As a graduate intern at Environmental Defense, I worked with the Living Cities team to make the environmental case for congestion pricing in New York City.  I served as the local GIS expert for the team and identified statistical and geospatial analysis that could be conducted in line with the research being done by staff experts.  Based on then-new findings out of Harvard’s School of Public Health, I collected data from existing sources on demographics and facilities to determine potential public health impacts from local congestion on particularly at-risk populations, such as children and the elderly.

The full report and appendix with maps and tables for all New York City borough is available here.

Specifically, under guidance from HDR Decision Economics I developed a model for a comprehensive cost-benefit analysis for bike-sharing, which is new territory across the world.  Costs and benefits I was able to quantify include public health, greenhouse gas and criteria pollutant emissions, time savings, increased affordability, increased access, and safety in numbers.  I also developed models and completed cost-benefit analysis for three transit centers.

Possibly the most significant achievement was my key role in bringing regional partners together on a very tight timeframe to create a process for more integrated regional planning and develop a regional project.  On a small team, I organized frequent meetings, served as a liaison to other sub-regional groups, and analyzed potential projects for the development of the final package of projects.

This is a slide from a presentation I delivered to the World Resources Institute Center for Sustainable Transportation on my graduate thesis for my Master of Science in Urban Planning from Columbia University’s Graduate School for Architecture, Planning and Preservation.  The full presentation is viewable here.  A summary of the presentation is available on the The City Fix blog.

In 2000 and 2001, the City of New Delhi undertook a massive campaign to improve the city’s terrible air quality.  After a law suit to begin enforcing environmental regulations, the city mandated the switch of all transit vehicles, both public and private, to compressed natural gas (CNG).  My research focused on the social and economic impacts of the mandated fuel change on the private auto-rickshaw industry.  I specifically wanted to explore how command and control environmental policies could work quickly and upon a single industry.  Through my surveys of the primarily poor auto-rickshaw drivers and owners, I found that the forced retrofit program was not entirely successful, in that it suffered from a missing planning process that resulted in serious social and economic consequences for an already marginalized population of people.  Specifically, Delhi’s implementation of the CNG mandate had serious problems with the timely provision of necessary CNG refueling infrastructure, effective public information regarding available financial incentives, and flexibility in achieving environmental objectives.  These missing elements, as well as other identified problems can provide a useful lesson for other cities.

This graph is a personal project I completed using output from the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments travel demand model.  I analyzed origin-destination pairs for each local jurisdiction in the region to satisfy a personal curiosity of where the major regional destinations really were in the greater Washington area.  I had initially thought that most trips that involved leaving one’s home jurisdiction would have the common destination of the District of Columbia, or potentially other urban core jurisdictions such as Arlington or Alexandria.  However, the chart clarifies that trips are actually made throughout the region, largely from suburban origins to suburban destinations.  This could have significant implications for the provision of new transit services, such as regional rapid bus transit that will need to do more than provide service for commute trips from outer jurisdictions to the inner core–a spider web of service that allows for suburban transit trips is necessary.

This is a map I created after I moved back to the District from two years in New York.  I found that I had trouble describing the “scene” in DC for my friends back in New York until I realized there some distinct similarities between some of the major cultural and physical characteristics of neighborhoods in the two cities.  For instance, I found that while I could describe my current neighborhood of Eastern Market as one with lots of dogs and strollers, it was more effective when I simply told my friends it was like Park Slope.  The best translation I think is K Street = Wall Street.  Our lobbyists are your bankers.

One month into my graduate program at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation I was nominated by administrators and faculty to one of two school representatives on the Earth Institute’s Student Advisory Council because of my demonstrated commitment to environmental protection.  In my role on the Council, I partnered with Urban Design student Tse-Hui Teh (who is primarily responsible for the design of the poster above) to organize a symposium on the environmental considerations in rebuilding a post-Katrina New Orleans just a few months after the hurricane hit.  We invited engineers, urban planners and designers, and environmental scientists to discuss the environmental implications of rebuilding, including the difficult question of whether, in light of increasing climate change impacts, particularly vulnerable parts of the city should be rebuilt at all.

As part of my graduate education, I completed a course on the fundamentals of digital design where I developed skills in major planning-related design software: CAD, Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, and InDesign, and Sketch-up, with which I built a digital 3D model of the National Gallery in Washington DC as seen above.  The image is the final poster I created for the class, which is a comparison of the urban development of three colonial cities–primarily the differences in the resulting urban form from varying colonial interests and time periods.