National Center for Smart Growth

Permanent URI for this communityhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/21472

The National Center for Smart Growth (NCSG) works to advance the notion that research, collaboration, engagement and thoughtful policy development hold the key to a smarter and more sustainable approach to urban and regional development. NCSG is based at the University of Maryland, College Park, housed under the School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation, with support from the College of Agriculture & Natural Resources, the A. James Clark School of Engineering, the School of Public Policy, and the Office of the Provost.

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    Creative Placemaking Along the Kenilworth Avenue Corridor
    (Partnership for Action Learning Sustainability (PALS), 2024-05) Cavanaugh, Stephanie; Hudson, Lauren; Josar, Eve; Kenney, Elliott; Morrison, Phoenix; Pully, Stephanie; Watkiss, Dana; Zaman, Auran; Sullivan, Jack
    The Purple Line will be a Light Rail connection that allows public transportation from New Carrollton to Bethesda with several stops along the way. One of those stops is at the Kenilworth Avenue and MD-410 intersection in Riverdale Park. The Landscape Architecture Urban Design Studio designed strategies and concepts to improve on the current plan for the streetscape along Kenilworth Ave. and MD-410 surrounding the new Light Rail Station. Students agreed to decrease road sizes, add sidewalks on either side of Kenilworth and MD-410, introduce bike lanes, remove slip lanes, manage stormwater, and add bus modality. At the core of the student’s design is accessibility for pedestrians and safe street crossings while balancing street character, shade, comfort, and shelter from vehicular traffic. Students implemented Placemaking strategies to communicate the community’s desires and plans for future investment.
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    Healthy Parks, Healthy Person App
    (Partnership for Action Learning in Sustainability (PALS), 2021) Baker, Drew; Hughley, Elizabeth; Iweala, Chinemerem; Pineda, Andy; Ramos, Jack; Soriano, Jian; Rainsford, TJ
    Through its Department of Parks and Recreation, Prince George’s County is looking for ways to improve community health by developing a mobile application to aid in physical and mental wellness. This application will be used as a tool to promote and track the use of parks, trails, and open space and the reported impacts on health outcomes. With the stress induced by the events of the past year (including but not limited to the COVID-19 pandemic), physical and emotional health concerns have become increasingly prevalent issues that the County’s Department of Parks and Recreation could help address. This project’s objective is to track the impact and performance of methods like ParkRx, which could prescribe the use of parks to citizens to increase healthy lifestyles in Prince George’s County. This will be accomplished by designing a mobile application that connects residents with available county parks, trails, facilities, and programs. The app will include a reward system that incentivizes engagement with these offerings, as well as track use metrics such as age, gender, and basic demographic information to help the county understand who is using what facilities and how often. The data collected through the app will be used by the Department of Parks and Recreation to assess the usage of its parks, facilities, and programs, to gauge where to focus its efforts in creating a physically and mentally healthier environment for Prince George’s County’s residents. The people involved in this project included teams from Prince George’s County Department of Parks and Recreation. Katrina Williams, Edeline Dormevil, Edith Michel, Thomas Paolucci, Lynell Poyner, Michael Wigglesworth, and Bonnie Man were involved in developing the wireframes for this project.
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    Gradual Rasterization: Redefining the Spatial Resolution in Transport Modeling
    (2014) Moeckel, Rolf; Donnelly, Rick
    Finding the appropriate spatial resolution in modeling is a serious challenge at the beginning of every modeling project. The paper presents a methodology to adjust the spatial geography to the resolution of a network. Based on the quadtree algorithm, raster cells are generated that are dynamic in size. Smaller raster cells are used in urban areas and larger raster cells are used in low-density, rural areas. Trip tables of a travel demand model for the State of Georgia are disaggregated to this new zone system of raster cells, and assignment results validate significantly better than when using the original zone system.
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    Comparing Driver and Capacity Characteristics at Intersections With and Without Red Light Cameras
    (2011) Weldegiorgis, Yohannes; Mishra, Sabyasachee; Jha, Manoj K.
