Organizational Unit:

School of City and Regional Planning

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https://hdl.handle.net/1853/70772

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Organizational Unit

College of Design

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Organizational Unit

Eco Urban Lab

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https://finding-aids.library.gatech.edu/agents/corporate_entities/1122

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Publication Search Results

Now showing 1 - 10 of 240

Participatory Science for Data Feminism: Application of an original feminist framework for assessing participatory datasets in urban planning decision-making

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2023-07-31) Khorashahi, Yasamin

The purpose of this study is to characterize participatory data science as an effective feminist framework for urban planning decision-making and assess its efficacy in achieving planning outcomes through a climate-oriented case study (UrbanHeatATL) in the Atlanta context. Cities are trending towards rapid digitization, and scholarship on Big and small data suggests that emerging methods of data collection and implementation are inherently biased because they disassemble individual identities into single-dimensional data points. Feminist epistemology suggests that meeting communities where they are when making policy decisions through practices such as participatory data collection and governance is an effective way to reduce bias against marginalized individuals and their communities. The UrbanHeatATL case is assessed against an original feminist framework for assessment of participatory science, the Participatory Science for Data Feminism (PSDF) framework. The PSDF framework has three dimensions: 1) participatory metadata, which addresses question of who is participating in data collection, how data are being collected, and who these data will represent; 2) data for power/data for liberation seeks to characterize why data are being collected and what stories are being told by the data; and 3) efficacy in planning outcomes is to assess whether these data are being collected as a means for implementation of plans and policy to lead to more equitable outcomes for marginalized communities. The project followed data feminism principles of data collection and told a compelling narrative about heat-vulnerable communities, but gaps remain in translating datasets into equitable planning and policy outcomes. Steps need to be taken by planning decision-makers and researchers to better integrate community participation into data collection by making technology more accessible. Researchers must also work directly with planning decision-makers before, during, and after the data collection process to determine a path forward for policy and planning outcomes.
Explore pedestrian route choice preferences by demographic groups: analysis of street attributes in Chicago

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2023-05-15) Lieu, Seung Jae

Traditional transit accessibility models often overlook travel behavior and fine-grained transit characteristics experienced during first and last-mile walking. Existing models typically assume travelers choose the shortest walking path to minimize travel time, but studies suggest pedestrians do not always follow this pattern. This study investigates pedestrian route choice preferences in Chicago, Illinois, using a diverse dataset of home-based work walking trajectories collected from a smartphone application. The impact of street attributes on route choice is examined, and a comparison is made of how built environment factors influence preferences among different demographic groups. A path-size logit model with a constrained enumeration approach-based choice set is employed for analysis. This study also addresses two gaps in pedestrian route choice research. First, unlike most studies that use data constrained to a particular study area or limited participant groups, this research employs a diverse dataset of actual walking trajectories covering a wide range of destinations and participant profiles. Second, this study utilizes GPS data, offering more accurate route choice analysis compared to questionnaires. Such surveys may suffer from recall bias, and they may not capture route choice variability across different times and days. The findings from this study indicate that factors such as distance, the number of amenities and establishments, sky visibility, greenery, and park accessibility along the route significantly influence route choice. While route distance and the number of establishments have a negative impact on preference, other factors positively affect route selection. To compare the effect of each variable across gender, age, and income, this study has operationalized the coefficients to use the concept of ‘equivalent walking distance.' This measure quantifies the incremental disutility resulting from various route attributes, represented as an equivalent increase or decrease in walking distance. The analysis shows that male pedestrians are more willing to walk further when there is greater sky visibility. Similarly, individuals aged over 30 years old tend to walk longer distances with increased sky visibility. Notably, we found no significant variables influencing route choice among different income groups.
Evaluating Long–Term MARTA Ridership Effects of the 2017 I–85 Bridge Collapse

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2022-05-25) Brandel-Tanis, Freyja Alice

