Subhrajit Guhathakurta

• Ph.D. City and Regional Planning, U.C. Berkeley
• Executive Director for the Center for Urban Resilience and Analytics at Georgia Institute of Technology

While various sensors have been deployed to monitor vehicular flows, sensing pedestrian movement is still nascent. Yet walking is a significant mode of travel in many cities, especially those in Europe, Africa, and Asia. Understanding pedestrian volumes and flows is essential for designing safer and more attractive pedestrian infrastructure and for...

This research explores the relationship between climate-induced migration destination choice and social ties in the US, using anonymized smartphone data from SafeGraph. It shows that Thanksgiving travel patterns correlate with relocations following Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria. Findings reveal a statistically significant positive correlation,...

While various sensors have been deployed to monitor vehicular flows, sensing pedestrian movement is still nascent. Yet walking is a significant mode of travel in many cities, especially those in Europe, Africa, and Asia. Understanding pedestrian volumes and flows is essential for designing safer and more attractive pedestrian infrastructure and for...

As office workers shift to telework, office building space requirements should decrease, but this relationship has not been empirically studied. We construct a dataset describing historical office building space, number of office workers, and number of teleworkers from 2003-2019 in the US, and use linear regression to estimate the effect of telewor...

Transit-oriented development (TOD) is widely recognized for its potential to create high-density, mixed-use, and pedestrian-friendly environments. It aims to reduce reliance on cars, promote non-motorized travel, and advocate the utilization of various transportation modes. Due to these expected benefits, TOD has gained popularity and widespread ad...

Attractive local businesses can make cities more walkable by providing desirable destinations to walk to. The term servicescape has been used to describe the physical settings and environments that affect customers' inference of the service quality of businesses at that location. This study extends the concept of servicescapes to include walkable s...

p>We introduce the new audio analysis task of pedestrian detection and present a new large-scale dataset for this task. While the preliminary results prove the viability of using audio approaches for pedestrian detection, they also show that this challenging task cannot be easily solved with standard approaches.</p

p>We introduce the new audio analysis task of pedestrian detection and present a new large-scale dataset for this task. While the preliminary results prove the viability of using audio approaches for pedestrian detection, they also show that this challenging task cannot be easily solved with standard approaches.</p

While pedestrian accessibility measures have been widely used interchangeably with walkability, walkability is not just about accessibility. Microscale streetscape factors can provide qualities that pedestrians seek, including safety from crime, traffic safety, and pleasurability. These qualities can encourage walking through direct contributions o...

Many U.S. cities are investing in making a more bike-friendly environment in hopes of reducing auto-dependency. Studies have shown that improving bike lanes enhance bike users’ perceived safety and comfort, but whether it also shifts mode choice towards more biking remains largely unaddressed. This study proposes a model to examine whether and how...

Using a bicycle for commuting is still uncommon in US cities, although it brings many benefits to both the cyclists and to society as a whole. Cycling has the potential to reduce traffic congestion and emissions, increase mobility, and improve public health. To convince people to commute by bike, the infrastructure plays an important role because s...

Assessing the impacts of new and disruptive technologies on the transportation system is crucial for planners and policymakers. This study offers an innovative method for estimating the impact of transportation network company (TNC, e.g., Uber and Lyft) operations on travel demand. Among various measures of travel demand, vehicle‐miles traveled (VM...

Measuring microscale factors of walkability has been labor-intensive and expensive. To reduce the cost, various efforts have been made including virtual audits (i.e., manual audits using street view images) and the introduction of computer vision techniques. Although studies have shown that virtual audits (i.e., manual audits using street view imag...

Efficient mobility and high accessibility to urban services are critical for residents’ quality of life and health. The outdoor environmental barriers, such as uneven sidewalks and missing curb cuts, can significantly impair pedestrian mobility, especially for people with disabilities. Removing those barriers is expensive and time-consuming. The Ap...

Using a bicycle for commuting is still uncommon in US cities, although it brings many benefits to both the cyclists and to society as a whole. Cycling has the potential to reduce traffic congestion and emissions, increase mobility, and improve public health. To convince people to commute by bike, the infrastructure plays an important role, since sa...

The built environment characteristics associated with walkability range from neighborhood-level urban form factors to street-level urban design factors. However, many existing walkability indices are based on neighborhood-level factors and lack consideration for street-level factors. Arguably, this omission is due to the lack of a scalable way to m...

While transit-oriented developments (TODs) are generally believed to promote the use of sustainable travel modes, the degree to which various components of TODs influence travel behavior is still debatable. This paper revisits Chatman’s (2013) question: “Does TOD need the T?” by addressing the effect of rail transit access in influencing walking be...

Millennials tend to use a variety of travel modes more often than older birth cohorts. Two potential explanations for this phenomenon prevail in the literature. According to the first explanation, millennials often choose travel multimodality at least in part because of the effects of the economic crisis, which affected young adults more severely t...

