Paul Waddell will deliver a talk on "Addressing the Challenge of Representing the Pedestrian Scale in Transportation Models." Waddell is a professor and chair in the Department of City and Regional Planning at UC Berkeley. He arrived at Berkeley in 2010, following 12 years at the University of Washington.  

His research focuses on land use and transportation interactions, and on the development of integrated planning approaches and modeling tools to support urban sustainability. He has designed and led the development of the UrbanSim land use model system, now in widespread use by metropolitan planning organizations in the United States. It is used to assess the effects of transportation projects on urban development outcomes and long-term induced demand. He has numerous active research projects, funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Federal Highway Administration, the European Commission and the Metropolitan Transportation Commission in the Bay Area.

A light lunch box will be provided.

Abstract

Transportation models have used zonal geography and coarse representations of the transport network to represent the spatial environment for trip origins, destinations and routes. But the coarseness of the zonal geography and transport networks is inconsistent with the level of detail needed to represent walking and bicycling adequately. This also has implications for the representation of transit, which is so dependent on walk access at origin and destination of transit trips. 

This talk addresses recent work under way as part of projects funded by the NSF and the Metropolitan Transportation Commission in the San Francisco Bay Area to develop an analytic and visualization capability at a level of detail of parcels and local streets. Preliminary development of an integrated database, model system and visualization platform yields early insight into strategies to more fully represent pedestrians and bicyclists within land use and transportation models and planning.