Publications and Analysis
As a National Science Foundation IGERT fellow in Sustainable Urban Infrastructure, I co-authored four peer-reviewed articles in journals focused on transportation, public health, and land use.
Reigning in Carbon Emissions Through Transportation
and Land Use Initiatives:
15-minute Neighborhoods and Travel Behavior in Boulder
I published an excerpt of my master's project in the monthly magazine of the Colorado chapter of the APA. This article summarizes my analysis of relationships between neighborhood access, associated trip generation, and daily miles traveled in Boulder. The analysis involved geocoding 12,000 survey responses in ArcMap, performing an ANOVA using the R statistical package to investigate mode share differences between residences in varying neighborhood access levels, and applying negative binomial regression to predict various measures of active travel.
Reliability Testing of the Pedestrian and Bicycling Survey (PABS) Method
This study investigated the reliability of a survey instrument designed to measure the amount and purpose of walking and cycling in communities. I performed statistical analyses in PASW (SPSS) to estimate the test-retest reliability across two administrations of a survey administered 7 to 9 days apart to the same individual. These analyses included calculating Pearson/Spearman correlations and Kappa coefficients, producing Bland Altman plots, and scripting SPSS commands to efficiently and accurately conduct statistical tests. The article was published in the Journal of Physical Activity and Health and funded as part of a larger Mineta Transportation Institute study.
Bicycling and Transit: A Marriage Unrealized
This paper surveyed existing knowledge about the intersection of bicycling and transit use, described three innovative initiatives that show promise in addressing capacity limitations, and sketched an analysis framework for communities and transit agencies to maximize the integration of bicycling and transit. My role in this collaborative paper was to build an index to predict levels of cycling transit users (CTU) along a regional bus route. I gathered socio-demographic data from the U.S. Census, information about bicycling facilities from the City of Boulder, and transit usage data from the RTD transit service. Then, I completed a preliminary factor analysis using SPSS to generate a standardized score for each of 70 transit stops that predicts their potential to attract cycling transit users. This article was published in the Transportation Research Record and funded as part of a larger Mineta Transportation Institute study.
also re-printed in:
Transport, the Environment and Public Health: Classic Papers on Non-motorised Travel. Classics in Transport and Environmental Valuation series Edited by Stephen P. Greaves,
Assessing Options to Enhance Bicycle and Transit Integration
This study described and evaluated four common bicycle and transit integration strategies: increased bicycle parking at transit stops, increased bicycle capacity on transit vehicles, and shared bicycle infrastructure. Our team developed a framework for evaluating strategies based on user preferences, and conducted an assessment to determine which strategies are most cost-effective. My specific contributions were to organize five local focus groups, to train collaborators leading remote focus groups, to assess cost-effectiveness, and to calculate user preferences from the focus group data via the analytic hierarchy process, a multicriterion decision-making tool.
These two articles and the complete MTI-funded project are available.