Urban Studies and Planning Commons^™

Refining The Machine Learning Pipeline For Us-Based Public Transit Systems, Jennifer Adorno

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

According to the Population Division of the United Nations, in the United States, almost 90% of the population will live in urban areas by the year 2050. As the population in a given area increases, higher traffic congestion follows due to an increase of vehicles in the road. A possible way to alleviate congestion could be with widespread use of public transit. However, according to the US Census Bureau, the percentage of individuals commuting through public transportation has been decreasing steadily over time, and the American Community Survey reports that during 2019, only around five percent of the US population …

Measuring Sustainable Development Through Tax Increment Financed Brownfield Redevelopment Statutes: A Florida Case Study, Jeff Burton

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This research measures the theoretically sustainable development synergy of United States’ redevelopment, tax increment, and brownfield statutes and questions local redevelopment professionals on this combination’s implementation. This policy’s integration and application measurements guide increased knowledge and best practice methods in the path of America’s population migration into urbanized areas, thus managing the economic, environmental, and social impacts for future generations.

This examination used a pragmatic, qualitative, and quantitative mixed-method approach to identify, collect, code, and analyze redevelopment, tax increment, and state brownfields laws. An exhaustive literature review of the laws’ histories explained when and why they exist. In addition, a …

Novel Approach To Integrate Can Based Vehicle Sensors With Gps Using Adaptive Filters To Improve Localization Precision In Connected Vehicles From A Systems Engineering Perspective, Abhijit Vasili

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Research and development in Connected Vehicles (CV) Technologies has increased exponentially, with the allocation of 75 MHz radio spectrum in the 5.9 GHz band by the Federal Communication Commission (FCC) dedicated to Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) in 1999 and 30 MHz in the 5.9 GHz by the European Telecommunication Standards Institution (ETSI). Many applications have been tested and deployed in pilot programs across many cities all over the world.

CV pilot programs have played a vital role in evaluating the effectiveness and impact of the technology and understanding the effects of the applications over the safety of road users. The …

Optimization And Machine Learning Methods For Solving Combinatorial Problems In Urban Transportation, Aigerim Bogyrbayeva

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation investigates three applications of emerging technologies for urban trans- portation. In the first chapter, we design a new market for fractional ownership of au- tonomous vehicles (AVs), in which an AV is co-leased by a group of individuals. We present a practical iterative auction based on the combinatorial clock auction to match the interested customers together and determine their payments. In designing such an auction, we con- sider continuous-time items (time slots) which are defined by bidders, and naturally exploit driverless mobility of AVs to form co-leasing groups. To relieve the computational burdens of both bidders and the …

Post-Overlay Flexible Pavement Performance Modeling And Its Application In Sustainable Asphalt Overlay Policy Making, Chunfu Xin

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Highway pavement is a critical component of the highway transportation infrastructure. After the construction of a pavement system, pavement condition will deteriorate over time due to a combination effect of material aging, traffic loading, and environmental impact. To restore the pavement performance and to reduce its adverse effects on public users and environment, asphalt overlay activities are conducted frequently during the service life of a pavement. As a key component that bridges the overlay policies with future pavement performance, economic cost and environmental impact, the forecast accuracy of post-overlay pavement performance model is extremely important. However, most of previous studies …

Algorithms To Profile Driver Behavior From Zero-Permission Embedded Sensors, Bharti Goel

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In this dissertation, we design algorithms to profile driver behavior from zero-permission sensors embedded in modern smartphones and wearables. These sensors are typically the accelerometer, gyroscope, magnetometer, pressure sensor and a few more than are now available in most modern smartphones and wearables. In order to profile driving behavior, we devised algorithms for detecting distraction while driving due to the use of modern-day smartphones (e.g., calling, texting and reading while driving) in real-time.

To do so, we conduct an experiment with 16 subjects on a realistic driving simulator, where each subject, where each subject carries a smartphone and a wearable …

Sundaas Story: A Mixed-Methods Study Of Household Sanitation Provisioning In Urban Informal Housing In India, Sarita Vijay Panchang

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The aims of this research were to examine sanitation insecurity in urban informal housing through the lens of the built environment, social disparities, and health implications. While the Millennium Development Goals for halving the global proportion of people without access to safe drinking water were met ahead of schedule, progress fell short for sanitation, creating new objectives for the Sustainable Development Goals to be met in 2030. Much research in the Global South is dedicated to community-level sanitation promotion, but often presumes a rural rather than urban setting. Urban informal housing settings constitute a unique challenge due to the range …