Automated vehicle (AV) technology is rapidly moving towards reality and will be mature within the next decade. However, the physical, institutional, and legal infrastructure for enabling widespread adoption of this technology are still lagging significantly. The focus of this research is on developing a decision framework for optimal upgrading of t...

Spatially explicit data about the physical and natural environment are becoming ubiquitous with the growing number of air/space-borne and terrestrial sensors. While this growing volume of data has transformed the operations of various sectors in both private and public domains, such as agriculture, natural resource management, transportation and re...

The millennial generation, the cohort born from 1981 to 1996, lives in large cities or denser parts of metropolitan areas more than preceding generations did at the same age. Studies have theorized that a combination of temporary economic hardship, long-term societal changes, and changing preferences and attitudes have been responsible for Millenni...

While previous studies in environmental equity found positive relationships between tree canopy and socioeconomic/demographic status of neighborhoods, few examined how changes in tree canopy are associated with changes in socioeconomic/demographic status. This study confirms that the relationship between them in Atlanta is changing and the hypothes...

Millennials tend to use a variety of travel modes more often than older birth cohorts. Two potential explanations for this phenomenon prevail in the literature. According to the first explanation, millennials often choose travel multimodality at least in part because of the effects of the economic crisis, which affected young adults more severely t...

This article presents a model to classify perceptions of various Atlanta neighborhoods based on social media. Tweets were extracted using Twitter's API and categorized to determine 1) whether they are neighborhood related; 2) whether a positive or negative sentiment could be assigned, and 3) whether they belong to one of eight categories of neighbo...

This study examines the potential changes in residential location choice in a scenario where shared autonomous vehicles (SAVs) are a popular mode of travel in the Atlanta metropolitan area. This hypothetical study is based on an agent-based simulation approach, which integrates residential location choice models with a SAV simulation model. The cou...

Prior research has shown that land use patterns and the spatial configurations of cities have a significant impact on residential energy demand. Given the pressing issues surrounding energy security and climate change, there is renewed interest in developing and retrofitting cities to make them more energy efficient. Yet deriving micro-scale reside...

Studies examining the influence of smart growth and compact development on travel behavior often focus on a limited subgroup of the population: those who have recently moved from one neighborhood to another. Despite the substantial proportion of existing residents in the population, their responses to land-use changes have not been thoroughly studi...

With 36 ventures testing autonomous vehicles (AVs) in the State of California, commercial deployment of this disruptive technology is almost around the corner (California, 2017). Different business models of AVs, including Shared AVs (SAVs) and Private AVs (PAVs), will lead to significantly different changes in regional vehicle inventory and Vehicl...

There is mounting evidence to suggest that the urban built form plays a crucial role in household energy consumption, hence planning energy efficient cities requires thoughtful design at multiple scales - from buildings, to neighborhoods, to urban regions. While data on household energy use are essential for examining the energy implications of dif...

Autonomous vehicles will have tremendous impact on our cities and regions. This rapidly emerging technology will affect the transport system in its entirety including changes in energy consumption; increased safety, climate change impacts, efficiency of transport operations and the platooning of trucks carrying freight. Primary questions remain. Wh...

Building energy consumption makes up 40% of the total energy consumption in the United States. Given that energy consumption in buildings is influenced by aspects of urban form such as density and floor-area-ratios (FAR), understanding the distribution of energy intensities is critical for city planners. This paper presents a novel technique for es...

Open data have come of age with many cities, states, and other jurisdictions joining the open data movement by offering relevant information about their communities for free and easy access to the public. Despite the growing volume of open data, their use has been limited in planning scholarship and practice. The bottleneck is often the format in w...

We are on the cusp of a new era in mobility given that the enabling technologies for autonomous vehicles (AVs) are almost ready for deployment and testing. While the technological frontiers for deploying AVs are being crossed, we know far less about the potential impact of such technologies on urban form and land use patterns. This paper attempts t...

This paper presents a methodology for the calculation of household travel energy consumption at the level of the traffic analysis zone in conjunction with information that is readily available from a standard four-step travel demand model system. The methodology presented in this paper embeds two algorithms. The first algorithm provides a means of...

The world is on the cusp of a new era in mobility given that the enabling technologies for autonomous vehicles (AVs) are almost ready for deployment and testing. Although the technological frontiers for deploying AVs are being crossed, transportation planners and engineers know far less about the potential impact of such technologies on urban form...

This study explores the spatial effects of two- and three-dimensional (2-D, 3-D) urban features in the formation of daytime and nighttime surface urban heat islands (SUHIs) with the help of satellite imagery and LiDAR. Spatially rectified statistical models are used to estimate parameters and understand the spatial spillover effects of urban driver...

