Urban Studies and Planning Commons^™

Introduction To Data Science For Transportation Researchers, Planners, And Engineers, Liming Wang

TREC Final Reports

Building on the successful scientific computing training program offered by the Software Carpentry (http://www.software-carpentry.org/), this course exposes students to the best practices in data science through hands-on lab sessions. Using transportation data and examples, it also aims to help students tackle the challenge of “drinking from a hose” when dealing with the overwhelming amount of data that is increasingly common in transportation research and practice.

Although computing is now an integral part of every aspect of science and engineering, transportation research included, most students of science, engineering, and planning are never taught how to build, use, validate, and share software …

The History And Development Of British Tramways And The Impacts That It Had, Noam Schuldenrein

Honors College Theses

The thesis is about the general history of the British tramways and how they developed throughout England in the nineteenth century. It includes their general development; how it affected England economically; how it affected England demographically; and how it affected the surrounding neighborhoods in England.

Designing Urban Policy For A Thriving New Jersey • New Jersey Urban Mayors Association Addresses Policy Priorities, Thomas Edison State University, Evan Weiss, New Jersey Urban Mayors Association

Urban Mayors Policy Center

Cities are the Solution, Not the Problem:

While decades of suburban development might suggest otherwise, New Jersey is at its core an urban state. It is dense, covered by one of the largest transit networks in the country and incredibly diverse. Every region of the state has great livable cities, with small, midsized and large cities all represented — most states are lucky to have just a handful. But, for decades, new jersey cities have too often been portrayed as problems that need to be fixed. As the economic and lifestyle preferences of future generations shift back toward cities and …

Voices Of Cully: A Case Study Of The Living Cully Weatherization And Home Repair Project 2.0, Lucy J.T. Cultrera

Cal Poly Humboldt theses and projects

The Cully neighborhood is situated in the Northeast quadrant of Portland, Oregon. It is 2.75 square mile plot of land and home to roughly 13,000 people. In addition to being one of the most diverse neighborhoods in Portland, it is the most densely populated, with the smallest amount of parkland per capita. Over the last two decades, home value has increased 203% in Cully, compared to a 90% citywide increase. Amidst these development trends are stories of incredible resilience, resistance and activism from the affected community. My project is a case study of one anti-displacement initiative, which was developed and …

The Lloyd Public Space Plan, Stuart Campbell, Àlvaro Caviedes, Ben Kahn, Raina Smith-Roller, Daniel Scheppke, Layne Wyse

Master of Urban and Regional Planning Workshop Projects

This plan defines a set of recommended strategies for enhancing and activating public spaces in Lloyd that fall within three main themes: Safe Lloyd, Collective Lloyd, and Dynamic Lloyd. Implementing these actions will help realize a new vision of Lloyd: A vibrant community filled with activities and amenities for people at different times of the day, days of the week, and months of the year.

The report Measuring Public Space is included here as a supplemental file.

Umatilla Together, Amber Ayers, Belen Herrera, Carlos Callava, Nate Miller, Samuel Roberts, Laura Voss

Master of Urban and Regional Planning Workshop Projects

Umatilla Together sets the stage for great opportunities and seeks to inspire the residents of Umatilla to imagine what your city could be: a truly desirable place to live, work, learn, and play. Great places are not created by accident. They are the result of a vision, leadership, planning, public investment, unrelenting tenacity on the part of city champions, and strategic, meaningful partnerships.

Summary Umatilla Together plans in English and Spanish are included here as supplemental files.

All Roads Lead To The Fair: How A 2022 Los Angeles World's Fair Would Accelerate The Implementation Of Sustainable And Innovative Forms Of Transportation, Isabella Levin

Scripps Senior Theses

This thesis explores the potential impact of a World’s Fair on urban mobility in Los Angeles County by 2022. A brief historical account of World’s Fairs, and their impact on technological innovations in transportation will be given in conjunction with the development of transportation in Los Angeles. These accounts will help to contextualize an analysis of current plans to provide Los Angeles with transportation solutions, in light of the oversaturated automobile landscape in place today. Specifically, my research has revealed that the further development of light-speed rail systems paired alongside a mass adoption of autonomous vehicles would both alleviate contemporary …

St. Johns Housing Action Plan, Jai Singh, Julia Michel, Andres Oswill, Gabriel Rousseau, Ludwig Salzmann, Eric Rutledge

Master of Urban and Regional Planning Workshop Projects

The St. Johns Housing Action Plan (Action Plan) is designed to serve vulnerable St. Johns residents who are first to feel the impacts of increased housing costs and market pressures. It also intends to capture the support of residents who are not at risk of displacement but realize that the neighborhood change they fear is partly fueled by housing instability.

