Tag: Research

Master’s Project Abstracts: COVID-19 Case Studies

October 28, 2021 / odrozd

The research conducted by the Department of City and Regional Planning reflects the planning challenges of the moment, and this relevance is no better represented than through the graduated class of 2021’s Master’s Projects focused on COVID-19. Below are abstracts and corresponding links from selected Master’s Projects that span issues of transportation and housing in response to the global pandemic.

For a complete list of DCRP Master’s Projects see here, and for more information on the Master’s Project process, here.

Active Transportation Policy Decisions in Response to COVID-19: Case Studies from Four North America Cities

Emma Stockton

This Master’s Project explores the planning processes, implementation, and public reactions to new active transportation infrastructure built in response to the COVID-19 pandemic in four North American cities (Washington, DC, Chapel Hill, NC, Oakland, CA, Halifax, Nova Scotia). The implementation of active transportation infrastructure moved abnormally quickly to respond to an increased demand for walking and biking in local areas due to COVID-19 lockdowns, restriction of travel and closure of many businesses. Interviews were conducted with transportation planners working for each of the four cities to gain insight into each city’s experience, lessons learned, and predictions for the future of active transportation infrastructure. The case studies particularly focus on two topics: the community engagement process with residents while physical distancing measures were in place, as well as equity considerations and perceptions of new active transportation programs. It is crucial to understand how these decisions were made as well as the implications of these decisions to guide future active transportation planning, implementation, and evaluation.

Housing Policy for Eviction Prevention during COVID-19

Lauren Turner

The COVID-19 pandemic has increased housing instability and put millions of renters at risk of displacement since stay-at-home orders began in the US in March 2020. Federal, state, and local actors rushed to expand and adapt existing housing policies, and create new ones, to prevent the additional public health disaster of millions of Americans being evicted. This paper examines two housing policy measures – eviction moratoria and emergency rental assistance (ERA) – taken to prevent evictions during COVID-19, exploring these policies at the federal, state, and local level. The paper uses the state of North Carolina, specifically Orange County, as a case study, examining Orange County’s Emergency Housing Assistance (EHA) fund. Finally, this paper examines how the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the weaknesses of US affordable housing policy, and explores potential policy proposals for the future of housing in the US.

How Has COVID-19 Affected Telework Attitudes and Behaviors?

Christian Snelgrove

Any change is difficult, but massive disruptions such as COVID-19 often make people see their daily habits in a new light. Transportation systems and habits have been acutely affected by the pandemic, and one significant way this disruption has manifested is in a large shift from traditional commuting to telework. The question is how long these changes will last, if at all. Using a cross-sectional attitudinal survey, my paper examines how COVID-19 has affected telework attitudes and behaviors. I asked respondents to report their pre-COVID-19 and current telework attitudes and behavior, as well as different socioeconomic and attitudinal indicators to further stratify the data. My data indicate a sizeable shift in workers’ desired commuting behavior. My respondents largely had positive experiences with telework, resulting in them wanting to telework most of the time moving forward. Commute-mode preferences shifted as well, with many respondents who previously preferred to drive alone now wishing to primarily telework. These results suggest a significant change in commuting attitudes that should be harnessed. Many employers have made large investments in telework technology and training due to the pandemic. This serves as an opportunity to offer workers more choice, creating a working environment better attuned to their needs.

Lane Reallocations during COVID: A Comparison of Interventions and Decision-Making Process

Joshua Mayo

This paper aims to look at the political factors around lane reallocations on commercial and mixed-use streets in the United States during the COVID pandemic. Using multiple case studies, this project will examine the political factors around the decision-making process, implementation, and discussions about the future of these interventions. Case study analysis will be conducted by examining the messaging in public meetings and associated materials, and supplemented by the author’s experience as staff at one of the case studies. This paper is targeted at people interested in the impacts of the COVID pandemic on support for active travel, and aims to set up future research on how these interventions fare after the pandemic.

Post-Pandemic Utilization of Office to Residential Adaptive Reuse Strategies in Cities

Shane Sweeney

American cities are facing an epidemic. Affordable housing is nearly impossible to find in desirable cities. This shortage has cost-burdened almost half of American families who spend 30% or more of their gross income on housing. The COVID-19 pandemic has also exacerbated previously grim outlooks for the office market. Cities nationwide are experiencing historic highs in office vacancy rates and catastrophic deficits in net absorption. Adaptive reuse is an innovative, sustainable, and viable solution to this two-pronged problem. It is the process of taking an older or underutilized structure and repurposing that structure for a new or different use. In this present situation, city officials have the ability to work with owners of underutilized office buildings to assist in repurposing these structures into residential units through a number of tools such as tax credits, grants, expedited permitting, trusts, affordable housing incentives, and much more. Adaptive reuse is a multi-dimensional solution to an emerging problem which encapsulates the real-estate market, city dynamics, zoning, housing stock and prices, homelessness, and long-term sustainability of cities. This paper serves as a guide to planners, students, and citizens to elaborately define the problems at hand, explore a successful case study, provide a repeatable and thorough analysis, present feasible tools and policies to enact change, and discuss the challenges of doing so. With this research, planners in large urban areas can assess the need and usefulness of adaptive reuse to help curb the constantly changing problems cities face and the effects of COVID-19 in their communities.

