Better Integrating Travel Choices into Future Urban Mobility Systems: The Day the Highways Stood Still
This exchange between a scientist and an alien in the 2008 remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still summarizes the dilemma that is facing urban transportation today and that will continue to be a major issue in determining our ability to create a sustainable future. Many engineers and technologists think that they have the answers, while the crux of the matter lies in another popular quote provided by Walt Kelly in his April 1970 Earth Day comic strip Pogo: “We have met the enemy and they is us.”
Travel and Transit Use at Portland Area Transit-Oriented Developments (TODs)
In recent years there has been a growing interest in using land use planning to reduce reliance on the automobile long-term, through ideas such as smart growth, New Urbanism, pedestrian pockets, and transit-oriented development (TODs). Many growing regions throughout the United States, are turning to these concepts to address problems of traffic congestion and suburban sprawl. However, the effectiveness of such policies in reducing automobile travel and improving livability is largely unknown. Portland was one of the early adopters and is often pointed to as a model for other regions. The Region's 2040 Growth Concept, adopted by the Metro regional government, includes many smart growth concepts. Metro uses a number of programs and policies to implement the 2040 Growth Concept, including subsidies to transit-oriented developments. This research surveyed residents of TODs in the Portland area to help answer the following questions: • Do residents of transit-oriented developments (TODs) drive vehicles less, use transit more, and/or walk and bicycle more than residents of other neighborhoods? • To what extent can TODs increase transit ridership? • How do the features of the TOD influence travel choices? • Do the features of TODs induce people to change their travel behavior? Alternatively, are people who move to these neighborhoods already active transit users, walkers, or cyclists, i.e. they are seeking an environment in which to practice their preferred travel behaviors? These questions are key to understanding the cause-effect relationship between the built environment and travel behavior. • How do people's attitudes towards travel and their neighborhood influence travel behavior? The survey collected a large amount of data from over 300 residents near four different light rail stations in the Portland region. The neighborhoods were selected to represent a range of types of TODs, while controlling somewhat for income (through housing styles and prices) and regional and transit accessibility. None of the neighborhoods completely satisfies generally agreed upon standards for good TODs: higher density, good land use mix, pedestrian friendly, and close to transit. Several key findings include. • Responding households in the neighborhoods tend to be smaller, without children. • Some of the TODs appear to be attracting older adults. • The residents of the surveyed TODs are not transit dependent. • Respondents take transit to work or school at a higher rate than residents citywide. About 30% or more of the respondents in each neighborhood commuted by MAX at least once a week and 23-33% used transit as their primary commute mode. This compares to less than 10% of workers in Hillsboro and Beaverton and 15% of Portland workers. • The varying physical features of the TODs does not appear to affect transit commuting. But, parking pricing at work or school is an important factor in commute mode choice. Workers and students who would have to pay to park at work were far more likely to use transit.
FlowBrush: optical flow art
The depiction of motion in static representations has a long tradition in art and science alike. Often, motion is depicted by spatio-temporal summarizations that try to preserve as much information of the original dynamic content as possible. In our approach to depicting motion, we remove the spatial constraints and generate new content steered by the temporal changes in motion. Applying particle steering in combination with the dynamic color palette of the video content, we can create a wide range of different image styles. With recorded videos, or by live interaction with a webcam, one can influence the resulting image. We provide a set of intuitive parameters to affect the style of the result, the final image content depends on the video input. Based on a collection of results gathered from test users, we discuss example styles that can be achieved with FlowBrush. In general, our approach provides an open sandbox for creative people to generate aesthetic images from any video content they apply.