Keunhyun Park

University of British Columbia | UBC · Department of Forest Resources Management

Problem, Research Strategy, and Findings: The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in a decrease in travel and social activities across the globe. But there was an exception—travel to parks and trails. Urban residents used parks as a refuge to relax, exercise, and socialize, and thus, overcome physical and mental issues caused by shelter-in-place and lac...

While the COVID-19 pandemic caused a decrease in travel and social activities, there was an exception—travel to parks and trails. Urban residents needed refuge to relax, exercise, and socialize. Thus, overcoming physical and mental issues caused by shelter-in-place and lack of social relationships. Nevertheless, trips to parks and trails vary by so...

Qilian Mountain National Park (QLMNP) is a biodiversity hotspot with great agriculture and tourism resources. With the expansion of human activities, a few areas of the park are experiencing massive landscape transformation, and these areas are also highly ecologically sensitive. Nevertheless, there are substantial differences in the human activiti...

The COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically altered people's travel behavior, in particular outdoor activities, including walking. Their behavior changes may have prolonged effects after the pandemic, and such changes vary by the context and are related to the characteristics of the built environment. But empirical studies about the relationships betwee...

As human populations become concentrated in larger, more intensely urbanized areas connected through globalization, the relationships of cities to their surrounding landscapes are open to social, ecological, and economic reinterpretation. In particular, the value of access to nature in the form of nearby, undeveloped wildland to urban populations i...

Geographic information systems (GIS) have become more suitable for online delivery. But teaching GIS online is challenging because, without enough interactions with the instructor or among themselves, students may not understand processes, use critical thinking, and collaborate effectively on a team project. This study aims to evaluate two online v...

While people with disabilities have different travel patterns compared with the general traveller population, such discrepancies are ignored in mainstream travel demand modelling and planning practice. The failure to represent the diverse travel behaviour of people with disabilities leads to inaccurate forecasting and poor decision-making and exace...

The COVID-19 pandemic response has had a significant impact on the general population’s ability to participate in their communities. Individuals with disabilities, an already socially disadvantaged population, are more vulnerable to and have likely been disproportionately impacted by COVID-19 response conditions. Yet, the extent to which daily comm...

Objective To identify factors that contribute to near-miss collisions between pedestrians and personal transportation devices (PTDs) in a university campus using a novel data collection method, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). Participants A total of 3,349 pedestrians and 173 PTD riders were detected through UAV observations. Methods The researcher...

Planners and planning scholars have debated the effects of public transit on changes in various employment outcomes. However, few studies have tried to understand how public transit affects employment changes in a community while accounting for housing costs at the same time. As an update to and methodological advance on early studies, this study a...

Public transit authorities have enhanced the travel experience to promote ridership and customer loyalty. Previous studies about satisfaction and loyalty of transit riders, however, give less attention to out-of-vehicle environments such as walking/biking routes, transfer comfort, and traffic and crime safety conditions. The first-mile and last-mil...

Direct-demand models of pedestrian volumes (identifying relationships with built environment characteristics) require pedestrian data, typically from short-duration manual counts at a limited number of locations. We overcome these limitations using a novel source of pedestrian data: estimated pedestrian crossing volumes based on push-button event d...

Vehicle ownership is an important determinant of the travel demand forecasting process. Vehicle ownership models are used by policy makers to identify factors that affect vehicle miles traveled, and therefore address problems related to energy consumption, air pollution, and traffic congestion. For the conventional travel demand forecasting, it log...

Large parks—including regional parks, state parks, and national forests and parks—have particular health, social, and environmental benefits. Thus, promoting equal access to large parks is increasingly becoming a goal of environmental justice activists, planners, and policymakers. Disadvantaged populations (e.g., low-income people of color) have wo...

This paper describes a before-and-after case study of a protected intersection in Salt Lake City, Utah. The intersection was completed in late 2015 and represented one of the first examples of a protected intersection design in North America. We analyzed bird's-eye view video data that was recorded before the intersection was implemented and compar...