By James Hamilton

Featured image courtesy of Carolina Angles

Master’s Project Abstracts: North Carolina Case Studies

September 22, 2021 / odrozd

Several Master’s Projects from the graduated class of 2021 underscored the impact the Department of City and Regional Planning can have in addressing equity, resilience, and accessibility across the North Carolinian planning landscape. A selection of abstracts and accompanying links to the full report are listed below.

For a complete list of DCRP Master’s Projects see here, and for more information on the Master’s Project process, here.

“The Answer Really Lies in the Community”: Exploring Inequity in Resilience Planning through Community Voice – A Study of Post-Florence New Bern, North Carolina

By Ranger Ruffins

The most recent National Climate Assessment states that low-income and marginalized groups with “lower capacity to prepare for and cope with extreme weather and climate-related events” will continue to be most affected, and that “adaptation actions for the most vulnerable populations” should be prioritized. However, while equity is receiving more attention in planning discourse, the uneven impacts of hazards on socially vulnerable populations are often ignored by traditional planning efforts. In 2018 Hurricane Florence devastated New Bern, NC, and in its aftermath revealed communities that were disproportionately at risk from the impacts of the hurricane. Through interviews with New Bern residents, this study aims to provide valuable insight regarding challenges and barriers facing equitable resilience planning in New Bern. The participants’ stories, experiences, and insight speak to some of the factors contributing to uneven resilience across the city. This study found that the avoidance and lack of confronting racism in New Bern, coupled with issues of mistrust and poor community engagement practices, are contributing to patterns of inequitable resilience in New Bern. This paper aims to provide a further understanding of these complex challenges and offer insight that can inspire approaches to resilience planning that best serve all of New Bern’s residents.

Bicycle Parking in Chapel Hill, North Carolina: Where It’s at and Where It’s Going

By Eli Powell

Chapel Hill, North Carolina, is a bustling college town with a great number of bicyclists, yet bicycle parking is a largely neglected topic by both its Code of Ordinances and its transportation planning staff. This project seeks to change that. Over six months in 2020, I collected a fieldwork inventory of almost all bicycle parking and maintenance resources within Town limits. I published this inventory as a public-facing interactive map and used it internally to perform a site-level analysis of adherence to the Town’s bicycle parking capacity requirements and design guidelines. I then evaluated the results of this analysis and consulted bicycle parking requirements in five United States municipalities similar to Chapel Hill to formulate recommendations to Town planning staff on improving their own codified bicycle parking requirements. My findings suggest that at least half of all sites in Chapel Hill have been violating bicycle parking capacity requirements and that almost all of them have been violating design guidelines, with the most common offense being an unsatisfactory amount of long-term parking. With my assistance, the Town of Chapel Hill Planning Department will use this dataset to amend bicycle parking capacity requirements and design guidelines in the Town’s Land Use Management Ordinance. The dataset will also be useful to all Chapel Hill bicyclists for more reliably locating bicycle parking at their destinations, making the Town of Chapel Hill a more bicycle-friendly place to live, work, and visit.

Dorothea Dix Park Access Study

Lucy Laird

This project proposes improvements to the Raleigh transit network and to Dorothea Dix Park’s edges that will allow for greater accessibility to neighborhoods both proximate and farther from the park, with an eye toward environmental justice concerns.

Historic Preservation and the Plan Integration for Resilience Scorecard: Case Study in New Bern, NC.

Rachael Wolff

Climate change will lead to more frequent and powerful natural hazards that can threaten historic resources and the benefits they provide to communities. Integration of different planning efforts offers one strategy towards better understanding gaps between land use policies that support or hinder resilience of historic resources. While prior research has explored both disaster planning for historic preservation and the resilience of a community’s network of plans, these two topics have not yet been combined. This study builds upon previous applications of the Plan Integration for Resilience Scorecard and applies it to historic properties at risk from flooding in New Bern, North Carolina. Using the 100-year floodplain and Hurricane Florence flood extent as the hazard zones and a sample of historic resources designated on the National Register as the planning districts, this research analyzes whether land use policies in New Bern’s network of plans increase or decrease resilience of historic properties. Findings suggest that New Bern’s historic resources are vulnerable to flood hazards since contradictory plans do not support their resilience. However, the deep, local ties of historic preservation planning provide an opportunity to enhance resilience and protect future resources.

