Urban Studies Commons^™

Does Compact Development Increase Or Reduce Congestion?, Reid Ewing

TREC Project Briefs

The net effects of sprawl or compact development on area-wide traffic congestion have been a subject of debate among transportation researchers.

This project aims to settle the debate using:

• Congestion data from the Texas Transportation Institute’s Urban Mobility Scorecard database;
• Compactness/sprawl metrics developed at the University of Utah.

Compact development may help at the margin, but the greatest reduction in congestion appears to be achieved through expansion of surface streets and higher highway user fees.

Portland Msa Economic & Population Outlook October 2017, Thomas Potiowsky, Portland State University. Northwest Economic Research Center

Northwest Economic Research Center Publications and Reports

NERC's binannual forecast of employment, income, housing permits, and house prices for the Portland MSA. The October release does not reiterate the population forecast from the April edition, but does include a long-run income forecast.

Connecting Wikipedia And The Archive: Building A Public History Of Hiv/Aids In New York City., Ann Matsuuchi

Publications and Research

This is an overview of a project that was started in 2015 that was collaboratively designed by archivists and historians with the La Guardia & Wagner Archives and LaGuardia Community College’s faculty/librarians. It involves students in the production of a needed public history of the outbreak and impact of HIV/AIDS in New York City via writing and researching contributions to Wikipedia.

Zycie W Ameryce: Life In America (Poster), Brynn A. Cotter

Summer Research Program

Poster complementing author's summer research project exploring the history of the Polish-American community of Worcester, Massachusetts centered on the parish of Our Lady of Czestochowa and how its members responded to the forces of Americanization. Research in area archives such as the Worcester Historical Museum, the Worcester Public Library, and at Our Lady of Czestochowa’s rectory and its parish school of Saint Mary’s, as well as oral history interviews with past and longtime members of the community test the assumption that the story of Worcester’s Polish community is one of loss and decline. On the contrary, Polish-American efforts to preserve …

The Effects Of Demand-Responsive Parking On Transit Usage And Congestion: Evidence From Sfpark, Nicole S. Ngo, Chandra Kiran Krishnamurth

TREC Final Reports

Parking is a serious issue in many urban areas, especially those experiencing rapid population growth. To address this problem, some cities have implemented demand-responsive pricing programs, where parking prices vary depending on the occupancy rate in a previous period. Yet, few empirical studies have rigorously evaluated these programs, though they have the potential to improve turnover and much needed parking availability in growing cities with limited infrastructure. In this study, we investigate the impacts of SFpark, a demand-responsive pricing parking program in San Francisco that began in 2011. We focus on metered, on-street parking and exploit the timing of SFpark …

Identifying Clusters Of Non-Farm Activity Within Exclusive Farm Use Zones In The Northern Willamette Valley, Nicholas Chun

Dissertations and Theses

This thesis provides an extensive look at where permitted non-farm uses and dwellings have clustered within Exclusive Farm Use (EFU) zones in the Northern Willamette Valley in Oregon. There is a looming concern that non-farm related uses and dwellings, or non-farm development, are conflicting with agricultural preservation strategies. Specifically, non-farm developments can potentially undermine the critical mass of farmland needed to keep the agricultural economy sustainable, but until now, studies have lacked spatially precise data to systematically track these phenomena. This thesis offers methodological contributions towards analyzing these operations and presents a broad account of what has been occurring in …

Zycie W Ameryce: Life In America, Brynn A. Cotter

Summer Research Program

My project explores the history of the Polish-American community of Worcester, Massachusetts centered on the parish of Our Lady of Czestochowa and how its members responded to the forces of Americanization. Like many ethnic groups new to America, Polish-Americans and Polish immigrants in the twentieth century had to adapt in a world that demanded conformity in exchange for social mobility and departure from tradition and community. Over eight weeks, I conducted research in area archives such as the Worcester Historical Museum, the Worcester Public Library, and at Our Lady of Czestochowa’s rectory and its parish school of Saint Mary’s, as …