    The primary purpose of installing Red Light Cameras (RLCs) is to improve intersection safety by discouraging motorists to cross the intersection when the signal for approaching vehicles turns red. Due to the fear of being fined when crossing an RLC equipped intersection at the onset of the red signal, many approaching vehicles may have a tendency of stopping during the yellow phase. This tendency may impact intersection capacity, which can be significant in congested transportation networks during rush hours, especially when several intersections are equipped with RLCs along a sequence of traffic signals, resulting in a disruption of traffic progression. In order to examine the driver and capacity characteristics at intersections with RLCs and compare them with those without RLCs we develop a binary probit choice model to understand driver's stop and go behavior at the onset of yellow intervals, also known as dilemma zone. Further, in order to capture the impact to intersection capacity at intersections with RLCs we develop a probabilistic computational procedure using data from ten intersection pairs (with and without RLCs) in the Baltimore area. The results indicate that, in general, RLCs reduce the intersection capacity since driver's travel behavior is influenced by the presence of the cameras. Other contributory factors for the so-called capacity reduction, such as driver population (e.g., familiar vs. unfamiliar drivers) and traffic-mix (e.g., trucks vs. passenger cars) characteristics have been left for future works.
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    A Case for Increased State Role in Transit Planning: Analyzing Land Use and Transit Ridership Connections Using Scenarios
    (2011) Chakraborty, Arnab; Mishra, Sabyasachee
    Land use and neighborhood characteristics have long been linked to transit ridership. Large-scale agencies, such as state departments of transportations, often make decisions that affect land use pattern and transit services. However, the interdependencies between them are seldom harnessed in decision-making. In this article, we develop and apply a transit ridership model based on land use and other neighborhood characteristics for an entire state. We then discuss its implications for regional and state-level decision-making. We chose the state of Maryland as our study area. Using a number of criteria, we subdivided the state into 1151 statewide modeling zones (SMZs) and, for each zone in the base year (2000), developed a set of variables, including developed land under different uses, population and employment densities, free-flow and congested speeds, current transport capacities, and accessibility to different transport modes. We estimated two sets of OLS-regression models for the base year data: one on the statewide SMZs dataset and other on subsets of urban, suburban and rural typologies. We find that characteristics of land use, transit accessibility, income, and density are strongly significant and robust for the statewide and urban areas datasets. We also find that determinants and their coefficients vary across urban, suburban and rural areas suggesting the need for finely tuned policy. Next we used a suite of econometric and land use models to generate two scenarios for the horizon year (2030) – business as usual and high-energy price – and estimated ridership changes between them. We use the resulting scenarios to show how demand could vary by parts of the state and demonstrate the framework’s value in large-scale decision-making.
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    Examination of Regional Transit Service Under Contracting: A Case Study in the Greater New Orleans Region
    (Mineta Transportation Institute (MTI), 2011) Iseki, Hiroyuki
    Many local governments and transit agencies in the United States face financial difficulties in providing adequate public transit service in individual systems, and in providing sufficient regional coordination to accommodate transit trips involving at least one transfer between systems. These difficulties can be attributed to the recent economic downturn, continuing withdrawal of the state and federal funds that help support local transit service, a decline in local funding for transit service in inner cities due to ongoing suburbanization, and a distribution of resources that responds to geographic equity without addressing service needs. This study examines two main research questions: (1) the effect of a “delegated management” contract on efficiency and effectiveness within a single transit system, and (2) the effects of a single private firm—contracted separately by more than one agency in the same region—on regional coordination, exploring the case in Greater New Orleans. The current situation in New Orleans exhibits two unique transit service conditions. First, New Orleans Regional Transit Authority (RTA) executed a “delegated management” contract with a multinational private firm, outsourcing more functions (e.g., management, planning, funding) to the contractor than has been typical in the U.S. Second, as the same contractor has also been contracted by another transit agency in an adjacent jurisdiction—Jefferson Transit (JeT), this firm may potentially have economic incentives to improve regional coordination, in order to increase the productivity and effectiveness of its own transit service provision. Although the limited amount of available operation and financial data has prevented us from drawing more definitive conclusions, the findings of this multifaceted study should provide valuable information on a transit service contracting approach new to the U.S.: delegated management. This study also identified a coherent set of indices with which to evaluate the regional coordination of transit service, the present status of coordination among U.S. transit agencies, and barriers that need to be resolved for regional transit coordination to be successful.
