Browsing by Subject "Neighborhoods"

Now showing 1 - 20 of 31
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    Affecting commute mode choice in Southern California: Which employer-based strategies work?
    (Journal of Transport and Land Use, 2020) Kane, Kevin; Hsu, Jenneille; Cryer, Joseph; Anderson, Marco
    Interest in mandatory employer-based trip reduction (EBTR) programs has been renewed due to increased emphasis on reducing transportation-related greenhouse gas emissions. This paper analyzes survey data from 2004 to 2016 from an EBTR program in Southern California, known as Rule 2202, which allows employers with more than 250 workers to choose among implementing commute reduction strategies to meet performance standards, show evidence of obtaining omissions credits, or pay a fee-in-lieu. We report program statistics and conduct bivariate and regression analyses to determine which land-use and location characteristics, employer characteristics, and mitigation strategies explain cross-sectional differences in average vehicle ridership (AVR) and AVR improvement to understand where future AVR increases might be realized. Decreasing program participation suggests that alternatives to commute-reduction strategies make financial sense to regulated employers, but Rule 2202 employers report higher alternative transportation shares than the region as a whole. AVR is found to be highest at smaller worksites, in transit-supported and pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods, and where employers support vanpool programs. Multivariate analyses indicate that AVR gains were also highest in commercially dense neighborhoods, for retail businesses, and where guaranteed ride home programs were offered, showing promise for future AVR gains.
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    Assessing Neighborhood and Social Influences of Transit Corridors
    (Center for Transportation Studies, University of Minnesota, 2012-07) Fan, Yingling; Guthrie, Andrew
    This research investigates neighborhood and social influences of major transit improvements in the Twin Cities metropolitan area. To delineate a comprehensive picture, this research focuses on four transit corridors—Hiawatha LRT, NorthStar Commuter Rail, Cedar Avenue BRT, and Central Corridor LRT—each of which is at a different stage of planning, construction, or operation. The project undertakes a general quantification of neighborhood social change in transit served areas. For each corridor, the researchers also investigate inter-neighborhood and inter-corridor variations in social change, and examine residents' and business owners' perceptions of neighborhood social change, as well as of the specific impacts of transit corridors. A mix of quantitative analysis and survey research is used. By examining a wide range of system development stages including planning, construction, and operation, research findings will help policy makers determine at what point in the timelines of major transit capital projects policy responses are needed and likely to be most effective. By covering a variety of transit technologies including LRT, BRT and Commuter Rail, as well as a diverse range of urban and suburban neighborhoods, results from this research will help policy makers make more informed decisions about how to prevent and mitigate socially harmful neighborhood changes associated with various types of transitways. The research also presents strategies for engaging residents and businesses with negative, neutral and positive perceptions of transit projects in the transitway development process.
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    Assessing Neighborhood and Social Influences of Transit Corridors (Research Brief)
    (Center for Transportation Studies, University of Minnesota, 2012-10) Fan, Yingling; Guthrie, Andrew
    This four-page document summarizes a study (Assessing Neighborhood and Social Influences of Transit Corridors, CTS 12-19) that assessed how residents and businesses along transit corridors in the Twin Cities perceive neighborhood changes caused by transitways. Key findings include: (1) The majority of residents and businesses in transitway corridors have a positive view of transit induced neighborhood change. The extent of positive neighborhood change that transitway corridor residents and businesses anticipate varies widely from corridor to corridor. (2) People with any experience using light-rail transit, frequent transit users, and transit-dependent riders all have overwhelmingly positive attitudes regarding transit-induced neighborhood change. (3) Racial differences in perceptions of transit-induced neighborhood change do exist, with specific groups on certain corridors having markedly more negative or positive views than others. (4) Five key strategies may help address negative perceptions and possible negative impacts of transit-induced neighborhood change: address misperceptions, engage the neutrals, play to the strengths, include transit users, and conduct community-sensitive planning.
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    Assessing The Influence Of The Neighborhood Environment On Evaluative And Emotional Subjective Well-Being
    (2020-03) Das, Kirti
    Comprehending and promoting well-being has been regarded as a key goal in academic research and policy making given its significant role in creating and maintain healthy, productive societies. As urban planners focus on designing and maintaining living environments, they have the potential to enhance the well-being of residents and provide opportunities for all to flourish. It is therefore critical for planners to understand how the built environment influences well-being. Despite the theoretical importance in linking planning to subjective well-being (SWB), the attention to SWB in planning is relatively recent. There remain significant gaps in the planning literature including inadequate research on the emotional aspects of SWB and omission of key SWB determinants in analysis due to a lack of interdisciplinary perspectives. In this dissertation, we hope to fill these gaps in the planning literature, add to the understanding of how attributes of the neighborhood influence the evaluative and emotional dimensions of SWB, and explore analysis methods best suited to study the neighborhood-SWB relationship. To this end, two detailed literature reviews were conducted to identify an extensive list of SWB determinants to include in the analysis. Original data were collected via a survey conducted in the Minneapolis-St Paul Twin Cities area from October 17, 2016 to October 25, 2017. The data collection effort was part of the Sustainable Healthy Cities project funded by the National Science Foundation. We find that evaluative and emotional SWB have varied determinants, both at the personal and neighborhood level. We also find evidence to support that relationships between neighborhood attributes and evaluative and emotional SWB can be asymmetric. Specifically, there is a typology of neighborhood attributes in terms of how they impact SWB when these attributes perform poorly/absent, at all levels of performance, and only at a high performance. The typology is also sensitive to modeling techniques as well as data coding schemes. Across all models used the nature of the relationships between neighborhood attributes and SWB is found to vary based on the SWB measure used. Given the sensitivity of findings to SWB measures used, analysis modeling and coding, directions for future research are discussed.