Unsupervised Load Shape Clustering For Urban Building Performance Assessment, Jimeno A. Fonseca, Clayton Miller, Arno Schlueter

Research Collection College of Integrative Studies

This paper presents a method to automatically cluster typical days of energy consumption in one or several buildings. The method is based on an optimized version of the Symbolic Aggregate approXimation (SAX) method. SAX is a data mining technique for clustering time series with recent applications in building fault detection and building performance assessment. The number of clusters and accuracy of SAX highly depends on two highly sensitive input variables, i.e., the word size and the alphabet size. We propose the use of the genetic algorithm NSGA-II to optimize the number of words and alphabet size of SAX subjected to …

Travel To Food: Transportation Barriers For The Food Insecure In Tampa Bay, Kevin Salzer, Ann Joslin

TREC Final Reports

In partnership with the Center for Urban Transportation Research (CUTR) at the University of South Florida (USF), the Transportation Innovation Group informed practical transportation solutions aimed at improved food access in Tampa Bay (Hillsborough, Pinellas and Pasco counties). The food pantry/bank sites that are part of Tampa Bay Network to End Hunger (TBNTEH) helped to gather data through a survey and interviews of food-related organizational leadership, staff and volunteers from each site to gain insight into how clients currently access emergency food sites (qualitative). This information was supplemented with a GIS analysis of transit accessibility for the food insecure in …

Transportation Access For The Food Insecure, Ann Joslin

TREC Project Briefs

A NITC small starts project explores transportation barriers for Tampa Bay’s food insecure population, and recommends strategies to help.

Webinar: Breaking Barriers To Bike Share: Insights On Equity, Nathan Mcneil, Jennifer Dill, John Macarthur

TREC Webinar Series

While the number of public bike share systems in the United States grew considerably in recent years, early evidence indicated that many systems were not serving the diverse populations of cities, particularly lower-income residents and people of color. Lack of bike share stations in neighborhoods with people of color and/or lower incomes is one factor; however, considerable disparities appear to persist even when stations are placed in these communities.

Efforts to overcome access and use barriers (such as cost, payment options, and familiarity with the system) to bike share for underserved communities have been initiated in a number of cities. …

Decoding Nopd's Thin Blue Line, Thomas Harrington

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

The New Orleans Police Department history dates back to the 1800’s. Since its inception, the department has been pledged by misconduct, low morale, and low public opinion. This research used Akers Social Structure, and Social learning theory or SSSL to understand the socialization process of the department and determine if the process could attribute for misconduct, the blue wall of silence, and the thin blue line.

A case study was conducted in which twenty former NOPD officers on the department from 1979 to 2004 were interviewed. They were only identified by race, gender, and the number of years on the …

Tod Beats Tad In Affordability Showdown, Brenda Scheer

TREC Project Briefs

A research project compares transportation affordability between transitoriented development (TOD) and transit-adjacent development (TAD).

How Does Transportation Affordability Vary Among Tods, Tads, And Other Areas?, Brenda Scheer, Reid Ewing, Keunhyun Park, Shabnam Sifat Ara Khan

TREC Final Reports

Transit-oriented development (TOD) has gained popularity worldwide as a sustainable form of urbanism; it concentrates development near a transit station so as to reduce auto-dependency and increase ridership. Existing travel behavior studies in the context of TOD, however, are limited in terms of small sample size, inconsistent TOD classification methods, and failure to control for residential self-selection. Thus, this study has three research questions. First, how can we distinguish between Transit-oriented development (TOD) and Transit-adjacent development (TAD)? Second, how do travel behaviors vary between TODs and TADs? Third, how does transportation affordability vary between TODs and TADs? This study utilizes …

Talking The Walk: An Autoethnography Of Pedestrianism In Chicagoland, Andrew Kuka

Student Research – Stevenson Center

This autoethnographic account of pedestrianism in Chicagoland aims to remind us of the sensory, social, and emotional experiences walking can provide, and how an environment centered around automobiles affects those experiences. It utilizes participant observations and refers to literature from a wide range of disciplines to construct a story of walks in downtown Aurora and Chicago, Illinois that illuminates factors at play in the shaping of the pedestrian experience in urban areas.

