PRESENTATION ARCHIVE
Active travel such as walking and bicycling can lead to health benefits through an increase in physical activity. At the same time, more active travelers breath more and so can experience high pollution inhalation rates during travel. This webinar will review the state of knowledge about how roadway and traffic characteristics impact air pollution risks for bicyclists, including the latest PSU research quantifying bicyclists' uptake of traffic-related air pollution using on-road measurements in Portland. The PSU research team including Alex Bigazzi, Jim Pankow, and Miguel Figliozzi quantified bicyclist exposure concentrations on different types of roadways, respiration responses to exertion level, and changes in blood concentrations of pollutants. Implications for planners, engineers, and policy-makers will be discussed, including guidance for more pollution-conscious bicycle network planning and design. Additionally, ways for individual travelers to reduce their air pollution risks will be discussed.
This 60-minute webinar is eligible for one hour of training which equals 1 CM or 1 PDH. NITC applies to the AICP for Certification Maintenance credit for each webinar. We will provide an attendance certificate...
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Speaker: Brian Saelens, Professor of Pediatrics and Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences, Seattle’s Children’s Hospital & University of Washington
Topic: Links Between Public Transportation and Physical Activity (Effects of LRT on Physical Activity Based on Seattle GPS Study)
Summary: This seminar will explore the empirical evidence regarding the links between the use of public transportation and physical activity, with a specific focus on using integrated device and self-report methods to identify travel modes and physical activity.
Bio: Brian E. Saelens, Ph.D. is a Professor of Pediatrics and Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences at the University of Washington and Principal Investigator at Seattle Children’s Research Institute. Dr. Saelens is a clinical/health psychologist. His interest areas include obesity treatment and prevention, especially in environmental factors and policies that influence physical activity and eating behaviors in children and adults. He has published over 150 peer-reviewed original investigation and review articles.
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Joseph Broach, PhD candidate in Urban Studies, will discuss the results of his research, which models the propensity of children aged 6-16 to walk or bike to parks and school without an adult chaperone, extending existing work on children’s active travel in several ways: 1) focus on travel without an adult, 2) inclusion of school and a non-school destinations, 3) separate walk and bike models, 4) consideration of both parent and child attitudes and perceived social norms, 5) explicit inclusion of household rules limiting walking or bicycling.
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Summary: Researchers from the transportation, planning and health fields share the common goal of promoting physically active lifestyle. One challenge that researchers often face is the measurement of physical activity, particularly among children. This is because the sporadic nature of children’s physical activity patterns makes it difficult to recall and quantify such activities. Additionally, children’s lower cognitive functioning compared to adults prevents them from accurately recalling their activities. This presentation will describe the design and application of a novel self-report instrument - the Graphs for Recalling Activity Time (GReAT) - for measuring children’s activity time use patterns. The instrument was applied in a study of children’s risk for obesity and diabetes in a predominately Hispanic community in Milwaukee, WI. Time-use data for two weekdays and one weekend day were collected for various physical and sedentary activities. The data was then assessed against measurements of the children’s cardiovascular fitness, weight status and insulin resistance through exploratory analysis and structured equation modeling. Findings on GReAT’s reliability and new evidence on the impacts of time-use in different activities on children’s risk for...
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Summary: Since about 2008, the planning world has been experiencing a paradigm shift that began in places like California and Oregon that have adopted legislation requiring the linking of land use and transportation plans to outcomes, specifically to the reduction of greenhouse gases (GHGs). In response to this need, Calthorpe Associates has developed a new planning tool, called UrbanFootprint, on a fully Open Source platform (i.e. Ubuntu Linux, PostGIS, PostGreSQL, etc.). As a powerful and dynamic web and mobile-enabled geo-spatial scenario creation and modeling tool with full co-benefits analysis capacity, UrbanFootprint has great utility for urban planning and research at multiple scales, from general plans, to project assessments, to regional and state-wide scenario development and analysis. Scenario outcomes measurement modules include: a powerful ‘sketch’ transportation model that produces travel and emissions impacts; a public health analysis engine that measures land use impacts on respiratory disease, obesity, and related impacts and costs; climate-sensitive building energy and water modeling; fiscal impacts analysis; and greenhouse gas and other emissions modeling.
Bio: Garlynn Woodsong is a Project Manager in the regional and large-...
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Summary: Urban bicyclists’ uptake of traffic-related air pollution is still not well quantified, due to a lack of direct measurements of uptake and a lack of analysis of the variation in uptake. This paper describes and establishes the feasibility of a novel method for measuring bicyclists’ uptake of volatile organic compounds (VOC) by sampling breath concentrations. Early results from the data set demonstrate the ability of the proposed method to generate findings for transportation analysis, with statistically significant exposure and uptake differences from bicycling on arterial versus bikeway facilities for several traffic-related VOC. These results provide the first empirical evidence that the usage of bikeways (or greenways) by bicyclists within an urban environment can significantly reduce uptake of dangerous traffic-related gas pollutants. Dynamic concentration and respiration data reveal unfavorable correlations from a health impacts perspective, where bicyclists’ respiration and travel time are greater at higher-concentration locations on already high-concentration roadways (arterials).
Bio: Alex Bigazzi is a Ph.D. candidate in Transportation Engineering at PSU, where he is also teaching a class on transportation emissions modeling....
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Summary: Dr. Lovell will talk about three projects funded by NASA and the FAA, addressing congestion in the National Airspace System. Dr. Lovell's team developed diffusion-based queuing models of individual airports that could support better building blocks for network-wide congestion models. The advantage of the new models is their flexibility with respect to input distributions. In a study for the FAA, Dr. Lovell's team developed day-of-operations collaboration "languages" suitable for the FAA and individual carriers in order to collectively manage expected airspace disruptions. Finally, he will discuss a study on predictability in the airspace, with a focus on scheduled block times.
Dr. Lovell is an Associate Professor with joint appointments in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and the Institute for Systems Research. He is a member of the faculty of the Applied Mathematics, Statistics, and Scientific Computation Program. He is director of the University of Maryland chapter of Engineers Without Borders - USA, and serves that organization on its board and as a leader of one of its Technical Advisory Councils. Dr. Lovell received his B.A. in Mathematics from Portland State University in 1990, and M.S. and Ph.D....
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