Making the Case for Planning Analysts: A Study for North Carolina Localities

Hallee Haygood

This project considers whether an analyst within city and county departments would be beneficial to its growth and success. An individual in this role could address roles of budget preparation, strategic planning, special projects, and more. A variety of departments currently have this type of position, and this paper outlines the recommendations for this position. In addition, it clarifies that based on qualitative interviews, it may not be necessary for all planning departments. Typically, those with over 250,000 people benefit the most from these positions. Municipalities like Raleigh, Durham, and Wake County were the most interested in this opportunity. As such, I recommend that localities consider adding these positions, and their benefits can be further studied.

Walking and Biking while Black: Wake County, NC

Luke Lowry

For Black Americans, the risk of being a victim of traffic violence while walking or biking is higher than it is for the general public. However, for local and regional governments, racial crash disparities are not well documented, and existing methods for addressing racial crash disparities are not widespread. Consequently, the purpose of this report is to provide an example of racial crash disparities at the regional level, and to test the effectiveness of an existing method used to address racial differences in crashes. Wake County, NC was selected as the analysis region for two reasons: the robust pedestrian and bicycle crash data publicly available, and the lack of existing analysis on pedestrian and bicyclist crashes by race. The ‘High Priority Network’ method for addressing racial disparities is the most popular existing model, and it can be easily modified for different regions. The Portland Vision Zero ‘High Priority Network’ model is a prominent version of this model; thus, it was applied and tested in Wake County. Its three main components—Communities of Concern, High Crash Roads, and High Crash Intersections—were analyzed individually. The analysis revealed that the overall rates of crashes were considerably higher for Black pedestrians and bicyclists, as were the median crash rates by Census Tract. Additionally, Black pedestrians and bicyclist crash victims had consistently less access to infrastructure at the location of the crash. When applied to Wake County, the Portland model for High Priority Networks was fairly competent at locating areas within Wake County with high numbers of Black crashes and a high rate of Black crashes. By modifying the network to focus on racial metrics, the model was more effective at addressing areas of high racial disparity. While some of the racial metrics were less effective at addressing all crashes within the system, a model which combines the standard metrics used by Portland and racial-specific metrics may result in better equity outcomes while not sacrificing the overall efficacy of the model.

By James Hamilton

Featured image courtesy of Carolina Angles

The Chapel Hill Inventory of Resources for Bicycles (CHIRB)

March 11, 2021 / odrozd

By Eli Powell

In May 2020, my supervisors on the Transportation Planning Team at the Town of Chapel Hill approached me about updating their bicycle parking inventory. It had not been touched since 2011 and the Planning Department wanted more current bicycle parking data in order to more thoroughly analyze how well developers were adhering to bicycle parking capacity requirements and design guidelines outlined in the Town’s Land Use Management Ordinance. I offered them one better: I wanted to create an interactive, Town-wide inventory of not only bicycle parking units (bike racks, bike lockers, etc.), but also bicycle maintenance units such as fix-it stations and air pumps, so cyclists who live, work, and play in Chapel Hill could more easily locate bicycle parking at their destinations.

Eight months of fieldwork later, I present the result: the Chapel Hill Inventory of Resources for Bicycles (CHIRB)!

To create this map, I personally scoured every reachable, public area within the Town of Chapel Hill’s limits for bicycle parking and maintenance units. I took a picture of every such unit and recorded the following attributes:

Type of resource: Is the unit a bike rack? Bike locker? Fix-it station? Air pump?
Type of parking: If this is a bike rack, what shape of bike rack is it? Grid? Wave? Inverted U?
Capacity
Condition
Lighting?: Is the unit located near a light? I was unable to return to the units at night to verify whether the lights worked, but the assumption was that most or all of them do.
Weather protection?: Would the unit stay dry during a rainstorm?
Accessibility: How many public building/street entrances are within 200 feet walking distance of the unit? Generalized on a scale from “Low” to “Super high”.
Visibility: From how many windows is the unit clearly visible? I defined “clear visibility” as that to the extent at which someone watching from the window would be able to identify someone stealing a bicycle from the unit, so some estimation was required. Generalized on a scale from “Low” to “Super high”.
Land use type
Distance to nearest bus stop: Measured by routing along the Town’s sidewalk network so the output was walking distance, not distance as the crow flies.

As of this writing, a few developments are missing from the inventory because they were unreachable while I was completing my fieldwork. Most notably, Chapel Hill High School was being renovated and the new Wegman’s was still under construction. I plan on adding these to the inventory in the near future!

My hope is that this interactive inventory will foster a more bicycle-friendly environment for the Town of Chapel Hill. Happy biking!

Find the map here: https://arcg.is/1WCKCe

Featured image courtesy of the Town of Chapel Hill

Eli is a second-year master’s student specializing in transportation at the Department of City and Regional Planning. Prior to arriving at Carolina Planning, he earned a B.A. in Geography with minors in Urban Studies and GIS from the University of Minnesota – Twin Cities. His professional interests include non-automotive transportation, traffic modeling, and planning for environmental protection. When he’s not planning, he can be found running, listening to indie music, or watching anything that could possibly be considered a sport.