Brentwood-Darlington: Say Our Name! Neighborhood Assessment And Action Plan, Laura Combs, Samuel Garcia, Olivia Holden, Amanda Howell, Andrea Pastor, Shannon Williams

Master of Urban and Regional Planning Workshop Projects

We wrote this plan with two audiences in mind: the city agencies that will be responsible for the large scale capital improvement projects; and engaged neighborhood residents who will be the steadfast advocates driving the direction of Brentwood-Darlington’s evolution. Our hope is the plan serves as a guide and a touchstone—a reminder of where the neighborhood has been, and an arrow pointing the way to the community’s shared vision of the future.

Rethink Nw 13th: Nw 13th Phased Action Plan, Cassandra Dobson, Courtney Simms, Dylan Johnstone, Geoff Gibson, Russ Doubleday, Santiago Mendez

Master of Urban and Regional Planning Workshop Projects

NW 13th has its own set of challenges and opportunities that set it apart from other streets in the Portland Pearl District. This plan refocuses the historic district street around the pedestrian, placing all other modes as secondary to the experience and comfort of those walking on the street. Creating a plan for the pedestrian includes creating stronger bonds with the residents, businesses, and services that run the street’s entire length.

Two appendices: Community Engagement, and Existing Conditions, are included here as supplemental files.

Columbia View Park Expansion Plan: St. Helens, Oregon, Paul Gagliardi, Jonathan Morales, Takayuki Shigematsu, Deme Shor, Nathan Williams

Master of Urban and Regional Planning Workshop Projects

Vista Planning led public engagement surrounding a waterfront park expansion to help determine how the City should expand and renovate Columbia View Park. Between March and June 2017 Vista Planning ran engagement activities to learn about the local community, build interest around the park expansion and broader framework plan, and ultimately develop a preliminary site plan based on community input.

Issues In Trip Generation Methods For Transportation Impact Estimation Of Land Use Development: A Review And Discussion Of The State-Of-The-Art Approaches, Kristina Marie Currans

Civil and Environmental Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

As agencies develop more robust planning objectives for creating sustainable and livable communities, the research community has continued developing supportive tools and methods to provide more accurate and robust means for estimating transportation impacts for site-level development review. This paper is a review of the state-of-the-art trip generation methods for land use transportation impact estimation. First, it provides an overview of the more recent available and peer-reviewed estimation methods. Second, the authors offer a discussion of the successes of state-of-the-art approaches using common themes of research to identify corresponding consistency with theories of travel behavior and urban economics. These themes …

Accessibility, Income, And Person Trip Generation: Multilevel Model Of Activity At Food Retail Establishments In Portland, Oregon, Kristina Marie Currans, Kelly Clifton

Civil and Environmental Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

In the past decade, the methods for estimating multimodal transportation impacts of urban land use development have improved substantially. One assumption commonly made in these new methods is that overall person-trip rates at similarly-sized establishments of the same land use do not vary across a region. This is an assumption of convenience to permit the adjustment of ITE Trip Generation vehicle trip rates for use in different urban environments. However, this assumption is inconsistent with theories of urban economics, which recognize that businesses pay a premium to locate in areas with high levels of accessibility to attract more customers. In …

The Political Water Web Of The United States, Omar Hammad

Dissertations and Theses

The United States’ water systems are interstate in their nature; these systems are governed by Congressional compact agreements. Water compacts have been influenced by common factors that have reverberated throughout the water-web of the country. These impacts varied in their scale, national level federal regulations, such as the Endangered Species Act of 1973, and recent concerns about climate change are macro-scale influences. Localized drivers such as regional economics and population change are localized impacts. While these concepts and issues influence water compacts as a whole, their impacts occur at different periods, albeit for the same reason. As such, we see …

The Tea Party Versus Planning: A Study Of Tea Party Activism And Its Impact On Local Government Planning, Spencer A. Norman

Theses and Dissertations

The Tea Party movement’s effect on local and regional planning in Virginia has received little study. This work identifies how conservative political activism has impacted planning in the Commonwealth and how planners have responded. The study relies on a qualitative approach involving 22 semi-structured interviews with activists, planners, and citizens, as well as textual analyses of planning documents, local and regional news reports, and Tea Party social media. The resultant findings show that Tea Party activism is rooted in deep seated ideals about private property rights and individualism. It also reveals that planning processes that increased the amount of public …