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    The attributes of residence/workplace areas and transit commuting
    (Journal of Transport and Land Use, 2011) Lee, Bumsoo; Gordon, Peter; Moore, James, II; Richardson, Harry
    Area type matters when we try to explain variations in public transit commuting; workplace (commuting destination) type matters more than residence (origin) type. We found this statistical link over a sample of all census tracts in the four largest California metropolitan areas: Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego, and Sacramento. In this research, we used a statistical cluster analysis to identify twenty generic residence neighborhood types and fourteen workplace neighborhood types. The variables used in the analysis included broad indicators of lo- cation and density, street design, transit access, and highway access. Once identified, the denser neighborhoods had higher transit commuting, other things equal. Yet what distinguishes this research is that we did not use a simple density measure to differentiate neighborhoods. Rather, density was an important ingredient of our neighborhood-type definition, which surpassed simple density in explanatory power.
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    Baltimore's urban fix: sounds of excess and exclusion in Station north
    (2013-03) Kotting, Jennifer
    This research seeks to tell a different kind of story about urban development, attentive to the details of everyday life that are often ignored by both supporters and critics of such projects. The case study of Station north is an immediately relevant project meant to improve the city as a whole by attracting capital investment. However, the social and political contradictions involved show the devastating consequences of a spatial fix for an urban neighborhood. Mapping neighborhood change is common, but using sound and digital mapping to evoke under-explored parts of everyday life is less typical in the field of urban studies.
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    Expanding Opportunities for Single Parents through Housing. Guidelines for New and Existing Housing and Neighborhoods that Meet the Needs of Single-Parent Families.
    (Minneapolis: Minneapolis/St. Paul Family Housing Fund., 1988) Cook, Christine; Vogel-Heffernen, Mary; Lukermann, Barbara L; Pugh, Sherie; Wattenberg, Esther
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    Exploring the importance of detailed environment variables in neighborhood commute mode share models
    (Journal of Transport and Land Use, 2018) Schneider, Robert J.; Hu, Lingqian; Stefanich, Joseph
    This paper analyzes the relationship between detailed neighborhood environment variables and commute mode share using a dataset drawn from across the United States and includes model validation results. Representing one of the first studies of its kind, we use United States journey-to-work data to explore the following questions: 1) Which detailed environment variables have significant associations with the proportion of people in a neighborhood who take public transit, walk, or bicycle to work? 2) Does adding detailed environment variables to existing, nationally available neighborhood variables improve the predictive accuracy of work commute mode share models? We use a set of 120 randomly selected census tracts to estimate fractional multinomial logit models that predict walk, bicycle, transit, and automobile commute mode shares. The Base Model includes a set of nine significant, nationally available variables identified from a previous analysis of 5,000 tracts. We test 18 additional detailed neighborhood environment variables and identify five variables that have significant associations with commute mode share: sidewalk coverage (positive association with transit and walk), proximity to a rail station (positive association with transit), bicycle facility density (positive association with bicycle), freeway presence (negative association with walk), and mixed land use (positive association with transit, walk, and bicycle). While these detailed environment variables add clarity to our understanding of factors that influence travel behavior, our validation analysis using 50 separate census tracts does not provide conclusive evidence that these variables improve model accuracy. Further studies with larger sample sizes are needed to determine the optimal set of variables to include to predict automobile, transit, pedestrian, and bicycle commute mode shares.
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    Fear follows form: A study of the relationship between neighborhood type, income and fear of crime at train stations
    (Journal of Transport and Land Use, 2020) Strandbygaard, Sofie Kirt; Nielsen, Otto Anker; Jones, Alan Keith Spence; Grönlund, Bo; Jensen, Lotte M. B.