From the Archives: 2020 Master’s Projects

September 25, 2020 / odrozd

Master’s project proposals are due today! While second-year DCRP students work to finalize their items for submission, let’s revisit a few projects completed by the class of 2020.

Today’s post comes from pieces originally published on February 7, 2020 and January 17, 2020.

UNC’s top-ranked master’s program is designed to successfully prepare students for professional planning practice. A central component of the curriculum is a final capstone project, an ‘MP,’ which provides an opportunity for students to apply the skills and knowledge they’ve developed in the classroom and demonstrate their readiness for practice. But the MP is also a space for students to engage with pressing social and institutional challenges that affect real-world communities.

Transportation Disadvantage of Refugees in the Research Triangle of North Carolina (Kaitlin Heatwole)

Building on transportation equity research that was conducted with refugees in Vermont (Bose 2014) and Ontario (Farber et al 2018), I’m surveying refugees who have settled in the Research Triangle to learn more about how they get around. Specifically, I’m interested in modes of travel, travel times, and barriers they face to access work, school, groceries, child care, healthcare, social connections, and other destinations. Results of this multi-lingual survey will identify patterns of refugees’ travel behaviors and recommend steps that public transit, housing, and other service agencies can take to meet the transportation, housing, and employment needs of this group.

Retiree In-Migration and Low-Wage Job Growth (Paul Liu)

In many areas of the U.S., the number of seniors and retirees is growing relative to other age cohorts. This demographic shift can have wide-ranging implications on regional labor markets and economic development more broadly. Because retirees do not participate in the labor force but still demand goods and services, some have argued that retirees’ consumption patterns drive demand for low-wage and part-time labor. However, up-to-date research on the effect of retiree spending habits on regional labor markets is surprisingly limited. To fill this gap, I am developing an econometric analysis using publicly available data to determine whether there is, in fact, a causal relationship between retiree in-migration and the number of low-wage jobs. These results will provide a valuable and much-needed understanding of the relationship between retiree in-migration and regional job quality.

Curbside Management in North Carolina (Tory Gibler)

Curbside management seeks to optimize curbside usage, typically in urban downtowns, where a variety of users, businesses, and city functions are all competing for limited space. Large cities such as San Francisco, Seattle, and New York are proactively addressing curbside management, but curb competition is not unique to large metropolitan areas. Small to mid-size southeastern cities face the same challenges at the curb, particularly with the growth in Transportation Network Companies (TNCs) like Uber and Lyft, the emergence of micromobility start-ups (e.g. e-scooter and dockless bicycle companies), urban freight delivery, and new complete street policies. My research looks at six North Carolina cities to better understand how these urban areas are managing the curb in light of new 21st century challenges.

Water Committees in sub-Saharan Africa (Catherine McManus)

The United Nations estimates that 1.8 billion people worldwide do not have access to safely managed drinking water sources. A major contributing factor to this problem in sub-Saharan Africa is that 25% of hand-pumps no longer work within four years of their construction. What explains why some water points reliably serve a community for decades while others fail within a year? Often, the answer lies in how local water committees manage their water systems. My MP looks at data from more than 3,000 water points across twelve countries in sub-Saharan Africa to understand whether different characteristics of these committees – including their composition, operations, and fee collection system – influence local water system functionality. I also intend to examine the potential of new definitions of ‘functionality’ to test the validity of existing, commonly used measures. These are questions we need to answer to help guarantee safe, reliable sources of drinking water for all.

From the Archives: How to Engage your Community Online

June 25, 2020 / odrozd

This week’s post was originally published by Sarah Parkins on April 19, 2018. This year has seen the world scramble to switch much of its in-person activities to an online format. What does this mean for community engagement? In her piece, Sarah Perkins shares her master’s project work, which researched the best practices for utilizing online community engagement tools.

It’s no secret that community engagement is a necessary part of planning that includes citizens in the ways that their communities are shaped. What is a secret is the best way to run community engagement processes. Planners have had varying success with engagement plans when balancing how to include as many voices as possible with getting feedback that is valuable to planning projects.

Typically community engagement is done face to face at community meetings, however it’s difficult to engage with the entire community at community meetings when there are many restraints such as time commitments, lack of accessibility, and pessimism about the ability to make a difference. There are also several drawbacks to traditional forms of engagement like public forums and charrettes, including high costs, lack of effectiveness, and being too exclusive.

While becoming increasingly frustrated with trying to navigate the Town of Chapel Hill’s website to learn more about a recent planning project, I couldn’t help but think that there has to be a better way to design websites that provide information but allow for the collection of feedback from the community. With a fair bit of research I found myself in a field of technology that I had no idea existed in the planning world: Online Community Engagement Tools.

This developing technology has allowed for towns and planning departments to increase their community outreach in the form of mobile apps, websites, or social media platforms that utilize methods of providing information and collecting feedback. These tools can be significantly cheaper, reach more people, and collect significantly richer data than traditional engagement. In recent years there has been valuable research on why we should be using technology to improve community engagement, however there hasn’t been much research on how we should be using this technology.

