Land Use, Transportation & Urban Form

Auditing Communities for Walkability and Bikability
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; UW TRAC and TransNow
October 2001--September 2004
(PI:  A. Vernez-Moudon)
This project is to develop retrospective environmental audit instruments for local jurisdictions, professionals, and neighborhood groups to support and encourage leisure- and transport-related physical activity. Walking and biking are well-accepted activities that can help enhance personal health and reduce the use of personal motorized transport. The project's audit instruments is based on a 630-respondent survey of walking and biking in neighborhoods, with respondents randomly selected from medium-density, mixed-used communities in King County, with different levels of maturity in their non-motorized transportation infrastructure and by the presence of bicycle/pedestrian trails. Objective (GIS-based) and subjective measures are taken for more than 200 variables used to capture environmental factors. The variables are tested empirically to establish their predictive power in estimating levels of walking and biking. Multinomial logit models are used to use estimate the likelihood of walking sufficiently (for health purposes) and moderately, relative to not walking at all, and to estimate the likelihood of walking sufficiently relative to moderately. Binary logit models are used for predicting the odds of biking relative to not biking at al. The modeling process includes (a) the estimation of a Base Model, consisting of survey variables (mostly socio-demographic confounders for this study); and (b) the development of Final Models, which add environmental variables to the Base Model. Models results are being interpreted for both their theoretical implications and their application to auditing environments.

The Exposure of Minority and Poor Populations to Mobile Source Air Pollution
UW Royalty Research Fund
$31,569, 2/2004
(PI:  C. Bae)

GIS Land Use Analysis Tool
Washington Department of Transportation, Policy Planning Office,
January 2004--March 2005
(PI:  A. Vernez-Moudon)
The goal of this research is to develop tools to help local jurisdictions and WSDOT more closely tie together the relationship between land use and transportation during the investment decision-making process. This project relates to the last of a three-phase program "Integrating Land Use and Transportation Investment Decision Making."  The products of this work will take the form of maps depicting different zones within the region, which correspond to different existing and targeted travel behaviors.  The maps will be derived from parcel-level GIS databases currently available for all urbanized counties in the State of Washington. The fine resolution of these databases allows for precise measurement of micro-scaled land use conditions known to be associated with levels of transit use and non-motorized travel. Land use characteristics will be captured by a series of variables known to be associated with different travel behaviors, such as density of people and activities, presence and spatial aggregation of destination uses, and transportation infrastructure attributes. Maps will depict zones of development associated with different values of the variables, classifying, for example, areas of the region by range of density, by spatial grouping of destination land uses, etc. It will also be possible to develop maps with zones that are defined by a combination of variables, such as zones that have a specified range of development density, of block sizes, and that are within a specified distance to regional trails.

Interaction and Participation in Integrated Land Use, Transportation, and Environmental Modeling
National Science Foundation, Information Technology Research
$3,500,000, September 2001-August 2006. 
(PIs:  A. Borning, P. Waddell, B. Friedman, M. Gross, D. Notkin, Z. Popovic)
Principal research topics: in human computer interaction, providing more effective ways of understanding the results from and interacting with complex simulations, and ways of linking stakeholder values with design choices in simulations and their interfaces; in computer graphics, capabilities for producing simulated street-level animations of urban environments from a policy-driven simulation; and in software engineering, new software structures that allow us to design, integrate, and evolve complex and diverse urban submodels. 

An Internet Platform to Support Public Participation in Transportation Decision Making
National Science Foundation, Information Technology Research
$2,632,883, September 2003--August 2007
(PIs:  T. Nyerges, T. Brooks, C. Drew, P. Jankowski, S. Rutherford, R. Young)