Flying High: A Case Study of the Integration of Drones into a Landscape Architecture Curriculum

The use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), or drones, is becoming increasingly important to the field of landscape architecture, and universities need to adapt their teaching practices to prepare students to use this technology in practice. This article describes the creation of a Department-wide drone program to train students on the operation of UAVs and the other components that compose an unmanned aerial system (UAS). This program led to impacts in faculty decisions regarding projects, as well as broader curricular changes. While the program has been demonstrated to be both successful and sustainable, several hurdles have had to be addressed in order to achieve this success

Empty Parks: An Observational and Correlational Study Using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs)

If a neighbourhood park fails to meet the needs of its residents usage may decrease, which potentially makes the park vulnerable to crime and social disorder. Despite the popularity of studying park visitation or park-based physical activity, there is a lack of studies on factors associated with empty parks. This study explores factors related to the underutilisation of neighbourhood parks in Salt Lake County, Utah, USA, using a novel data collection approach – unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). The findings from exploratory video analysis and inferential statistical modelling show that park programs and neighbourhood environments, as well as temporal aspects, are associated with the likelihood of empty parks. Additional analyses of no-child, no-senior, and no-female parks, respectively, support these findings. An understanding of park-use dynamics could promote effective plans, policies, and programs that promote park utilisation and park-based physical activity

Street Life and the Built Environment in an Auto-oriented US Region

Urban planners and designers believe that the built environment at various geographic scales affects pedestrian activity, but have limited empirical evidence at the street scale, to support their claims. We are just beginning to identify and measure the qualities that generate active street life, and this paper builds on the first few studies to do so. This study measures street design qualities and surrounding urban form variables for 881 block faces in Salt Lake County, Utah, and relates them to pedestrian counts. This is the largest such study to date and includes suburbs as well as cities. At the neighborhood scale, we find that D variables – development density, accessibility to destinations, and distance to transit – are significantly associated with the pedestrian activity. At the street scale, we find significant positive relationships between three urban design qualities – imageability, human scale, and complexity – and pedestrian counts, after controlling for neighborhood-scale variables. Finally, we find that pedestrian counts are positively associated with seven of twenty streetscape features – historic buildings, outdoor dining, buildings with identifiers, less sky view, street furniture, active uses, and accent building colors. This study provides implications for streetscape projects that aim to create walkable places in typical auto-oriented, medium-sized cities

The missing link between place and productivity? The impact of transit-oriented development on the knowledge and creative economy

Emerging research suggests that planners and policy makers should explore the expanded role Transit-Oriented Development (TOD) plays in promoting innovation and economic growth. TOD station characteristics including accessibility, walkability, density, and mixed uses may create environments beneficial for creative and knowledge industries. However, the evidence linking place to productivity, as measured by firm sales volume is lacking. Using cluster analysis and Propensity Score Matching for national-level data, this research tests these relationships. Findings indicate that firms located in dense, mixed use, and walkable TODs with higher levels of activity experience increased sales. Hence, TOD and knowledge-based economic development strategies should be planned in tandem to maximize outcomes

The Usability of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) for Pedestrian Observation

The monitoring of pedestrian activity is challenging, primarily because its traffic levels are typically lower and more variable than those of motorized vehicles. Compared with other on-the-ground observation tools, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) could be suitable for counting and mapping pedestrians in a reliable and efficient way. Thus, this study establishes and tests a new method of pedestrian observation using UAVs. The results show that UAV observations demonstrate high levels of interrater reliability (intraclass correlation coefficient = 0.99) and equivalence reliability (Cronbach’s α = .97 with on-the-ground counts and .73 with Google Street View). Practical implications of the new tool are discussed

Long-Range Urban Air Mobility Land-Use Planning for Vertiports

21-8224Urban Air Mobility (UAM) is a rapidly developing industry that highlights tremendous growth opportunities and a major shift in the delivery mode of services and products. This project focuses on a vital step towards the integration of UAM: the siting of vertiports based on their impact on the surrounding community. The identification of potentially suitable sites offers a spatially explicit visualization to facilitate discussion of the future of UAM-focused infrastructure. This project uses a combination of geospatial analysis techniques to determine the suitability of the site across the Wasatch Front for vertiport development. Suitability is a theoretical potential for a given area (or parcel) to support vertiport activities. We define suitability consisting of five categories: the built environment, natural environment, regulatory requirements, technological limitations, and community social values. This report provides details about how these five elements are included in a final suitability map for the region. Feasibility is not considered in this process; neither are land value and access to utility infrastructure which will be elemental for the deployment of UAM infrastructure. Conceptual and procedural frameworks detail the authors\u2019 underlying processes used to complete the analyses. Our tools and maps can allow developers and planners to converse about land-use decisions that could influence UAM operations. Further, the geospatial tool is customizable and freely available, allowing communities to adapt for their specific circumstances

