Geotrans

GEOTRANS INVITED LECTURE MONDAY OCTOBER 26 2009 at 5824 Ellison hall at 12:00 noon

A GEOTRANS INVITED LECTURE – MONDAY OCTOBER 26, 2009 – 5824 ELLISON HALL

"Children in Transit Oriented Developed Japan:

Connections with Neighbors, Independent Travel, and Exercise"

E. Owen D. Waygood, PhD

Research Associate

Centre for Transport & Society

University of the West of England

Bristol, UK

Children’s travel in many developed countries is increasingly by automobile. This should be a concern to society as: patterns established as children often carry through to adulthood; the increased car trip generation contributes to congestion, traffic danger, pollutants, and GHGs; the children loose independence, daily exercise, and other developmental benefits of non-motorised travel. Most research on children has come from the UK and North America, which are both anglo-saxon dominated countries with urban planning roots in the UK. Japan has its own distinct history and recent urban planning roots in the German model of separating industrial uses, but allowing mixed land-use in most other areas. This talk will discuss previous literature on children, and findings from several studies in the Osaka Metropolitan Area that discuss how the built environment and a connection with neighbors influence children’s independent travel and exercise.

Owen Waygood joined CTS in September 2009 as a Research Associate working on a European Union project to reduce car usage through the influence of information on individuals, mass transit operators, and other stakeholders such as government decision makers. His main research interests lie in sustainable travel, particularly the societal impacts of mode choice. His doctoral thesis was on children's travel in Japan with respect to independence, physical activity, and community connections. His past research includes entrenched travel behaviour, mode use trends in shopping, and the built environment's influence on sustainable travel. He is currently researching social-psychological applications to travel behavior change. He is originally from Saskatoon, Canada.

Two UCTC Dissertations Awards to Geography

Six UCTC Dissertation Grants were awarded for 2009-2010 and UCSB Geography graduate students Kriste Henson and Tom Pingel took home two of them.  University of California Transportation Center (UCTC) is a multi-campus research unit of whose theme is Transportation Policy and Systems Analysis. UCTC’s mission is to significantly advance the state of the art in transportation research and practice and to expand the workforce of transportation professionals.  (http://www.uctc.net/theme.shtml).

Seo Youn Yoon Wins Eisenhower Graduate Fellowship

Grad student Seo Youn Yoon has been awarded an Eisenhower Transportation Fellowship of $1500 to cover travel costs to the 2009 Annual Transportation Research Board meeting in Washington DC. The US Department of Transportation's Dwight David Eisenhower Transportation Fellowship Program was established in 1991 to attract qualified students to the field of transportation education and research and to advance transportation workforce development. Seo Youn's adviser, Kostas Goulias, notes: "It is very hard to get award funding for foreign nationals," so he is doubly proud that two of his students were among this year's recipients. There were 178 applications for the Eisenhower Graduate Fellowship this year, and less than 70 received funding.

Seo Youn's research focuses on two questions fundamental to transportation studies, i.e., what shapes people's decisions about travel behavior, and how can the mechanism underlying people's behavior be captured? To address these issues, Seo Youn proposes to use GIS to develop a measurement procedure that captures accessible opportunities from individual movement through time and space, and to use econometric models which consider human interaction to assess the significance of the accessibility measures. To quote Seo Youn, "this research addresses the relationship between urban development patterns and travel behavior and the propagation of the impact on behavior through human interaction. The result from this study will enhance the understanding of the impact of urban development and land use change on travel behavior and help establish better transportation policies."

Kriste Henson Wins Multiple Fellowships

Grad student Kriste Henson has been awarded an Eisenhower Graduate Fellowship from the US Department of Transportation, a Geography and Regional Science Dissertation Improvement Grant from the National Science Foundation, and a Doctoral Dissertation Grant from the University of California Transportation Center. According to Kriste’s advisor, Kostas Goulias, her Eisenhower Graduate Fellowship award of $35,500 “was the largest award that I have ever seen since the creation of the program. This year the program received 178 applications and we know the #70 ranked did not get any funding. This means Kriste is somewhere in the very top 5.”

Kriste’s current Eisenhower award will fund her doctoral research on “Travel Determinants and Multi-scale Transferability of National Activity Patterns to Create Synthetic Populations,” and it supplements her 2008 NSF grant of $6,000 for her doctoral dissertation research. Kriste’s UCTC grant of $15,000 is also a fellowship towards conducting her dissertation research. According to her Project Summary:

“Homeland security applications require fine modeling and simulation resolution in time and space to represent human activity and travel behavior. The TRansporation ANalysis SIMulation System (TRANSIMS-LANL), an activity-based transportation modeling system, has the ability to simulate the movements of individuals around a network on a second-by-second basis between parcel-level locations. At the core of TRANSIMS-LANL are "synthetic" schedules which are formulated based on activity/travel diaries. In order to model cities or large regions in a timely manner, a new methodology is proposed that will allow a person's activity patterns to be "transferred" to another person living in a different geographic location. A Structural Equations Model (SEM) will be developed based on sociodemographic information for survey households in the 2001 National Household Travel Survey (NHTS) and land use, land form, and accessibility measures gathered from several sources of national-level geographic data including Navteq Navstreets and Dunn & Bradstreet business data. The SEM will be used to define lifestyle groupings to describe the NHTS survey households. A synthetic population can be classified based on these lifestyle groupings and matched to survey households utilizing a multiple imputation model. The synthetic household will assume the activity schedule of the corresponding survey household.”

Kriste is a staff member in the Decision Applications Division of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, working on a variety of projects including modeling dependencies between infrastructures (including transportation) and bioevent reconstructions. She hopes to complete her PhD in May 2009 and continue to work at LANL. Kriste’s achievements are remarkable, and she is a credit to both the department and to the discipline. Go, girl!

Two Eisenhower Graduate Fellowships to Geotrans Students

Kate Deutsch and Nate Isbell won major national fellowships. Eisenhower Graduate Fellowships are designed “to attract qualified students to the field of transportation education and research, and advance transportation workforce development,” and they are awarded on the basis of plan of study relevance to national issues, letters of recommendation, leadership, writing ability, and academic excellence (for more see: http://www.geog.ucsb.edu/events/department-news/562/kate-deutsch-and-nate-isbell-win-eisenhower-graduate-fellowships/).