Improving Service Level Of Free-Floating Bike Sharing Systems, Aritra Pal

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Bike Sharing is a sustainable mode of urban mobility, not only for regular commuters but also for casual users and tourists. Free-floating bike sharing (FFBS) is an innovative bike sharing model, which saves on start-up cost, prevents bike theft, and offers significant opportunities for smart management by tracking bikes in real-time with built-in GPS. Efficient management of a FFBS requires: 1) analyzing its mobility patterns and spatio-temporal imbalance of supply and demand of bikes, 2) developing strategies to mitigate such imbalances, and 3) understanding the causes of a bike getting damaged and developing strategies to minimize them. All of these …

The Effects Of Age And Gender On Pedestrian Traffic Injuries: A Random Parameters And Latent Class Analysis, Tatok Raharjo Raharjo

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Pedestrians are vulnerable road users because they do not have any protection while they walk. They are unlike cyclists and motorcyclists who often have at least helmet protection and sometimes additional body protection (in the case of motorcyclists with body-armored jackets and pants). In the US, pedestrian fatalities are increasing and becoming an ever larger proportion of overall roadway fatalities (NHTSA, 2016), thus underscoring the need to study factors that influence pedestrian-injury severity and potentially develop appropriate countermeasures. One of the critical elements in the study of pedestrian-injury severities is to understand how injuries vary across age and gender ‒ …

A Theoretical And Methodological Framework To Analyze Long Distance Pleasure Travel, Vijayaraghavan Sivaraman

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The United States (US) witnessed remarkable growth in annual long distance travel over the past few decades. Over half of the long distance travel in the US is made for pleasure, including visiting friends and relatives (VFR) and leisure activities. This trend could continue with increased use of information and communication technologies for socialization, and enhanced mobility being achieved using fuel-efficient (electric/hybrid) and technology enhanced vehicles. Despite these developments, and recent interest to implement alternate mass transit options to serve this market, not much exists on the measurement, analysis and modeling of long distance pleasure travel in the U.S.

Statewide …

The Effect Of Urbanization On The Embodied Energy Of Drinking Water In Tampa, Florida, Mark Vincent Eli Santana

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Increasing urbanization has serious implications for resource and energy use. One of these resources is drinking water. The increased amount of impervious surfaces associated with urban development is responsible for increased runoff during rain events, which may have a negative impact on the quality of nearby bodies of water, including drinking water sources. The growing populations associated with urbanization require a higher water demand. In addition, urban drinking water systems use energy to collect, treat, and distribute a safe reliable effluent to users. Therefore, this study focuses on the degree to which urbanization influences the embodied energy of drinking water …

Location And Capacity Modeling Of Network Interchanges, Aldo D. Fabregas

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Network design decisions, especially those pertaining to urban infrastructure, are made by a central authority or network leader, and taking into consideration the network users or followers. These network decision problems are formulated as non-linear bi-level programming problems. In this work, a continuous network design problem (CNDP) and discrete network design problem (DNDP) bi-level optimization programs are proposed and solved in the context of transportation planning. The solution strategy involved reformulation and linearization as a single-level program by introducing the optimality conditions of the lower level problem into the upper level problem. For the CNDP, an alternative linearization algorithm (modified …

Automatic Identification Of Points Of Interest In Global Navigation Satellite System Data: A Spatial Temporal Approach, Khoa Anh Tran

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In addition to the emergence of smartphones and tablets in recent years, the rise of Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) has allowed mobile tracking applications to become popular and be put into many uses. Analyzing tracking records to identify points of interest (POIs) is useful for both prediction applications and research such as human behavior analysis, transportation planning, and especially travel surveys. Past research in travel surveys has shown that a GPS mobile phone-based survey is a useful tool for collecting information about individuals. Moreover, a passive travel survey collection is preferred to an active travel survey method by the …

Spatial Distribution Of Nitrogen Oxides, Benzene, Toluene, Ethylbenzene, And Xylenes In Hillsborough County, Florida: An Investigation Of Impacts Of Urban Forests On Ambient Concentrations Of Air Pollutants Associated With Traffic, Jill Sears

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Urban air pollution is responsible for high levels of morbidity and mortality in exposed populations due to its effects on cardiovascular and respiratory function. Transportation-related air pollutants account for the majority of harmful air pollution in urban areas. Forests are known to reduce air pollution through their ability to facilitate dry deposition and atmospheric gas exchange. This work characterizes the interactions between transportation air pollutants and urban forests in Hillsborough County, Florida. A highly spatially resolved passive air sampling campaign was conducted to characterize local concentrations of nitrogen oxides, benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene, and xylenes (BTEX) in Hillsborough County, Florida. Sampling …