University of Washington

Canada

Relationships between accessibility and residential location.

U.S.A., South Korea, China, and Japan

I am a fourth year doctoral candidate in the Interdisciplinary Ph.D. Program in Urban Design and Planning at the University of Washington (UW). I have a Bachelor of Applied Science degree in Civil Engineering from the University of British Columbia. In the five-year undergraduate program is where I first encountered the transportation field through transport-related courses as well as co-operative education work terms at the City of Vancouver and private consulting firms. These experiences led me to pursue the Transportation Program at Northwestern University, where I received a Master of Science degree in Civil Engineering. At Northwestern, my academic interests focused on transportation planning and policy analysis; my thesis was an evaluation of the bicycle helmet legislation in California. In the summer between my M.S. and Ph.D. programs, I worked as a guest researcher at the City of Stockholm and examined a local transportation conflict from the point of view of a North American transport engineer. The transition from engineering to planning was natural, in my case, as these disciplines compliment each other in the dynamic field of transportation.

Presently, I am research assistant at the UrbanSim laboratory in the Center for Urban Simulation and Policy Analysis at the UW. UrbanSim is a micro-simulation software designed to recognise the interdependent relationships among land use, transportation, and the environment in urban development. My primary research pursuits concern accessibility – individual and household access to activities – and residential location choices. In particular, I am interested in the translation of the accessibility concept and the integration of its three dimensions – transportation, spatial, and temporal – into quantitative measurements for use in planning and policy analyses as well as location choice modeling. These subject matters include the interactions of land use and transportation and the effects of the built environment on travel and location choice behaviour. This is a complex but timely area of study of which the scientific understanding is rapidly accelerating. There are tremendous demands and potentials for planning and policy applications in the local and regional government contexts.

By participating in the Institute on International Digital Government Research, I aim to gain further insights into the role of advanced technology in addressing public problems in general, and transport-related issues, in particular. Governmental organisations dominate the provision and management of transportation infrastructures and services and have significant controls over land use. There are, however, some institutional barriers in governments that separate these functions into individual domains without much recognition of the feedback mechanisms between them. While in New York City, I hope to get a better understanding of what these barriers are and how they differ in different parts of the world. Also, I would like to better assess how different technologies, from advanced urban simulation and modeling systems to data warehousing and information technology, can help governments address interdisciplinary problems. I would contribute by sharing my experiences from the Seattle and North American contexts and would greatly appreciate learning more about other cities from the other participants. I think that this experience would greatly enhance my abilities to develop meaningful research contributions and practical applications for the transportation systems in North America and other parts of the world.