Roots Of A Movement: Community Action And The Impact Of Urban Agriculture In Chicago, Maia Welbel

Pomona Senior Theses

Efforts to maintain a relationship to food pathways have been consistent throughout U.S. history despite the general evolution towards an increasingly industrialized food system. Urban agriculture serves as a means of reclaiming and furthering knowledge of where food comes from while also addressing larger social, economic, and environmental goals. This has been demonstrated in Chicago where urban farmers have worked to improve food access, increase employment, and revitalize communities all across the city. For many years, federal policies have promoted maximum production of commodity crops and kept supermarket prices low, allowing the government to ignore the impacts these policies are …

The Economic Impact Of City-County Consolidations: A Synthetic Control Approach, Joshua Hall, Josh Matti, Yang Zhou

Economics Faculty Working Papers Series

Although more rapid development is a primary motivation behind city-county consolidations, few empirical studies explore the impact of consolidation on economic development. No studies look at government consolidation in the United States using modern causal inference methods. We use the synthetic control method (SCM) to examine the long-term impact of city-county consolidations on per capita income, population, and employment. The results from the three cases explored indicate that consolidation does not guarantee development and actually can have negative effects. Additionally, consolidation can deepen the urban-rural divide by accelerating the decline of rural populations relative to those of urban areas. The …

Assessing State Efforts To Integrate Transportation, Land Use And Climate, Rebecca Lewis, Robert Zako

TREC Final Reports

Climate change is increasingly recognized as a threat to life on earth. “Continued emission of greenhouse gases will cause further warming and long-lasting changes in all components of the climate system, increasing the likelihood of severe, pervasive and irreversible impacts for people and ecosystems. Limiting climate change would require substantial and sustained reductions in greenhouse gas emissions” (International Panel on Climate Change, 2014, 8).

The transportation sector accounts for almost one-third of all greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) in the United States. Reducing GHG from transportation rests on the “three-legged stool” of improving vehicle efficiency, reducing the carbon content of fuels …

Do People’S Perceptions Of Neighborhood Bikeability Match “Reality”?, Liang Ma, Jennifer Dill

Urban Studies and Planning Faculty Publications and Presentations

Do people perceive the built environment the same as we objectively measure it? If not, what are the relative roles of the objective versus the perceived environment on bicycling behavior? This study, based on data from Portland, Oregon, explored the match or mismatch between the objective and perceived bicycling environment and how it affects people’s bicycling behavior. The descriptive analysis indicated a fair agreement between perceived and objective measures. Older adults, women having children, less-educated and lower-income persons, and those who bicycle less tended to perceive their high-bikeable environment (measured objectively) as being a low-bikeable environment. In addition to the …

Periodic Atlas Of The Metroscape: The Geography Of Future Housing, Randy Morris, Sheila Martin

Metroscape

In this edition of the Periodic Atlas, we provide a glimpse of housing construction that has been permitted over the past few years, with a focus on multifamily housing. Focusing on recently-permitted units provides a perspective on how the newest housing is and will be different from existing housing. The type of housing that will be built, where it is built, its characteristics, and its price will shape the Portland region in the years to come.

Better Outcomes: Improving Accountability & Transparency In Transportation Decision-Making, Robert Zako, Rebecca Lewis

TREC Final Reports

This report aims to help policymakers and staff at all levels of government make transportation investments that serve the public better.

Amazingly, we simply don’t know how effective government spending is at achieving the outcomes the public expects and has been promised! Clearly, taxpayer dollars buy roads, bus service, airports, ferry service, and other transportation facilities and services. But it is unclear how well such investments help get people where they want to go, create jobs, improve public health, support community development, and provide other benefits. In other words, it is uncertain how cost-effectively the means (transportation investments) achieve the …

Community Land Trusts: A Help Or Hindrance To Community Development In The United States, Andrew Kuka

Student Research – Stevenson Center

The availability of affordable housing in the United States continues to be an issue for Americans who are on the brink of homelessness, rely on housing subsidies, or struggle to pay their mortgages or rents. These issues, as well as the gentrification threat that community development poses to low-income residents can have deleterious effects on democratic participation and community development efforts. One proposed solution to these problems is the implementation of more community land trust programs nationally. This paper will assess the practicality of CLTs, and what such an implementation would mean for individuals, government entities, community members, and community …

Robocar Risks, Michael Lewyn

Scholarly Works

Suggests that policymakers should not widen roads or stringently enforce anti-jaywalking laws in order to accommodate autonomous vehicles.

