(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2009-02-19)
Wagner, James Bartley
Public school planning and land use planning have become increasingly separated fields over the last 35 years. This results in misaligned goals when school districts do not plan facilities that support a community's land use planning goals. The result is a disjointed growth pattern where new schools are built on the urban fringe and act as a magnet for new development that often goes against desired development patterns. Previous research on school locations and development patterns has focused on institutional barriers to cooperation and strategies to help local governments cooperate better with local land use planners. To date, there has been no significant research that attempts to quantify the relationship between school location and development patterns and the transportation infrastructure necessary to serve new development.
This research shows that there is a relationship between school location and new development. Four counties in Georgia were selected as case studies and analyzed with a Geographic Information System (GIS) to determine the significance of the link between these activities. Counties were selected based on their character (urban, suburban, exurban, rural) and analyzed separately. An elementary school and high school were analyzed for each county. In addition, interviews with school facility planners were conducted to further define what institutional barriers prevent cooperation among local land use planners and school planners. It was found that there is a wide range of levels of cooperation between school planners and local planners. Some school districts had a formalized communication process with local planners, some had an ad-hoc communication process, and others had no process at all. Recommendations are made on ways to improve the cooperation between these two professional fields. This thesis also examines the link between education and transportation capital funding. Georgia lawmakers are struggling to determine what type of capital funding mechanism would be appropriate for new transportation projects, but these new projects may negatively impact educational funding, which is currently based on a sales tax.
(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2005-08-08)
Dumbaugh, Eric
Transportation safety is a highly contentious issue in the design of cities and communities. To enhance community livability, urban designers, architects and city planners often encourage the placement of street trees, aesthetic street lights, and other roadside features in a buffer zone between the pedestrian realm and the vehicle travelway. While such designs clearly enhance the aesthetic quality of a roadway, conventional geometric design practice regards roadside features located in the clear zone as fixed-object hazards, and strongly discourages their use. This study examines roadside safety in urban environments to better understand the nature of urban fixed-object crashes, as well as the safety impacts of livable streetscape treatments.
While the prevailing assumption is that livable street treatments have a negative impact on a roadways safety performance, the existing empirical evidence indicates that such designs are much safer than more conventional roadside designs. Current safety objections to the use of livable street treatments are not based on empirical evidence, but are instead the result of a design philosophy that systematically overlooks the real-world operating behavior of road users.
This study details the origin and evolution of this philosophy, termed passive safety, and subjects it to an empirical test to evaluate its applicability to urban arterial roadways. It finds that passive safety assumptions do not meaningfully explain empirical observations of crash frequency and severity. To enhance contemporary geometric design practice, this study then proceeds to more thoroughly examine the nature and characteristics of urban roadside crashes, and proposes a new design approach, termed positive design that better addresses the twin goals of safety and livability.