangement and not the other. This paper argues that the local government decisions to enter into MLAs are influenced by the characteristics of goods and services, the nature of interjurisdictional relations, the geographic configuration of governments, and the number of …

Fiscal Conditions, Political Interests, And Service Outsourcing Decisions: The Case Of Georgia Counties, Ya Anna Ni, Zhirong Jerry Zhao

Working Group on Interlocal Services Cooperation

The question why a government chooses a specific service delivery tool to provide public service to its citizenry is a central intellectual inquiry in public administration. This paper develops a framework to explain the production and sector choices of public services by political-economic environment, organizational capacity, service market condition, and nature of service. Using operation and financial data of Georgia county governments during 2000-2006, we apply the framework to analyze Georgia counties’ public service outsourcing decisions, focusing on the effects of fiscal condition and political interests. The logistic regression results show that the choice of external production is negatively associated …