In March 2017, an overpass on I–85 in Atlanta caught fire and collapsed, disrupting traffic for 43 days while the Georgia Department of Transportation (GDOT) rebuilt the bridge. During this time, transit ridership increased as commuters reacted to the changes in travel time, thanks in part to concerted efforts to expand service by the Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority (MARTA). Ridership declined after GDOT restored service but remained higher than pre-disaster levels, requiring further research to understand how long the effect lasted. Multiple linear regression models are used to investigate the relationship between 2019 ridership and origins and destinations affected by the bridge collapse. Travel time matrices from the Atlanta Regional Commission’s (ARC) Activity Based Model (ABM) are used to identify Traffic Analysis Zones (TAZs) with notable service impacts and choose comparable regions. The weighted trip counts from the ARC’s 2010 and 2019 onboard transit surveys map transit trips to origin and destination TAZs. When controlling for MARTA’s service quantity, residential and employment population, and the percent of households without access to a vehicle (choice riders), the models found a significant relationship between the region impacted by the bridge collapse and an increase in MARTA rail trips and MARTA trips by patrons who could have used a vehicle. A significant increase in choice rail ridership from the impacted TAZs, those most likely to have switched during the network disruption of 2017, suggests that the bridge collapse’s impact on MARTA riders lasted until at least the fall of 2019, over two years after the inciting network disruption.
Sustainable Funding Mechanisms for Recreational Trails

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2022-05-03) Bray, Vincent Micah

Recreational trails are a crucial component of public infrastructure in communities across the United States, having significant social, environmental, and economic impacts in urban, suburban, and rural settings. In addition to benefits derived from recreation, trails also play an important role for commuters seeking alternative modes to motorized vehicles. Furthermore, recreational trails have provided communities with outdoor space to foster resiliency in the face of lockdowns and quarantines during the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite growing national importance, deficits in funding for operations and maintenance (O&M) have led to deferred maintenance backlogs that reduce the value added by recreational trails while worsening negative environmental impacts. This work proposes a value capture (VC) approach to funding trail O&M that dedicates state sales tax revenue generated from retail trade and food and accommodation services supported by recreational trails to trust funds that can be distributed to state and local trail managing entities. State-level estimates are generated using economic data from the Outdoor Recreation Satellite Account of the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis to estimate sales tax revenue from activities and industries supported by trails. VC estimates are further analyzed to assess the scale and stability of this funding approach before identifying methods for implementation of this approach. Findings of this study include: 1) total estimated state sales tax revenue of $10.64 billion in 2020 USD suggests that VC could greatly expand O&M funding for trails at the state level; 2) not all states may see growth in economic activity supported by recreational trails as demographic shifts occur between states; and 3) successful implementation of VC would likely require legislative protections to prevent reduction of appropriations or diversion of funds to other state accounts.
A Greenspace Ethnography of Southwest Atlanta: A Review and Tool

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2022-05-03) Wright, Janelle Paige

The purpose of this thesis study is to provide a tool and foundation for a community science-based greenspace ethnography of a neighborhood. The research requires an assessment of environmental history, policy, plans, and programs throughout the region of interest. This tool's development and application will build on the Southwest Atlanta region and the Bush Mountain neighborhood's existing strategic and programmatic work. Bush Mountain is one of the smallest historically Black neighborhoods within the region, and this study area contains significant environmental and community action and planning around maintaining historical breadth. The neighborhood origin during Reconstruction between 1910 and 1960 and had "developed and sustained [itself] by mobilizing and utilizing its indigenous resources despite the neglect it received from municipal and social institutions" (Pope 2013). Transformation amongst annexations and impending urban redevelopment informed greenspace maintenance throughout time. The ethnography asks the following question: How is place-keeping facilitated across landscape through greenspace change? It does so in the development of a greenspace timeline, and analysis of the structure of greenspace assessment tools support the quantitative ethnographic methodology that builds the practice from the experience of urban agriculture stewards in greenspaces, into practice into community through a community science framework. Perhaps the methodology seeks to reclaim tradition, both Black and indigenous, and in "sustaining curiosity rather than knowability" (McKittrick 2021, YouTube)
Re-Think the Streets: An Evaluation of Green Street Practices as a Method to Achieve Combined Sewer Separation

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2022-04-19) Krieger, Jenna Elizbeth

