Research Projects
I am a fairly fluid researcher, always looking for good opportunities to utilize research to advance issues of sustainable urban form and social change. You can find some details of the work through the Biosketch page, but a general summary of the main areas of current work include:
Participatory Mapping and Active Transportation
This area of work seeks to engage citizens in assessing the walking and biking environments in their communities and to utilize the process as well as the data to affect change in local policies and actions.
The spatial scale is highly localized,
engaging citizens in a street by street and intersection by intersection
audit of how well the local environment supports walking, biking, and transit.
The policy areas of this work includes Transportation & Livability, Safe Routes to School, Complete Streets, and Transit Oriented Development. For more details on some of the tools, refer to the Mobile GIS page. These tools were created in ArcPad GIS. I have experimented with smart phone versions and am interested in continuing to explore ways to empower community members with spatial data collection and display to improve their walking and biking environments.
Built Environment, Active Transportation & Health
This area of work seeks to understand the relationship between urban form and active modes of transportation (walking and biking) at a neighborhood scale.
Of emerging interest is a focus on retrofitting suburban areas, building on the ground breaking work in this area and working with Professor Nico Larco (Architecture) at the University of Oregon. Currently, I am working with Architecture Professor John Rowell to develop a national, evidence-based design manual of Complete Streets.
Developing Performance Measures for Walking, Biking, & Transit
The emerging livability agenda coming out of the United States Department of Transportation will require various transportation agencies to develop new forms of performance measures to evaluate their work. This area of research seeks to assist federal, state, and local transportation
agencies in developing metrics that take into account local and regional measures, and measures that both assess the system-wide performance of transit and active transportation modes, as well as the local urban design and land use that may support or hinder increased use of these modes.