Park and Neighborhood Attributes Associated with Park Use: An Observational Study Using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

As the world becomes more urbanized, neighborhood parks are becoming an increasingly important venue where people engage in physical and social activities. Using park-use data collected by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), the aim of this study is to account for park use in light of park attributes and neighborhood conditions. The role of the built environment near a park receives particular attention as it is understudied in the literature. A regression model shows that neighborhood park utilization is positively associated with park attributes (i.e., larger area, a playground, a creek/pond, quality maintenance, and organized activities) and neighborhood attributes (i.e., fewer minority/low-income population, higher density, more commercial and public uses, and a well-connected street network). The statistical significance of these factors varies by user types. This study provides insights into the role of neighborhood compactness and mixed land use, which calls for interdisciplinary collaboration among urban planners/designers, landscape architects, and park programmers

Doctor of Philosophy

dissertationObservation is one of the classic, essential methods of studying the interaction between people and places. A systematic direct observation fosters researchers' understanding of urban public life in an objective and measurable way. In direct observation, a researcher observes the activities of humans rather than intervening in their behavior and asking questions, and then documents, analyzes, and interprets the behaviors. Main tools include manual counts, video recording, and automatic counts. Each method has pros and cons, so an observer can choose a method depending on the purpose and context. However, these methods take place in a limited number of locations which may not represent the entire area of interest. To fill the gap created by the lack of appropriate observation tools, this dissertation explores the usability of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), also known as drones, to observe people's behavior in public spaces. As UAVs cover a greater area in a shorter amount of time, they save time and money required for data collection. They are also more informational as they can capture the user activities, attributes, and spatial patterns. The use of UAVs has become popular in environmental studies. This study is one of the first attempts to employ UAVs to observe people's behavior in public spaces and integrate the benefits of human observation and video recording. This dissertation consists of three papers that share core concepts of urban design and behavioral research. The first paper develops a new observational tool using UAVs to survey park-based physical activity and tests its reliability and validity. The second paper establishes a consistent methodology for pedestrian observation through the use of UAVs and tests its reliability. Using UAV-observed park-use data, the final paper establishes a comprehensive statistical model that estimates the number of park users by type (e.g., age group, gender, and activity level) and accounts for the attributes of park environments and community characteristics. Compared to traditional tools, a more efficient and reliable observation tool using UAVs could lead to savings in cost and time for both researchers and practitioners collecting behavioral data and comparing it across various communities

Not Parking Lots but Parks: A Joint Association of Parks and Transit Stations with Travel Behavior

Urban design literature says that public open space in a station area could promote walking and other types of physical activity, enhance place attractiveness, and increase property values. In the context of station areas, however, there is a lack of empirical studies on the relationship between the presence of parks and sustainable travel behavior, which is one of the primary goals of transit-oriented developments (TODs). This study examined the impact of park provision on transit users’ mode choice in three U.S. regions: Atlanta (GA), Boston (MA), and Portland (OR). This study utilized multilevel multinomial logistic regression to account for hierarchical data structures—trips nested within station areas—and multiple travel modes—automobiles, transit, and walking. After controlling for the built environment and trip attributes, this study showed that when there was a park, people were more likely to walk or take transit to access or egress a transit station. A transit station having a park nearby may provide a more pleasant first-mile/last-mile travel experience. This paper demonstrated that station areas need to incorporate more public space, an overlooked element in current TOD plans

How Does Transportation Affordability Vary Among TODs, TADs, and Other Areas?

Transit-oriented development (TOD) has gained popularity worldwide as a sustainable form of urbanism; it concentrates development near a transit station so as to reduce auto-dependency and increase ridership. Existing travel behavior studies in the context of TOD, however, are limited in terms of small sample size, inconsistent TOD classification methods, and failure to control for residential self-selection. Thus, this study has three research questions. First, how can we distinguish between Transit-oriented development (TOD) and Transit-adjacent development (TAD)? Second, how do travel behaviors vary between TODs and TADs? Third, how does transportation affordability vary between TODs and TADs? This study utilizes cluster analysis to classify station area types and propensity score matching to control residential self-selection. From cluster analysis with built-environment factors—density, diversity, and walkability—in a half-mile buffer, this study classifies existing station areas as TOD, TAD or Hybrid types. After controlling for residential self-selection, it shows that a TOD motivates its residents to walk more and take transit more while using personal vehicles less. The significant difference between TOD and TAD in both VMT and the number of auto trips demonstrates that TODs make the personal vehicle trips shorter and fewer. Travel behavior in the Hybrid type demonstrates the possibility of gradual and practical change. Finally, the percentage of household income spent on transportation is lower in TOD households than TAD households. This shows that a TOD household is likely to save enough money on vehicle ownership and use that, while it likely spends more on transit, the final result is a significantly lower financial burden from transportation