There are many different types of online engagement tools being developed and not every tool is ideal for specific engagement efforts. With so many different types of tools, it makes it very difficult for planners researching engagement tools to know which one is the best to pick, or even to understand all their options. Finding a list of 50+ tools on a blog post from OpenPlans, a software incubator, I decided to focus my master’s project, a year-long project as part of my degree requirements for a Masters in City & Regional Planning from UNC-Chapel Hill, on researching best practices for using these tools and creating a user guide that would assess each tool for practical use by planners.

My master’s project critiques typical community engagement efforts, explores the current field of community engagement technology, and analyzes three online engagement technology case studies to analyze best practices for using digital tools developed for community engagement. From this research, I created the user guide, assessing the 23 tools that are still publicly available, organizing them into five categories (surveys, message boards, mapping, budget simulation, and website builders), and developing a chart for each with the findings. This user guide is available to anyone interested on a website I created.

In text image_blog — Types of online engagement tools (Image credit: Author)

I hope that by creating this guide and making it available to planners it will assist communities in improving the ways that they engage with residents, making it easier to provide meaningful engagement opportunities and getting more citizens involved in the ways that their communities are shaped.

About the Author: Sarah Parkins is a master’s student in UNC’s Department of City and Regional Planning, concentrating in housing and community development. She has a bachelor’s degree in architecture, and her current academic interests include affordable housing and placemaking. When not working at the Carrboro Parks and Rec department, Sarah is baking and DIY-ing her way through Pinterest.

Senior Honors Thesis: Greenspace and Health

April 8, 2020 / odrozd

By Lizzie Tong

In the decades to come, cities must grapple with a myriad of challenges – climate change, increasing population density, rising inequality – and develop mitigation strategies through smart urban design. Cities around the world, including Singapore, Vienna, and Shenzhen, have turned to greenspace as a way to address these concerns and improve overall quality of life for its citizens.

Greenspace can mitigate challenges like excessive urban heat. The urban heat island effect is a phenomenon in which the heat trapped in densely built environments raises summer city temperatures. This exacerbates air pollution and heat-related illnesses, which can disproportionately affect minorities and other vulnerable populations. Increased greenery lessens urban heat by providing shade to city residents, reducing dark, heat-absorbing surfaces, and contributing to overall lower city temperatures. Additionally, more tree canopy better filters particulates in the air, improving air quality and reducing the risk of respiratory-related illnesses. While it is clear that the benefits of greenspace improve the natural environment for city dwellers, greenspace is also linked to improving an individual’s physical and mental health by affecting one’s mood and behavior.

“Faces in the Fountain” Photo Credit: Creative Commons

Recent studies find a slight positive correlation between greenspace and overall health; however, the research fails to shed light on whether greenspace causes improved health. And if it does, what aspect of health – physical or mental – is it improving? My honors thesis research applies an econometric, fixed-effects analysis of cross-sectional data to determine the effect of greenspace on physical activity rates and social cohesion in Baltimore, MD. Exercise is an indicator of physical health while relationships, like social capital, social networks, and social cohesion, are indicators for mental health and well-being. The paper not only establishes a causal link between greenspace, physical activity rates, and social cohesion, but also seeks to address the inverse relationship between heat and income by analyzing how greenspace can be introduced to minimize health disparities and improve living conditions for Baltimore’s most vulnerable populations.

“Row of Houses in Baltimore” Photo Credit: Creative Commons

Why is a fixed-effects analysis important?

Traditional Ordinary Least Squared (OLS) regressions are not able to determine a causal link between greenspace and health because it fails to eliminate residential self-selection, non-random greenspace, and reverse causality, which are various types of estimation bias. These three estimation biases present endogeneity — internal factors that can be biasing the effect of greenspace on health. For example, residential self-selection assumes that individuals who prefer to exercise could intentionally move to areas of increased greenspace that facilitate exercise, causing a bias that overestimates the effect of greenspace on physical activity. Similarly, intentionally targeting increases in greenspace in certain neighborhoods (non-random greenspace) overestimates the benefits to health, further introducing bias that traditional OLS cannot capture. The Baltimore Sustainability Plan specifically states that the City of Baltimore intentionally targets greenspace development in low-income, African-African, and minority residential neighborhoods, which proves that non-random greenspace is an endogenous factor that makes it difficult to determine the causal link between greenspace and health. Finally, strong social cohesion levels could also encourage communities to band together to improve their own neighborhood’s greenspace. Thus, reverse causality, or the effect of social cohesion on greenspace is another example of bias that needs to be accounted for. Applying a fixed-effects analysis at the zip code and census tract level accounts for this type of endogeneity. Fixed-effects is an estimation technique that controls time-invariant, unobserved characteristics at a given geographic area, like community culture, an individuals’ perception of safety, retail environment, or features of the natural environment. Holding these unobserved variables constant reveals the causal link between the effect of greenspace on physical activity and social cohesion, removing bias caused by residential selection, non-random greenspace, and reverse causality.