This paper compares the effects of long term suburban growth on travel behavior, energy consumption, and GHG emissions through a case study of neighborhoods in central Phoenix and the suburban city of Gilbert, in the Phoenix metropolitan region, USA. Motorized travel patterns in these study areas are estimated using 2001 and 2009 National Household...

This paper analyses recent trends transforming the energy sector in the United States (US) and examines the long-term implications, while providing a critical overview of the path forward. The role of megaregions is examined as spatial and economic structures that offer great potential as entities that can accelerate the pace and support the more a...

In this study, we empirically model the interactions between 2D and 3D geospatial information and both daytime and nighttime urban heat islands, and estimate the relative importance of various urban heat islands drivers. While previous studies have explored the relationship between the urban heat islands and 2D urban features, the interactions with...

Urban form, land use patterns, and the type of structures significantly influence a city's energy needs, and consequently, its greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. This study aims to clarify connections between urban form and its use together with the associated energy demands for infrastructure (buildings and paved surfaces) and transport. The model is...

In this article, the authors introduce a novel way to define and measure housing submarkets in relation to foreclosures. Instead of the traditional methods of identifying submarkets a priori, this study uses an approach that empirically delineates housing submarkets based on spatial contiguity and housing attributes. The spatial clustering algorith...

The recently introduced concept of Shared Autonomous Vehicle (SAV) system, a taxi system without drivers or a short-term rental car-sharing program with autonomous vehicles, presents great potential to promote ridesharing travel behavior. Given the reliability and flexibility provided by the SAV system, some hurdles in the current ridesharing progr...

This paper demonstrates a new method of optimizing land-use patterns to reduce the negative impacts of urbanization on watershed stormwater systems. The Yong-Ding watershed in western Beijing, China, serves as a case study for this research. A regression model that estimates watershed hydrology response to land use pattern changes is integrated wit...

This study investigates the impact of urban form and landscaping type on the mid-afternoon microclimate in semi-arid Phoenix, Arizona. The goal is to find effective urban form and design strategies to ameliorate temperatures during the summer months. We simulated near-ground air temperatures for typical residential neighborhoods in Phoenix using th...

This paper demonstrates a new methodology for finding optimal walking routes according to user specified conditions selected from a set of attribute choices. The pedestrian network planning methodology discussed in this paper reflects the influence of environmental factors facilitating or impeding pedestrians’ propensity to walk. The principle task...

Beginning in 2004, the Border Observatory Project started to collect quality-of-life data in the US-Mexico border region especially in the urban areas along the border. Up to that time, the various efforts to measure urban conditions in the border were limited, piecemeal, or not systematic, and replete with serious data shortfalls. This made drawin...

Quality of life (QOL) is a central concern in urban planning, given the profession’s orientation towards advancing the public well-being. This study develops a multi-attribute Quality of Urban Life (QoUL) Index to compare and track place-based amenities and the state of public welfare in cities within the Atlanta region. Of particular interest is t...

Studies have shown that proximity to light rail transit (LRT) stations positively affects property values and that these effects can appear before a system opens for operation. Here, we expand on these questions. We explore capitalization effects at several stages during the planning process for four real estate markets: single-family homes, homes...

This paper explores how urbanization, through its role in the evolution of Urban Heat Island (UHI), affects residential water consumption. Using longitudinal data and drawing on a mesoscale atmospheric model, we examine how variations in surface temperature at the census tract level have affected water use in single family residences in Phoenix, Ar...

The dreaded effects of climate change have led to a new research focus in many applications. In urban planning, the visualization of carbon footprints has become one of the most sought after aspects. Urban planning data of carbon footprints contains spatial (location) and abstract (statistical indicators) information. Although many techniques for t...

Population growth and increased concentration of economic activities in urban areas pose significant challenges for sustainable development of urban regions. Our ability to make correct choices about future development will depend upon our understanding of the impact of these choices on the future quality of life of the urban inhabitants. Land use,...

The border region between the United States and Mexico reflects many of the problems stemming from globalization and bi-national boundary issues. Such problems confront most border regions and often reflect asymmetrical develop - ment, but they are nearly always indicative of rapid urban growth rates coupled with cycles of economic imbalances and f...

Prior LCA studies take the operational phase to include all energy use within a residence, implying a functional unit of all household activities, but then exclude related supply chains such as production of food, appliances, and household chemicals. We argue that bounding the functional unit to provision of a climate controlled space better focuse...

This paper presents a novel approach for calculating the carbon footprint in an urban region at the scale of individual neighborhoods. The approach is applied to Maricopa County, Arizona, for two different scenarios of growth. Our strategy for monitoring carbon footprints also involves a new form of visualization that goes beyond the two-dimensiona...

