Lisa Schweitzer

ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE IN TRANSPORTATION PLANNING

Abstract Environmental justice is a public policy goal of ensuring that the adverse human health or environmental effects of government activities do not fall disproportionately upon minority populations or low-income populations. This article presents a practical approach to measure the extent to which the air quality or noise consequences of a transportation system change would disproportionately affect those populations. The approach applies a geographic information system (GIS) to blend U.S. Census data with the results from emission and dispersion models of vehicle-generated pollutants, and from noise propagation models. Air pollution and noise contours can thus be overlaid upon data representing race and income levels, to discern whether disproportionate effects would occur.

Neighborhood Air Quality, Respiratory Health, and Vulnerable Populations in Compact and Sprawled Regions

Problem: Recently, public health researchers have argued that infill development and sprawl reduction may improve respiratory outcomes for urban residents, largely by reducing vehicle travel and its attendant mobile-source emissions. But infill can also increase the number of residents exposed to poor air quality within central cities. Aside from emissions studies, planners have little information on the connections between urban form, ambient pollutant levels, and human exposures or how infill changes these. Purpose: We examined neighborhood exposures in 80 metropolitan areas in the United States to address whether neighborhood-level air quality outcomes are better in compact regions than in sprawled regions. Methods: We used multilevel regression models to find the empirical relationship between a measure of regional urban form and neighborhood air quality outcomes. Results and conclusions: Ozone concentrations are significantly lower in compact regions, but ozone exposures in neighborhoods are higher in compact regions. Fine particulate concentrations do not correlate significantly with regional compactness, but fine particulate exposures in neighborhoods are also higher in compact regions. Exposures to both ozone and fine particulates are also higher in neighborhoods with high proportions of African Americans, Asian ethnic minorities, and poor households. Takeaway for practice: Compact development and infill do not solve air quality problems in all regions or for all residents of a given region. Planners should take differences in neighborhood air quality and human exposure into account when planning for new compact developments rather than just focusing on emissions reductions. Research support: This project was supported by a grant from the ShenAir Institute at James Madison University and by the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration.

Planning and Social Media: A Case Study of Public Transit and Stigma on Twitter

Problem, research strategy, and findings: How media portray public transit services can affect the way voters and stakeholders think about future transit investments. In this study, I examine social media content about public transit from a large sample of Twitter comments, finding that they reflect more negative sentiments about public transit than do the comments about most other public services, and include more negative material about transit patrons. However, transit agencies may be able to influence the tone of those comments through the way they engage with social media. Transit agencies that respond directly to questions, concerns, and comments of other social media users, as opposed to merely “blasting” announcements, have more positive statements about all aspects of services and fewer slurs directed at patrons, independent of actual service quality. The interaction does not have to be customer oriented. Agencies using Twitter to chat with users about their experiences or new service also have statistically significantly more positive sentiments expressed about them on social media. This studys limitations are that it covers only one social media outlet, does not cover all transit agencies, and cannot fully control for differences in transit agency service. Takeaway for practice: Planners committed to a stronger role for public transit in developing sustainable and equitable cities have a stake in the social media strategy of public transit agencies; moreover, they should not let racial and sexist slurs about patrons dominate feeds. Planners should encourage interactive social media strategies. Even agencies that only tweet interactively a few times a day seem to have more civil discussions surrounding their agencies and announcements on Twitter than agencies that use their feed only to blast service announcements.

Planners Learning and Creating Power: A Community of Practice Approach

Learning networks, such as a community of practice, can be an important way for planners to gain access to, and power in, new professional knowledge domains. In this manuscript, the authors develop, implement, and evaluate a community of practice model for planning education and practice in energy and sustainability planning. The authors find that although this active, learner-centered method helps enable flexible, self-directed study for those learning new content, there is a strong need for leadership in heterogeneous learning networks to help participants overcome problems created by social position and structuration within the network. New knowledge formation within learning networks ultimately challenges some of the planning professions fundamental assumptions about the validity of “moving knowledge into practice” in contexts with uncertainty.

Charting the challenges and paradoxes of constructivism: a view from professional education

This article examines the implications of constructivist theory for university-level professional education. Constructivist approaches to instructional design promise desirable outcomes for pre-professional education: professionals who think independently, who can frame and define problems and who can evaluate their own choices. However, the trend to constructivism, when coupled with a parallel cultural trend toward the commodification of higher education may, if left unaddressed, lead to pedagogical paradoxes that undermine professional preparedness. We discuss three such paradoxes and conclude by suggesting how constructivist approaches might be reframed to promote a more authentic student-centeredness in higher education professional programs.