World Changers: Inspiring Cultural And Linguistic Excellence In Children, Parents And Teachers, Ana I. Berdecia Med, Caitlin Kosec Mpp, The John S. Watson Institute For Public Policy For Thomas Edison State College

Center for the Positive Development of Urban Children

The New Jersey Cultural Competency and English Language Learners Summer Institute and Mentoring Program hosted its 10th Anniversary, Three-Day Learning Institute, Aug. 23-25, 2016, with the theme, World Changers: Inspiring Cultural and Linguistic Excellence for Children, Parents and Teachers. After the Three- Day Learning Institute, classroom teachers were assigned a mentor who provided monthly supports to the classroom teachers in the adoption English language learners and cultural competency strategies with the goal of creating culturally and linguistic responsive classrooms. Twenty-three teachers from Trenton Public Schools were recruited and received 21 hours of training in best practices for engaging diverse …

A Cross-Sectional Exploration Of Household Financial Reactions And Homebuyer Awareness Of Registered Sex Offenders In A Rural, Suburban, And Urban County., John Charles Navarro

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

As stigmatized persons, registered sex offenders betoken instability in communities. Depressed home sale values are associated with the presence of registered sex offenders even though the public is largely unaware of the presence of registered sex offenders. Using a spatial multilevel approach, the current study examines the role registered sex offenders influence sale values of homes sold in 2015 for three U.S. counties (rural, suburban, and urban) located in Illinois and Kentucky within the social disorganization framework. Homebuyers were surveyed to examine whether awareness of local registered sex offenders and the homebuyer’s community type operate as moderators between home selling …

Knowing Nature In The City: Comparative Analysis Of Knowledge Systems Challenges Along The 'Eco-Techno' Spectrum Of Green Infrastructure In Portland & Baltimore, Annie Marissa Matsler

Dissertations and Theses

Green infrastructure development is desired in many municipalities because of its potential to address pressing environmental and social issues. However, despite technical optimism, institutional challenges create significant barriers to effective green infrastructure design, implementation, and maintenance. Institutional challenges stem from the disparate scales and facility types that make up the concept of green infrastructure, which span from large-scale natural areas to small engineered bioswales. Across these disparate facilities 1) different performance metrics are used, 2) different institutions have jurisdiction, and, 3) facility types are differentially classified as assets, producing epistemological and ontological variegation across the spectrum of green infrastructure that …

Rogue Disposal & Recycling Simplified Refuse Rate Index: Technical Report, Peter Hulseman, Emma Willingham, Peter Whitehead, Northwest Economic Research Center

Northwest Economic Research Center Publications and Reports

As regulated franchises, waste management services are required to have all rate adjustments approved by local governing bodies. This typically involves supporting the requested adjustment with financial and operational data. The cost-intensive nature of this process limits its frequency. Many jurisdictions conduct a formal review every five years, with interim rates set using a proxy for marginal cost changes, typically an index such as the Consumer Price Index (CPI)1. Rogue Disposal & Recycling (RDR) is governed in such a way in several of the jurisdictions it serves. The central reason for this report is that the CPI has not proven …

Webinar: Land Use Mix And Pedestrian Travel Behavior: Advancements In Conceptualization And Measurement, Steven R. Gehrke

TREC Webinar Series

Smart growth policies have often emphasized the importance of land use mix as an intervention beholding of lasting urban planning and public health benefits. Past transportation-land use research has identified potential efficiency gains achieved by mixed-use neighborhoods and the subsequent shortening of trip lengths; whereas, public health research has accredited increased land use mixing as an effective policy for facilitating greater physical activity.

However, despite the celebrated transportation, land use, and health benefits of improved land use mixing and the extent of topical attention, no consensus has been reached regarding the conceptualization and measurement of this key smart growth principle …