“NDVI values in Baltimore 1999 to 2011”. Photo Credit: Lizzie Tong

What is the impact of greenspace on health?

The results find a small, positive association between greenspace and physical activity rates for individuals in Baltimore. This confirms the findings of previous research; however, the results of my research do not indicate a statistical significance. There are more promising results for social cohesion; there is a positive, statistically significant relationship between greenspace and social cohesion rates. Social cohesion is a composite variable measured by individual responses to the following characteristics on a scale from 1 to 5, from strongly disagree to strongly agree: whether the neighborhood is close knit, trusting, willing to help, and has strong problem solving abilities. Based on the individuals’ composite responses, the results find that a 10% increase in greenspace in a given zip code can cause a 1 point increase in the social cohesion index, suggesting that a moderate increase in greenspace can translate to a tangible change in neighborhood social cohesion.

Who benefits from increases in greenspace?

Not only do the results suggest that greenspace improves social cohesion rates broadly, but the results indicate significantly more beneficial effects for low-income populations. Individuals with lower income, lower levels of educational attainment, that do not identify as White exhibited greater increases in social cohesion rates than other demographics. The results confirm a hypothesis by Gordon-Larsen (2016) that suggests that an increase in the accessibility and availability of public amenities, like recreational areas, can improve health outcomes for lower-income, minority populations. In my research, a similar trend finds that increasing greenspace could be even more beneficial for low-income, minority demographics than for wealthier, Whiter demographics.

City Livability

Given these findings, cities can be more confident in their decisions to implement greenspace as a means to improve its residents’ health. Not only is there a direct causal link, but cities can evaluate a quantitative impact on their populations – a 10% increase in greenspace increases public perception of social cohesion by one index value. Further, the fixed-effects analysis eliminates any concerns of overestimating the effect of greenspace on health. Once all endogeneity is removed, the results still indicate a large, statistically significant increase in social cohesion rates. Thus, greenspace, which is already a viable solution in megacities internationally, is undoubtedly a key pillar of urban design that not only improves the natural environment, but also improves the final frontier of city liveability: human physical and mental well-being.

Featured Image: “Luiseninsel Großer Tiergarten Berlin” Photo Credit: Tobias Nordhausen, Flickr Creative Commons

About the Author: Lizzie Tong is a senior studying economics and computer science at UNC, with an interest in applying data science to solve challenges tied to urban sustainability. After graduating, she will be working as a research assistant for the Community Development and Policy Studies Team at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. In her free time, she enjoys trying her hand at oil painting, running, and new Bon Appetit recipes.

Master’s Project Research: Development of Curbside Management Strategy Typologies

March 13, 2020 / odrozd

by Tory Gibler

As a resident of downtown Raleigh, I’ve seen an increased demand of curb access for delivery trucks, bike lanes, rideshare drop-off/pick-ups, and on-street parking. Riding my bicycle around downtown, it’s not uncommon to see a delivery truck using the bike lane as a loading zone, or see a rideshare drop off a passenger at a bus stop. Automobiles cruising for limited on-street parking also adds congestion and chaos to increasingly busy downtown streets. As an aspiring transportation planner, these interactions and observations motivated me to research curbside management for my master’s project.

The curb can refer to both the curb lane, where on-street parking typically occurs, and the sidewalk curb, where parking meters, bike racks, and utility poles are housed. This blog post – and my research – is focused on the curb lane. The term “curbside management” has recently become more popular within the transportation industry. Zipcar called 2018 the year of the curb, and the Smart Cities Collaborative is focusing their 2020 program on the curb. Startups have sprung up in response to curb chaos. Take, for example, Coord and CurbFlow, launching within the last 24 months with the aim of applying real-time technology to manage curb competition in urban cores.

A rideshare vehicle waiting for its next customer at a curb in downtown Raleigh. Photo credit: Tory Gibler.

Curbside management is not new. It’s an umbrella term that describes many of the operations occurring on city streets: primarily on-street parking, but also including some loading zones and transit stops. The rise of the term “curbside management” coincides with increases in technology-based mobility such as rideshare, bicycle share, and e-scooters, and increased urban development and urban freight delivery.

As more demand is placed on curb access in large metropolitan areas, cities are thinking creatively about how to balance these demands. Curbside management attempts to find the right balance and utilization of curb access among transportation modes and functions. Good curbside management enables safer mode interaction at the curb.

Curbside Management Typologies

As part of my master’s project, I wanted to see what innovative curbside management strategies cities were actually implementing. My master’s project looks at current and aspirational curbside management work in six North Carolina cities. In order to gain context, I performed an environmental scan of grey literature for examples of cities attempting innovative curbside management strategies. Below, I outline my environmental scan of grey literature and the typologies I developed at this point.