Older cities across the United States have been grappling with how to mitigate stormwater for decades. The ongoing trend of land development coupled with the heightened frequency and intensity of storm events has necessitated costly infrastructure improvements that are short-sighted and fail to address the underlying cause of increased runoff. Green stormwater infrastructure (GSI) has recently emerged as a popular stormwater mitigation tool that mimics and restores the natural environment while providing the same functional benefits as conventional systems. The purpose of this research is to evaluate the effectiveness of GSI in roadside applications (i.e., “Green Streets”) to reduce combined sewer dependency and provide an alternative solution to sewer separation. Typically, roadways reach the end of their design life after 40 years, at which point, they are fully reconstructed. Reconstruction provides an opportunity to re-imagine the right-of-way (ROW) and shift away from conventional drainage design. The Green Street Toolkit presented in this research provides a planning and design framework that can be utilized prior to reconstruction to integrate green infrastructure into the ROW, which has the potential to eliminate stormwater runoff from the combined sewer system along the reconstructed segment. The Toolkit is applied under three design storm scenarios to evaluate the feasibility of a green street approach for varying storm intensities. Although green streets may not eliminate combined sewer dependency in every case, this work shows their potential in removing a substantial amount of stormwater runoff from the combined sewer system while providing secondary benefits not offered by conventional infrastructure.
Shared E-scooter Adoption and Mode Substitution Patterns

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2021-08-30) Chen, Yun-Hsuan

This thesis explores the adoption and mode substitution patterns of e-scooters using survey data from four metropolitan areas in the southern United States, obtained from Fall 2019 to Spring 2020. For adoption patterns, we find a positive correlation between the use of ridehailing services and being an e-scooter user, as well as observed higher multimodality for e-scooter users compared to non-users (N =2,914). E-scooters are found to be used by people with lower income, higher racial diversity, and certain disabilities. For substitution patterns, we examine heterogeneity in trip attributes, substitution patterns, and rider characteristics in a sample of e-scooter rides (N=295). With a latent-class cluster analysis, we identify three distinctive classes of e-scooter rides and associated users. The off-to-nightlife class (39.9%) captures many rides for social and recreational trips at night, many of which substitute for private vehicles, ridehailing, or taxis. Many users associated with this class are college-educated and middle-aged with middle-to-high household income, convenient access to cars, and positive attitudes toward density, technology, and environmental policies. The weekend-fun class (31.9%) includes many trips made “just for fun” by users, many of which would not have been made otherwise. Riders taking this type of trip rarely use e-scooters, live in the least dense suburbs with auto-oriented lifestyles, and are more likely to be female, older (relative to the other classes), well-educated, and wealthy. The commutes class (28.2%) tends to involve short rides during weekday daytime for work/school-related trips, most of which would replace active modes. Most commutes users are low-income young students with diverse racial backgrounds and limited access to cars. These tend to reside in the densest neighborhoods and are the most multimodal in the sample. For each class, we discuss behavioral mechanisms and policy options for sustainable transportation. In brief, this thesis fills important literature gaps by identifying heterogeneous e-scooter rides and users, incorporating attitudes, and focusing on the southern U.S.
AN ATLANTA-BASED ANALYSIS ON THE FEASIBILITY OF EMPLOYEE COMMUTE OPTIONS PROGRAMS AND SWITCHING FROM DRIVING ALONE TO ALTERNATIVE COMMUTE MODES

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2021-08-02) Ling, Sharon

Employee commute options programs – also known as employer-based transportation demand management (TDM) programs – are rooted in the philosophy of TDM and trip reduction. There is a long history of TDM policies and efforts undertaken by both the public and private sectors in the United States, although the name and shape of such efforts has varied over time. However, a common goal has persisted throughout, which is to reduce employees’ reliance on gasoline-powered single-occupant vehicles (i.e. traditional cars) for traveling to and from work. To this end, employee commute options programs today often focus on incentivizing employees to switch from driving alone to using an alternative commute mode. These alternative modes range from public transit (e.g. rail or bus), ridesharing (e.g. carpooling or vanpooling), “active commuting” (e.g. biking or walking), to even alternative work hour arrangements (e.g. telecommuting) where possible (Griffin 2020). Carrot-and-stick approaches are often used to motivate employees to make the switch – such as rewarding alternative mode users with financial incentives and/or workplace perks, or even imposing charges for driving and parking. In addition, the benefits of adopting alternative modes are often extolled to the employee audience to make these options appear more attractive to potential users. Commonly cited benefits of alternatives to driving alone include reducing travel times and commute-related stress, saving commute costs, improving commuter satisfaction, creating a more sustainable environment, and so on. Employer-based TDM proponents and enthusiasts tend to emphasize, perhaps overtly so, that employee commute options programs can and will help create lasting behavioral changes. All parties involved in this enterprise – namely employers, employees, and society at large – are assumed to reap rewards from adopting TDM approaches and goals.
Has the COVID-19 Pandemic Changed People’s Attitude about Where to Live? Some Preliminary Answers from a Study of the Atlanta Housing Market

