Spring 2011 April Webinar
April 13, 2011: Rethinking Infrastructure
- How to Participate This will be an online only webinar click here for details on how to join us.
- Further seminar materials will be available on the Materials page.
Presentations & Speakers: |
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How Do We Make Urban Arterials Safe and More Comfortable for Pedestrians? Findings from the Accumulated Research and Possible New Performance Measures Traditional traffic engineering practice considers the primary function of urban arterial streets to be moving through vehicle traffic and design standards intended to ease traffic flow and increase roadway capacity have been developed and widely adopted. And yet, many of the streets designated as arterials are much more than just vehicle movement corridors for the local communities through which they pass. Among other things, they are local shopping streets, places to catch a bus, and routes that children and their parents must take or cross to reach school and community services - all of which suggests the need to make them more pedestrian-friendly. Research coming from multiple fields suggests that pedestrian safety and comfort along arterial streets can be accomplished via physical design elements that run counter to the current norm. What does the research suggest for designing more pedestrian friendly urban arterials? What new peformance measures might Caltrans adopt to move in this direction? Dr. Elizabeth Macdonald is Associate Professor of Urban Design in the Departments of City and Regional Planning and Landscape Architecture/Environmental Planning at UC Berkeley, and a Principal in the San Francisco based urban design firm Cityworks. Her research focuses on street design, pedestrian-oriented environments and the history of urban form. Her work seeks to be useful to urban design practitioners and so is oriented to issues of current practices as well as theory. |
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Environmental Life Cycle Assessment for Pavements California is identifying and evaluating strategies for reducing net green house gas (GHG) emissions and other pollutants from all sectors of the economy. Environmental Life Cycle Assessments (LCA) is an approach for calculating and assessing net environmental impacts during the life cycle of a product, including the use phase. LCA models are being developed for Caltrans to help identify pavement construction, maintenance and mangement options and evaluate them for GHG emissions. An overview of LCA, the questions being addressed and a few early results will be discussed. John Harvey is Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at UC Davis and a Director of the University of California Pavement Research Center (Davis and Berkeley). He is a licensed professional engineer in California. |
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Eyeballs on the Street: Using Smartphones for Security at a Los Angeles Transportation Hub Martin Krieger - METRANS Transportation Center, USC and CSULB Our Urban Tomography system uses smartphones (as "embedded networked sensors") to provide multiple views of complex situations. We developed it in conjunction with security personnel at a major Southern California Transportation Hub. The phones enable us to take high-quality videos, and then they are automatically uploaded, tagged with time and location to the Internet and then displayed on a passwod-protected website. Our major innovations are the automaticity of the upload, the protocols we employ to upload multi-megabyte video files reliably given wireless availability, and our use of summary videos sent immediately while the more detailed videos follow as wireless conditions allow. Dr. Martin Krieger is professor of planning at the University of Southern California School of Policy Planning and Development. His most recent book is Urban Tomographies (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011). He works on photographic, aural and video documentation of Los Angeles and other cities. His website is http://www-rcf.usc.edu/~krieger, and the Urban Tomography smartphone project is at http://tomography.usc.edu . His Paris project, comparing photographs of Paris ca. 1870 and today is at http://www.usc.edu/sppd/parismarville . |
Spring 2011 Season of Webinars |
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April 13, 2011 |
May 11, 2011 |
June 15, 2011 |
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