An environmental scan of grey literature essentially scans news articles, white papers, blogs, reports and academic papers. I was primarily looking for examples of innovative curbside management in US cities. I defined innovation as any attempt to manage an increase in curbside demand beyond time limited loading zone and on-street parking signage. Using a simplified systematic review process with key terms and inclusion criteria I identified 37 US cases of innovative curbside management.

Within the 37 cases, I used coding and groupings to develop a typology matrix, which allowed me to create three innovative curbside management typologies:

Asset management at the curb

Of the 37 cases, 16 fell into this typology; it includes innovative strategies that attempt to inventory, assess demand, or guide prioritization of curb uses. A good portion of these strategies incorporated real-time data or demand data to better inform decisions. An example of this strategy is mapping and inventorying real-time curb data with the startup Coord or the open source nonprofit SharedStreets.

Influence user behavior at the curb

This typology applied to 11 of the 37 cases. This management strategy primarily works by adjusting pricing or increasing enforcement at the curb. An example in both New York and San Francisco is automated enforcement of illegal automobile stopping in a bus lane. Policies that shift interaction with the curb were also included, such as New York and Washington, DC’s, overnight freight delivery programs.

Modification of the curb

The remaining 10 cases fell under this typology. These curbside management strategies are the most traditional in that they seek to modify the physical curb for mode or time access. For example, designated curb areas in West Hollywood become rideshare passenger drop-off and pick-up sites during the evening.

A few strategies overlapped in typology type, but all cases were placed in a typology based on their primary function. One strategy that has strong ties to all three typologies is a startup called CurbFlow. CurbFlow uses curb modification to designate reservable spaces for delivery and passenger loading. Using real-time data collection, users can see if a loading zone is available. Usage data is collected to understand demand at sites and inform future loading zone decisions. Access to the space is monetized and time-limited, influencing user behavior with the loading site. CurbFlow was first piloted in DC and has a current pilot in Columbus, Ohio.

A delivery truck blocks the crosswalk as pedestrians attempt to cross a downtown Raleigh street. Photo credit: Tory Gibler.

Using these innovative curbside management typologies as context, my next task is to assess current and aspirational strategies in six North Carolina cities through qualitative analysis of interviews. As with most DCRP final semester master’s students, my master’s project is a work in progress. I’m looking forward to how the project comes together as the end of the semester approaches.

Feature photo: A freight truck blocks a bike lane in downtown Raleigh. Photo credit: Tory Gibler.

About the Author: Tory is a second-year master’s candidate in the Department of City and Regional Planning with a concentration in Transportation Planning. An advocate for accessibility in transportation, she actively promotes multimodal transportation as a volunteer and former board member of the Raleigh bicycle advocacy group, Oaks & Spokes, and as a Safety and Planning Intern at VHB. Tory received her undergraduate degree in Nonprofit Management and Fundraising from Indiana University. In her free time, she enjoys bicycle camping.

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“Smart Cities Collaborative.” Transportation for America Blog. Transportation for America, 2019. Web. 2 Mar. 2020.

Addressing Climate Change with the Federal Government: A Summer at Golden Gate National Recreation Area

August 31, 2019 / odrozd

My experience this summer was a bit different than that of most students finishing their first year of a doctoral program. Rather than sticking around to do research, I headed out West as part of a program designed to give students the opportunity to work on pressing climate change-related management challenges with the National Park Service (NPS).

The Future Park Leaders of Emerging Change (FPL) is a program of the NPS Climate Change Response Program; it’s at its heart a program to recruit young talent to Federal Service. Students – we ranged from undergraduate rising seniors to a newly minted PhD – spend their summer at different national park units or offices around the country working on twelve-week research and management projects. The program culminates with a professional development symposium at the end of the summer where we were able to meet staff from across the Department of the Interior (DOI) at all stages of their careers working on climate change issues from one angle or another. We spent the week in Fort Collins at the Climate Change Response Program headquarters talking about federal climate change research, job opportunities in DOI, and all the tips-and-tricks for connecting with federal employment (and dealing with its unique challenges).

The Professional Development Symposium in August in Fort Collins was an opportunity for all program participants to learn more about DOI jobs and federal service, but also a chance for us to meet each other in-person and hear about all our different projects (and a chance to go hiking in Rocky Mountain National Park!).

The other primary goal of the FPL program if to help individual national park units or offices get valuable and much needed assistance with critical management challenges. This year, there were ten of us placed all over, from the high country of Mt. Rainier to watery Biscayne National Park in south Florida. One student was working on acquiring a Dark Sky Certification for Minnesota’s Voyageurs National Park. Another was developing a bacterial water quality citizen science monitoring program at swampy Congaree National Park in South Carolina. Two students were in Arizona – one using tree cores to develop a historical record of snowfall in arid Saguaro National Park and another assessing erosion risk to cultural resources in Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument right on the Mexican border. Other projects included assessing the extent and impact of coral disease, developing climate change vulnerability metrics at historical parks in the Northeast, and building a predictive model for historical cultural resources in collaboration with a local native tribe. The diversity of projects reflects the diversity of park needs and challenges, as well as the diversity of students the program is trying to recruit.

