The COVID-19 Pandemic has provided a challenge for educators to create virtual learning materials that are engaging and impactful during times of high stress and isolation. In this creative project, I explore the variety of virtual tools and web applications from Esri by creating a Story Map on the Verde…
The COVID-19 Pandemic has provided a challenge for educators to create virtual learning materials that are engaging and impactful during times of high stress and isolation. In this creative project, I explore the variety of virtual tools and web applications from Esri by creating a Story Map on the Verde River Watershed. This Story Map is intended for an audience of students in late middle school and early high school but can be a resource to teachers for a wider age range. The integration of interactive technology and virtual tools in educational practices is likely to continue past the immediate circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic. The purpose of this Story Map is to showcase one of the many uses for geospatial web applications beyond the immediate realm of GIS.
With the acceleration of urbanization in many parts of the world, transportation challenges such as traffic congestion, increasing carbon emissions, and the “first/last-mile” connectivity problems for commuter travel have arisen. Transport experts and policymakers have proposed shared transportation, such as dockless e-scooters and bike-sharing programs, to solve some of these…
With the acceleration of urbanization in many parts of the world, transportation challenges such as traffic congestion, increasing carbon emissions, and the “first/last-mile” connectivity problems for commuter travel have arisen. Transport experts and policymakers have proposed shared transportation, such as dockless e-scooters and bike-sharing programs, to solve some of these urban transportation issues. In cities with high population densities, multimodal mobility hubs designed to integrate shared and public transportation can be implemented to achieve faster public connections and thus increase access to public transport on both access and egress sides. However, haphazard drop-offs of these dockless vehicles have led to complaints from community members and motivated the need for neighborhood-level parking areas (NLPAs). Simultaneously, concerns about the equitable distribution of transportation infrastructure have been growing and have led to the Biden Administration announcing the Justice40 Initiative which requires 40% of certain federal investments to benefit disadvantaged communities. To plan a system of NLPAs to address not only the transportation shortcomings while elevating these recent equity goals, this thesis develops a multi-objective optimal facility location model that maximizes coverage of both residential areas and transit stations while including a novel constraint to satisfy the requirements of Justice40. The model is applied to the City of Tempe, Arizona, and uses GIS data and spatial analyses of the existing public transportation stops, estimates of transit station boardings, population by census block, and locations of disadvantaged communities to optimize NLPA location. The model generates Pareto optimal tradeoff curves for different numbers of NLPAs to find the non-dominated solutions for the coverage of population nodes and boardings. The analysis solves the multi-objective model with and without the equity constraint, showing the effect of considering equity in developing a multimodal hub system, especially for disadvantaged communities. The proposed model can provide a decision support tool for transport and public authorities to plan future investments and facilitate multimodal transport.