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    A Joint Travel Demand and Environmental Model To Incorporate Emission Pricing For Large Transportation Networks
    (2012) Mishra, Sabyasachee; Welch, Timothy; Welch
    Emission reduction strategies are gaining greater attention to support the national objective for a sustainable and green transportation system. A large percent of emission contribution that arises from transportation modes are primarily from auto and truck travel. Reductions in highway travel require prudent planning strategies and modeling user’s response to planner’s policies. Modeling planning goals and user’s response is a challenging task. In this paper the authors present a joint travel demand and environmental model to incorporate vehicle emission pricing (VEP) as a strategy for emission reduction. First, the travel demand model determines the destination, mode and route choice of the users in response to the VEP strategy set by the planner. Second, the emission model provides NOx, VOC, and CO2 estimates at a very detailed level. A Base-case and three models are proposed to incorporate VEP in a multimodal transportation network. The objective function of the Base-case is the minimization of Total System Travel Time (TST), and the models are designed with the objective of minimizing Total System Emission (TSE). User Equilibrium method is used for travel to model user responses and solved by Frank Wolfe algorithm. The Base-case represents “do-nothing” conditions and the three models address the interactions between planner’s perspectives and user responses to VEP strategies. The proposed model is applied to Montgomery County’s (located in the Washington DC-Baltimore region) multimodal transportation network. The case study results show that VEP can be used as a tool for emission reduction in transportation planning and policy.
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    Assessing the impact of urban form measures in nonwork trip mode choice after controlling for demographic and level-of-service effects
    (2003) Rajamani, Jayanthi; Bhat, Chandra R.; Handy, Susan; Knaap, Gerritt; Song, Yan
    The relationship between travel behavior and the local built environment continues to be a contentious issue, despite several research efforts in the area. The current paper investigates the significance and explanatory power of a variety of urban form measures on nonwork activity travel mode choice. The travel data used for analysis is the 1995 Portland Metropolitan Activity Survey conducted by Portland Metro. The database on the local built environment was developed by Song (2002) and includes a more extensive set of variables than previous studies that have examined the relationship between travel behavior and the local built environment using the Portland data. A multinomial logit mode choice model results indicate that higher residential densities and mixed-uses promote walking behavior for nonwork activities.
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    Internally Connected, No Commercial, With a Touch of Open Space: The Neighborhoods of New Homes in the Portland Metropolitan Area
    (2004) Song, Yan; Knaap, Gerrit
    For many years, neighborhoods have been classified as either “suburban” or “traditional.” But new homes today are built in many different types of neighborhoods with many different design features. In this paper, we develop a quantitative method for classifying the neighborhoods of new homes in the Portland metropolitan area. We proceed in three steps. First we measure urban form attributes of neighborhoods around newly developed homes. We then use factor analysis to identify a small set of factors that capture essential differences in urban form. Finally we use cluster analysis on these factor scores to identify distinctly different neighborhood types. Applying these methods to neighborhoods around new single family homes in the metropolitan Portland, Oregon, we are able to identify eight factors of urban form and six neighborhood types. We then show that most new single family homes in metropolitan Portland are built in new suburban neighborhoods but a substantial portion is occurring in traditional urban neighborhoods.
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    Silver Spring Connect: People and Places on the Purple Line
    (Partnership for Action Learning in Sustainability (PALS), 2017) Narron, Jack
    http://uofmd.maps.arcgis.com/apps/MapJournal/index.html?appid=2b055d16d3124cee8b4da1da1dacb057