My project was to develop a formal protocol and standard operating procedures for monitoring shoreline change and coastal topography at Golden Gate National Recreation Area (GGNRA) in California’s Bay Area. Coastal parks around the country are increasingly threatened by sea level rise and climate change-driven flooding, which poses a threat to park infrastructure, facilities, and natural resources. But these challenges are particularly acute at GGNRA, where the park’s sandy beaches typically abut semi-urban development and draw some of the largest crowds in the national park system. In addition, GGNRA is unique in that it’s not one contiguous park. Rather, it’s a conglomeration of various units – and various jurisdictions as a result – across the region, from Silicon Valley up to Pt. Reyes. These challenges limit the potential of landward migration of park infrastructure and ecosystems and restricts the use of other traditional adaptation strategies, particularly at some of the park’s more remote sites.

These are very urgent problems the park has been grappling with for years. The challenges are most obvious at the beaches of Marin County: Stinson, Muir, and Rodeo. Stinson, in particular, has been identified as one of the communities in the Bay Area most vulnerable to sea level rise and climate change-driven flooding. Just last year, the nearby creek overtopped its banks and flooded the entire parking lot, blowing through a new opening in the dunes along the beach. However, despite recent studies, information is still limited on the geomorphic processes – sediment supply, erosion, beach migration – at play at these beaches. This information gap severely limits the park’s planning and coastal adaptation efforts. In response, the park’s 2017 Resource Stewardship Strategy identified the development of a Marin County beach geomorphology program as a high priority.

The parking lot at Stinson Beach is still unusable after flooding in April 2018 from the nearby creek destroyed a section of the parking lot and blew a new opening in the dunes.

That’s where I came in. Having reliable data on shoreline position and seasonal and annual variation in beach width will help park staff calculate shoreline migration, erosion rates, and sediment supply, which can, in turn, inform coastal management and adaptation efforts. Although park staff had been doing some topography monitoring at Muir Beach since 2012 (in response to creek and lagoon restoration), it was in an ad hoc manner, and they hadn’t had the time to do the involved work required to develop a comprehensive monitoring protocol to ensure that data collected year-to-year is consistent. As such, my objectives included assessing the park’s existing monitoring efforts, becoming familiar with similar protocols from other parks, and formalizing a protocol that incorporates best practices, but also meets park needs and accommodates existing resources.

The first step was data collection, which also provided me an opportunity to learn about the technology and different surveying techniques. Using similar protocols from within the park system and from the USGS, who have been doing this kind of monitoring in San Francisco since 2004, I was able to refine and formalize our existing approach. Then, I tested my methods by collecting another year’s worth of data at Muir Beach and pilot data, to establish baseline conditions, at Stinson Beach.

The actual process of data collection involved setting up a base GPS station (left) that communicates both with overhead satellites and a roving GPS station, which I carry using a retrofitted backpack (right) as I walk up and down the beach, collecting elevation and position data at different points.

After data collection, I developed analysis techniques and products for Muir and Stinson Beaches that would be both useful and usable by the park and partner organizations. Using Excel, ArcGIS, and specialized survey software, I developed plots and maps showing landward shoreline migration, cross-sectional beach morphology, and elevation loss. I also developed templates to make the analysis simple as monitoring is initiated at additional sites in the future.

An example of one of the plots we created using the data collected shows the annual migration of the beach shoreline (roughly, the mean high water mark) at Muir Beach since 2012.

The primary product of this project, though, was the protocol itself. The protocol outlines the conceptual framework, overarching objectives, and sampling and analysis design of the monitoring program. It’s a high-level document meant to broadly guide monitoring efforts and inform any future decision-making as questions, technology, and management paradigms evolve. The SOPs are more specific. They contain step-by-step instructions for mission planning, conducting the survey, analysis and reporting, and data management. These are to ensure that data is collected and managed in a formal, reliable manner year-to-year to ensure consistency between surveys and facilitate inter-survey comparisons of data.

It’ll take a few years until the impact of the protocol will actually be felt by GGNRA staff. They are taking it out in September to essentially give it a test-run. The hope is that an intern, with limited familiarity with this equipment and these sites, is able to pick up my document and both collect reliable, accurate data and do all the analyses and reporting that follows. Hopefully, in a few years, they’ll have enough survey data to have a solid enough grasp of the local geomorphology that they can then get to addressing the real challenge of using that information to make difficult decisions for the people, facilities, and ecosystems of GGNRA in an era of climate change.

About the Author: Leah Campbell is a second-year Ph.D. student in the Department of City and Regional Planning, where she focuses on integrating equity and resilience into climate adaptation to address urban flooding. Prior to UNC, she worked in the environmental nonprofit sector in California advocating for progressive water quality and coastal resilience.

Featured Image: Rodeo Beach in Marin County, California where the Natural Resources Division of Golden Gate National Recreation Area is based (and where I was paid to live for three months!).