The Potential And Limits Of Extended Producer Responsibility: A Comparative Analysis Study, Jessica Bass

CMC Senior Theses

This thesis draws on the concept of product stewardship and its focus on incorporating all of the actors in a product’s lifecycle into steps to take responsibility for waste management. Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) recognizes the producer’s distinct potential to consider and drive change in waste management. Producers often serve like mediators between the design and use phases of a product’s lifecycle. Through EPR policies, the producer takes on the costs of ensuring safe end-of-life waste disposal. In this way, EPR can be expected to help relieve the public of some of the costs of waste disposal, and to support …

Oceans Of Space, Stephanie Steinbrecher '16

EnviroLab Asia

"Oceans of Space" relates my observations of the 2016 EnviroLab Asia Clinic Trip to Singapore and Sarawak, Malaysia. In this meditation, the concept of space serves as a lens to examine assumptions of geopolitical, historical, and philosophical positioning—regionally and globally. At the center of my inquiry is EnviroLab's connection to the Dayak communities in Baram, Sarawak. This region is experiencing dramatic social and ecological change as a result of industrial development. By triangulating my subjective impressions of this space, various knowledge systems, and the qualitative data EnviroLab gathered in Southeast Asia, I aim to untangle some paradoxes that complicate the …

Regulation Of Recreational Marijuana In Small Cities And Counties In Colorado, Katherine Nesse, Colin Victory

SPU Works

In November 2016 the number of states where recreational marijuana sales are legal increased to eight. Thousands of cities and counties are now on the front lines of regulating these new land uses. Local governments in Colorado, the first state to implement recreational marijuana legalization, are models for jurisdictions in other states. We study counties and municipalities in the eight micropolitan statistical areas in Colorado to learn how they regulate recreational marijuana businesses. We reviewed codes, ordinances, and other documents of 43 local governments and interviewed planners in a third of these jurisdictions. These places were purposefully selected and reflect …

Peak Pedaling: Has Portland Bicycling Reached The Top Of The Logistic Curve?, Robert Mccullough

PSU Transportation Seminars

The recent City Club report on bicycling provided an opportunity to collect and analyze a number of data sets including the new Hawthorne Bridge data. One question is where Portland bicycling on the logistic curve -- a common tool for judging the maturity of a developing product or activity. Logistic curves are used for marketing, for epidemiology, and even for visits to Indian owned casinos. The preliminary evidence is that we are reaching the horizontal area of the curve. Additional evidence Our further research into future policies indicates a shift to bicycle boulevards in order to attract more risk averse …

Data Profiles-Rhode Island-Burriville, John C. Brown, Richard A. Ramsawak, James R. Gomes

Mosakowski Institute for Public Enterprise

We continue support the Federal Bank of Boston “Working Cities” challenge which aims to support social and economic recovery of underperforming small and mid-sized cities in the New England region. We continue to extend our data profiles of these cities located in Massachusetts, Rhode Island and now Connecticut. It is our hope that these data ‘rich” profiles which includes key indicators on health, population and demographic changes, industrial growth, and educational performance can not only support policy development in these targeted areas, but also help in monitoring the progress these cities make over time.

Data Profiles-Rhode Island-Central Falls, John C. Brown, Richard A. Ramsawak, James R. Gomes

Mosakowski Institute for Public Enterprise

We continue support the Federal Bank of Boston “Working Cities” challenge which aims to support social and economic recovery of underperforming small and mid-sized cities in the New England region. We continue to extend our data profiles of these cities located in Massachusetts, Rhode Island and now Connecticut. It is our hope that these data ‘rich” profiles which includes key indicators on health, population and demographic changes, industrial growth, and educational performance can not only support policy development in these targeted areas, but also help in monitoring the progress these cities make over time.

Data Profiles-Rhode Island-Cranston, John C. Brown, Richard A. Ramsawak, James R. Gomes

Mosakowski Institute for Public Enterprise

We continue support the Federal Bank of Boston “Working Cities” challenge which aims to support social and economic recovery of underperforming small and mid-sized cities in the New England region. We continue to extend our data profiles of these cities located in Massachusetts, Rhode Island and now Connecticut. It is our hope that these data ‘rich” profiles which includes key indicators on health, population and demographic changes, industrial growth, and educational performance can not only support policy development in these targeted areas, but also help in monitoring the progress these cities make over time.