Incorporating Household Gathering and Mode Decisions in Large-Scale No-Notice Evacuation Modeling

This article presents a model framework to integrate human behavior analysis and traffic simulation in evacuation modeling. During an evacuation, household members tend to evacuate as a unit. However, most engineering-based evacuation models treat evacuees as independent and separate entities, and overlook the interactions among household members during an evacuation (i.e., gathering children/spouses or uniting with other family members at home). The omission of these behaviors leads to imprecise modeling of evacuation situations. Transportation mode choice in a no-notice evacuation has seldom been investigated. The authors present a framework to incorporate both household-gathering behavior and mode choice in an emergency into an evacuation model to examine the effects of these two issues on evacuation efficiency and network performance. The framework was tested in the Chicago metropolitan region for two hypothetical incidents with evacuation radii of 5 and 25 miles. Evacuation models that omit gathering behavior give dangerously optimistic evacuation times and network congestion levels compared to models that include family interactions. Optimistic estimates are significant for a large-scale evacuation. These optimistic estimates can cause the reduction in the number of evacuees who can reach safe zones in a certain time threshold to nearly 50% between the gathering and no-gathering models. Gathering behavior could also cause distinct effects on network performance for inner and outer areas, the break point of which may be where severe bottlenecks are located. In this study, average travel speed increases on the overall network within 15 miles of the incident location (where downtown Chicago is located), but decreases outside the 15-mile radius. The paper concludes that without considering family gathering in the evacuation scenarios the management strategies may actually impede rather than help the evacuation process.

Impact of Temporary Freeway Closure on Regional Air Quality: A Lesson from Carmageddon in Los Angeles, United States

Large cities in the United States face multiple challenges in meeting federal air quality standards. One difficulty arises from the uncertainties in evaluating traffic-related air pollution, especially the formation of secondary pollutants such as ozone and some particulate matter. Current air quality models are not well suited to evaluate the impact of a short-term traffic change on air quality. Using regional traffic and ambient air quality data from Southern California, we examine the impact of a two-day freeway closure on traffic and several criteria air pollutants (CO, NO2, O3, PM10, PM2.5). The results indicate that regional traffic decreased about 14% on average during the closure. Daily average PM2.5 levels decreased by about 32%, and daily 8 h maximum ozone levels decreased by about 16%. However, the daily 1 h maximum NO2 concentration was higher at some sites during the closure. Despite the mixed results with NO2, this study provides empirical evidence to support traffic reduction as an effective strategy to address chronic air pollution problems, especially with regard to ozone, in Southern California.

Household no-notice evacuation logistics: how well do households optimize?

In no-notice events, adults must decide whether and how to gather household dependents. This article examines how effectively households plan their evacuation logistics for a daytime event in a multimodal network and how these plans match the outcomes of a nonlinear integer optimization approach that simultaneously determines optimal meeting locations, final destinations, and family member pickup assignment and sequencing. The model outcomes are compared to information from 59 in-depth interviews. Households largely assign emergency-gathering activities to the parent normally responsible for child-related travel and prefer to meet at home; these decisions are optimal only in some cases. The authors also identify the sensitivity of the optimized logistics to the time adults spend at pickup locations gathering their dependents and “break-even” points where a combination of walking and trains become competitive with personal vehicles. For some households, the additional travel time to make these modes competitive is fewer than 2 h, which is not necessarily an unexpected delay during evacuations. Thus, emergency management agencies should continue to include transit agencies in their planning process and ensure that employees are available to provide services for cases where severe congestion is encountered, and not just for socioeconomically vulnerable populations.

Planning, Development, and Media A Case Study of the Woodrow Wilson Bridge

Given the importance of the media in 21st-century western liberal democracies, planning actors that seek media attention may do so for multiple ends, such as to dampen controversy and increase their status as “stars” in their professions through media branding. We develop a case study of the Woodrow Wilson Bridge project, along with expert interviews with public relations specialists, journalists, editors, producers, and scientists. We find that development professionals, including scientists, adopted mediatized behaviors, such as filming themselves, while working so that audiences might witness experts’ actions and successes. The stories and ideas that reached broad audiences concerned experts’ stories rather than those of a broad array of stakeholders.

Relocating Children in Daytime No-Notice Evacuations

Under no-notice conditions in which family members are collecting dependents, the geographic location and the characteristics (e.g., the number of entrances and exits) of the pickup points become factors crucial to efficient evacuation. This paper presents a linear integer mathematical program for facilities to relocate dependents who need to be picked up in an optimal manner. The program is iterated with a traffic simulation model to obtain an optimal set of locations to which dependents are relocated, on the basis of anticipated travel times. The entire methodology is applied to a sample network based on the Chicago Heights, Illinois, network with three safety time thresholds. The results indicated that the safe evacuation time threshold is important to the relocation strategy. When the safe evacuation time threshold is adequate, the relocation of dependents increases the number of successful evacuees and increases the average travel speed of the network; it also significantly benefits those who rely on public transit to evacuate because new sites are closer to bus stops and walking times to those stops are reduced. Application of the proposed methodology can assist local decision makers with taking effective measures during no-notice evacuations, and the relocation sites could be part of local evacuation management plans.