    In pursuing fear-reduction strategies in public transport, the total experience of accessing rail stations should be taken into account. This article correlates passengers’ fear of crime at train stations with neighborhood types and income data within the pedestrian catchment area. The research is based on urban form and income around 84 S-train stations in the Copenhagen metropolitan area and nine years of passenger surveys on fear of crime at these stations. The study reveals a significant positive correlation between low income and fear of crime; the lower the income in an urban area, the more unsafe passengers feel at the station. However, when controlling for the relationship between income, safety and neighborhood type, stations in neighborhoods with urban form associated with low incomes have the lowest ratings of safety. The research indicates that train passengers’ sense of security is connected to neighborhood type and the city’s planning characteristics. This is an important finding for urban designers and planners working on the integration of public transport and station design in urban areas.
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    A Guide to Neighborhood Assessment: A Student Workbook
    (2003) Crump, Jeff; Students in DHA 2453: Housing and Community Development, University of Minnesota
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    Home Improvement through NRP: An Analysis of the Distribution of Funds for Single-Family Home Improvement Projects.
    (Minneapolis: Center for Urban and Regional Affairs (CURA), 2006) Nesse, Katherine; Lukermann, Barbara
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    Impact of Twin Cities Transitways on Regional Labor Market Accessibility: A Transportation Equity Perspective
    (Center for Transportation Studies, University of Minnesota, 2010-06) Fan, Yingling; Guthrie, Andrew; Teng, Rose
    This study evaluates the impact of the Hiawatha light rail line on job accessibility for the economically disadvantaged, seeking to further understanding of transit’s role in promoting social equity, and to identify commute flow changes among low-wage workers. The results will inform more equitable transit polices and improvements in the future. Numerous studies find spatial mismatch is an impediment to employment for low-wage workers. While transit is recognized as a tool for improving outcomes, results of empirical research are mixed. Several studies find positive relationships; others find none. The study examines changes in jobs accessible by transit throughout the service day. We utilize Geographic Information Systems (GIS) map analysis, summary statistics and regression analysis. Regression models estimate before- and after-LRT accessibility as a function of distance to the nearest transit stop, location within the immediate area of a light rail station or other transit premium stop, and of various demographic variables. We examine shifts in actual home-to-work commute flows using the Longitudinal Employment and Housing Database (LEHD) Origin-Destination Matrix. We employ GIS map analysis, summary statistics and regression analysis. Regression models estimate shifts in where individuals commute from and to as a function of distance to the nearest transit stop at both ends of a commute, location within the immediate area of a light rail station or other premium transit stop at both ends of a commute, and of various demographic variables. The report makes recommendations for applying our method to future transitways. Policy implications are discussed.
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    The influence of urban form and socio-demographics on active transport: A 40-neighborhoods study in Chengdu, China
    (Journal of Transport and Land Use, 2020) Guan, ChengHe; Forsyth, Ann
    In China, a centralized planning culture has created similar neighborhoods across the country. Using a survey of 1,048 individuals conducted in 2016 in Chengdu—located in a carefully conceptualized typology of neighborhood forms—we analyzed the associations between individual and neighborhood characteristics and active or nonmotorized transport behavior. Using several multiple logistic and multilevel models, we show how neighborhoods were categorized and how the number of categories or neighborhood types affected the magnitude of the associations with active transport but not the direction. People taking non-work trips were more likely to use active compared with motorized modes in all neighborhood types. Neighborhood type was significant in models but so too were many other individual-level variables and infrastructural and locational features such as bike lanes and location near the river. Of the 3-D physical environment variables, floor area ratio (a proxy for density) was only significant in one model for non-work trips. Intersection density and dissimilarity (land-use diversity) were only significant in a model for work trips. This study shows that to develop strong theories about the connections between active transport and environments, it is important to examine different physical and cultural contexts and perform sensitivity analyses. Research in different parts of China can help provide a more substantial base for evidence-informed policymaking. Planning and design recommendations were made related to active transport need to consider how neighborhoods, built environments, and personal characteristics interact in different kinds of urban environments.
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    It takes a village? neighborhoods and children's readiness for school
    (2014-01) Wruck, Peter Jordan
    From classical theorists like Durkheim, to the Chicago School's Park and Burgess (1916) and Shaw and McKay (1942), to today's work in criminology, sociologists have demonstrated clear relationships between residential context and a variety of outcomes. We also know that children vary in their school readiness. A variety of social forces push and pull on preschool age children and impact their overall school readiness, including family, health, institutions, and neighborhood. This research bridges the neighborhood and early education research literatures to answer three questions: first, is there an association between neighborhoods and school readiness in the United States? Second, which social disorganization-theory informed neighborhood characteristics are most salient in describing this observed association? Finally, do families act as a mediator of this relationship? Given the literature and theory, I hypothesized that these relationships would be substantial and endure across a variety of definitions of neighborhood and school readiness. My results, however, paint a different picture: while neighborhoods appear to be associated with school readiness, the importance of this association is perhaps best described as mild. This has important implications for neighborhood and social capital theories, as well as future research into neighborhood effects on individuals and families.