Conventional four-step travel demand models, used by most metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs), state departments of transportation, and local planning agencies, are the basis for long-range transportation planning in the United States. Trip distribution—whether the trip is intrazonal (internal) or interzonal (external)—is one of the essentia...

Different types of urban green spaces provide diverse benefits for human health and environmental sustainability, but most studies on access to green space focus on neighborhood parks, with less work on smaller or larger green spaces. In this study, we examined sociodemographic differences in access to green spaces of different sizes for 14,385 cen...

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...

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 t...

Behavior mapping is an effective tool for the direct observation of the interaction between people and places. However, current approaches have shortcomings that introduce location inaccuracies and hinder micro-context recording of observed activities. This study explores the applicability of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in behavior mapping. Fir...

In the context of rapid urbanization, parks are important assets for enhancing the quality of life in urban settings. They provide opportunities for outdoor physical activity, recreation, and therapeutic benefits. A growing number of park assessment studies are shifting their focus from spatial assessments such as availability, proximity, and acces...

Ride-sourcing services have made significant changes to the transportation system, essentially creating a new mode of transport, arguably with its own relative utility compared to the other standard modes. As ride-sourcing services have become more popular each year and their markets have grown, so have the publications related to the emergence of...

Problem, research strategy, and findings: The monocentric development pattern in the Alonso–Mills–Muth model underpinned theoretical discussions of urban form in the 1960s and 1970s and truly dominated theory up to the point when Joel Garreau published Edge City: Life on the New Frontier in the early 1990s. Monocentric development patterns remain d...

Urban planning is information-driven decision-making. Cities and regions are “systems of systems”; their characteristics are many, including the dimensions of time and space. There is much information about the history and characteristics of cities and regions as well as information generated by cities and regions. Plan-making, it can be argued, is...

This study aims to improve a previously-developed methodology for predicting the traffic impacts of mixed-use developments (MXDs). In 31 diverse metropolitan regions across the United States, we collected consistent regional household travel survey data and computed built environment characteristics—D variables—of MXDs. Multilevel modeling (MLM) wa...

The subjects of this comparative case study are Orenco Station, a transit-oriented development (TOD) in the Portland region, and Station Park, a transit-adjacent development (TAD) in Salt Lake City region. The peak parking demand at Orenco Station is less than one half the Institute of Transportation Engineers (ITE) suburban parking supply guidelin...

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...

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,...

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...

The planning literature has taken a recent interest in journal article citation counts, which are often used to measure the scholarly impact of articles, authors, or university departments. However, little is known about the factors that determine citation counts for planning-related articles. We find that citation counts in planning vary across pl...

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...

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 stu...

Guidelines for trip and parking generation in the United States come mainly from the Institute of Transportation Engineers (ITE). However, their trip and parking manuals focus on suburban locations with limited transit and pedestrian access. This study aims to determine how many fewer vehicle trips are generated and how much less parking demand is...

Transit-oriented development (TOD) has gained popularity worldwide as a sustainable form of urbanism by concentrating developments near a transit station so as to minimize auto-dependency and maximize ridership. Existing TOD studies, however, have limits in terms of small sample size and aggregate-level analysis. This study examines various travel...

Transit-oriented development (TOD) has gained popularity worldwide as a sustainable form of urbanism by concentrating developments near a transit station to minimize auto-dependency and maximize ridership. Existing behavior studies in the context of TOD, however, are limited in terms of small sample size, lack of consistency in TOD classification,...

While various observation techniques have been developed to measure park use or park-based physical activity, no study has used unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to do so. Thus, this study develops a new observation method that uses UAVs to survey park-based physical activity. This study tests the inter-rater reliability and criterion validity of the...

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 m...

Traditional park accessibility studies relying on physical distance have critical limitations, because proximity alone does not predict park use, and contemporary cities struggle with a land shortage for more parks. Efficient, integrated methods of analysing the psychological dimension to park accessibility are scarce. Thus, this study examines fac...

Two primary tools to study park use are surveys and direct observation. Existing methods, however, are limited in terms of considerable costs in both time and money and the personal bias of respondents or observers. These limitations result in a lack of efficient, reliable, and affordable tools to investigate park use. This study explores the relia...