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- Creators: School of Life Sciences
- Creators: Byrd, Andrew
People of color, and more especially Black Americans, make up a minuscule portion of annual National Park visitation. This podcast is a look into the prejudiced history surrounding the formation of the national parks, the modern theories surrounding continuing lack of park diversity, and personal accounts of where the movement for outdoor equality is going and where your support should go. This all culminates into a project that aims to understand why this statistic exists as it is and present it through podcast.
People of color, and more especially Black Americans, make up a minuscule portion of annual National Park visitation. This podcast is a look into the prejudiced history surrounding the formation of the national parks, the modern theories surrounding continuing lack of park diversity, and personal accounts of where the movement for outdoor equality is going and where your support should go. This all culminates into a project that aims to understand why this statistic exists as it is and present it through podcast.
The research presented here aims to explore the perceived Quality of Life (QoL) and perceived accessibility among varying demographic and socioeconomic groups in the Phoenix Metropolitan Area. A relationship between perceived QoL and perceived accessibility was further investigated. The data was collected through the Phoenix Area Social Survey (PASS), which sent randomized surveys to 496 people in the Phoenix region. The survey’s response rate varied, from a low of 22.2% in one of the lowest-income neighborhoods and a high of 55.6% for a middle-income neighborhood. Results were obtained through statistical analyses, such as correlations, chi-squared tests, and t-tests. Results for income, gender and ethnicity indicated similar and comparable perceived QoL and perceived accessibility in the Phoenix area. The data did not reveal a relationship between perceived QoL and perceived accessibility; however, accessibility did increase with increasing income. A striking finding revolved around disparities in access to walkability and transit across all income, genders and ethnicities. This presents implications for built environment and resource allocation planning in order to enhance the lives of residents in the Valley. Future research and investigation into the objective indicators of QoL and impacts of culture on QoL should be pursued.
Accessibility is increasingly used as a metric when evaluating changes to public transport systems. Transit travel times contain variation depending on when one departs relative to when a transit vehicle arrives, and how well transfers are coordinated given a particular timetable. In addition, there is necessarily uncertainty in the value of the accessibility metric during sketch planning processes, due to scenarios which are underspecified because detailed schedule information is not yet available. This article presents a method to extend the concept of "reliable" accessibility to transit to address the first issue, and create confidence intervals and hypothesis tests to address the second.
There is a need for indicators of transportation-land use system quality that are understandable to a wide range of stakeholders, and which can provide immediate feedback on the quality of interactively designed scenarios. Location-based accessibility indicators are promising candidates, but indicator values can vary strongly depending on time of day and transfer wait times. Capturing this variation increases complexity, slowing down calculations. We present new methods for rapid yet rigorous computation of accessibility metrics, allowing immediate feedback during early-stage transit planning, while being rigorous enough for final analyses. Our approach is statistical, characterizing the uncertainty and variability in accessibility metrics due to differences in departure time and headway-based scenario specification. The analysis is carried out on a detailed multi-modal network model including both public transportation and streets. Land use data are represented at high resolution. These methods have been implemented as open-source software running on commodity cloud infrastructure. Networks are constructed from standard open data sources, and scenarios are built in a map-based web interface. We conclude with a case study, describing how these methods were applied in a long-term transportation planning process for metropolitan Amsterdam.