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2021-05-04) Kim, Ilsu

In March 2020, the national lockdowns and social distancing mandates to contain the COVID-19 pandemic in the US abruptly disrupted all aspects of urban life, requiring people to conduct daily activities including work, shopping, learning, schooling, and socializing, from home using online tools. These lockdowns and stay-at-home orders sharply increased unemployment and hindered active transactions in the housing market in the second quarter of 2020 (Liu & Su, 2021). While the high unemployment rate was a severe economic and social concern affecting housing demand, monetary easing and low interest rates increased liquidity and the flow of money into the housing market (Zhao, 2020). A growing body of work started to examine the overall vitality of the housing market in response to the disruptions caused by the pandemic (D’Lima et al., 2020; Liu & Su, 2021; Yoruk, 2020; Zhao, 2020). In addition, reports in popular media have highlighted trends in cities like New York and San Francisco, where many households were giving up expensive central city residences for low-density suburban houses with large yards. This finding implied that cities were losing their appeal given the reduction in the need for commuting in a work-from-home culture and the desire for security and open space in a low-density environment in the suburbs. Despite this type of anecdotal evidence, we know very little about how the preferences for housing in different locations are changing in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. This study explores whether and how the pandemic affected the housing preferences in the Atlanta single-family housing market. The focus goes to locational characteristics such as the accessibility to the rail transit system, accessibility to freeway systems, and walkability. The housing market participants’ attitudes toward the different travel modes can be revealed with the price effects of the accessibility-related locational characteristics. The impact of whether a house is in the inner city, inner-ring suburb, or outer-ring suburb on housing prices is also examined. A few main findings are derived from comparing the descriptive statistics and hedonic price models for 2018, 2019, and 2020. First, a steep drop in the number of transactions in the second quarter of 2020 was followed by an increase in the number of transactions and housing prices. The observed boom in the Atlanta single-family housing market aligns with the arguments of Zhao (2020) and Liu and Su (2021) that the lowered mortgage rate caused the influx of money to the housing markets across the US. Second, the positive price effect of parcel size and a pool increased in 2020 while that of square footage decreased. Third, the recently increasing preference for the inner city over the suburban area was restrained in 2020, which might have resulted from the diminished advantage of staying near the city center for job accessibility. Fourth, the pandemic did not substantially change the capitalization effect of the accessibility to a MARTA rail station and freeway. A few suggestions are made for future studies. First, the endeavor to further clarify the underlying reasons for the observations from this study would be necessary, which hedonic price models alone cannot do. Conducting a customized survey is one way to reveal the existence of and reasons for the changes in the attitudes, lifestyle, and travel patterns of diverse market participants covering both the supply and demand sides. Second, investigating the parts of the housing market that are not examined in this study will bring a comprehensive and detailed understanding of the housing market and the changes the market went through. The houses for rent and the houses other than detached single-family houses are not included in this study. Moreover, the transactions of the newly constructed houses are not usually in the FMLS data even though they take up a significant proportion of the transactions in the Atlanta region. Third, the analyses with some submarket segmentation using such criteria as the housing price, number of rooms, and location are expected to bring useful policy implications enabling detailed and customized solutions to the issues that planners are tackling.
Cluster-based Delineation of Megaregions in the United States: Identifying administrative boundaries that reflect meta-communities to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of government

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2021-05-04) Miller, Bryce Curtis

Coordination and collaboration through governance at meta-urban scales have the potential to significantly improve quality of life while reducing the bureaucratic burden on society. Megaregional research and delineation has largely focused on scholarly inquiry into specific relationships using narrow datasets or on private efforts to identify market opportunities with opaque analysis methods. This work aims to provide a megaregion delineation that is transparent, data diverse, and comprehensible to a degree that the resulting boundaries are well suited to administrative implementation. The process developed leverages a combination of cluster analysis and metropolitan planning organization locations to identify sub-regions that share morphological characteristics and functional relationships. Recommendations are made for subsequent research into four areas: new data sources, process refinements, applications for megaregional planning, and implementation principles for megaregional government.