The chapter presents a case study illustrating how secondary analysis of aggregated spatial data is used to determine spatial variations in objective attributes of quality of life (QOL) across a large metro region in the USA. A set of QOUL attributes covering separate communities in the metro area are analyzed. The case study also uses longitudinal...

While previous studies have shown that urban heat islands (UHI) tend to increase residential water use, they have not yet analyzed the feedbacks among vegetation intensity, diurnal temperature variation, water use, and characteristics of the built environment. This study examines these feedback relationships with the help of a path model applied to...

Urban planners are dealing with problems of urban sprawl and CO2 emissions. The multidimensional character of these phenomena requires new analysis and visualization tools that are unavailable in platforms like the Geographical Information Systems (GIS). This paper, first, presents an approach for measuring and monitoring urban sprawl and carbon fo...

The continued expansion of the paired U.S.–Mexican border cities of Ambos Nogales presents many environmental management and urban planning challenges. This study focuses on a comparative study of spatial patterns and rates of land-use and land-cover change, in relation to land degradation, deforestation, and urban growth over different time peri...

En este libro se muestra información sobre la calidad de vida en pares de ciudades de la frontera entre México y Estados Unidos.

This article examines the relationship between urban sprawl and health using a new methodological approach that accounts for the subregional variation in the different attributes of sprawl in metropolitan regions. We have developed several indicators of sprawl at the neighborhood level, including compactness, land use mix, automobile dependency, tr...

The Digital Phoenix Project is a multiyear project aimed at developing a realistic digital representation of the Phoenix metropolitan area through space and time that can be experienced in Arizona State University’s Decision Theater. A significant objective of this project is to create an environment for querying, researching, and visualizing criti...

This chapter provides a theoretical and methodological approach for dealing with the challenges facing sustainable urban planning. It postulates that by moving our frame of reference from prediction to exploration and speculation we are able to focus attention on theory building and other pedagogic aspects of urban models. It especially exposes our...

The authors present the state of the art in the rapidly growing field of visualization as related to problems in urban and regional planning. The significance and timeliness of this volume consist in its reflection of several developments in literature and the challenges cities are facing. First, the unsustainability of many of our current paradigm...

This chapter contains section titled: GLOBALIZATION AND MIGRATION NATIONAL VOICES AND GLOBAL AGENTS References GLOBALIZATION AND MIGRATION NATIONAL VOICES AND GLOBAL AGENTS References

Sophisticated simulation models are now extensively used in urban planning for estimating future population and job distributions to measure the impact of planning decisions on future urban environments. Simulated population projections usually result in large, macro-scale, and multivariate geospatial data sets. Millions of records have to be proce...

One goal of the smart growth movement is a more compact urban form, intended to reduce energy use and the cost of moving materials, products, and people. The benefits of compactness are compromised, however, if higher densities and more intense land use create urban heat islands, which increase water and energy use. This study examines the effects...

To encourage sustainable development, engineers and scientists need to understand the interactions among social decision-making, development and redevelopment, land, energy and material use, and their environmental impacts. In this study, a framework that connects these interactions was proposed to guide more sustainable urban planning and construc...

In this paper we explore the conditions leading to the evolution and eventual weakening of urban regimes by comparing two sunbelt metropolitan areas in two continents. While Greater Phoenix is selected to represent the US case, the Brisbane-South East Queensland region provides a similar representative case in Australia. Both Greater Phoenix and Br...

The last few years have witnessed efforts to eliminate the Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) program in Congress. Critics of the CDBG program have pointed to the dearth of studies documenting successful impacts in affected neighborhoods. This article examines the impact of the use of CDBG monies in Phoenix, Arizona. Using housing condition s...

Metropolitan Phoenix lacks a current, publicly accessible statement of its water supply from which to evaluate options for growth. This article presents research into the size and sustainability of the regional water supply. It introduces residential carrying capacity as an intuitive measure of the economic size of a water supply and examines entit...

This paper analyzes the impact of the proposed Phoenix Light Rail transit system on future land use and household characteristics adjacent to station areas using a software-based simulation model called UrbanSim. UrbanSim is a microsimulation modeling environment, developed at the University of Washington, Seattle, which enables detailed analysis o...

This paper analyzes the impact of the proposed Phoenix Light Rail transit system on future land use and household characteristics adjacent to station areas using a software-based simulation model called UrbanSim. UrbanSim is a microsimulation modeling environment, developed at the University of Washington, Seattle, which enables detailed analysis o...

This article explores the determinants of exports of the two coastal regions of the continental United States and the differences between them. The authors evaluate the contribution of international sociocultural and business networks to exports of the two major coastal regions of the United States, the West Coast and the East Coast, and examine th...

While urban and environmental models have evolved in separate domains of knowledge, they have always shared a common goal, that is, to maintain and advance the relationship between Earth and its inhabitants. This goal is implicit in the specific issues that typically concern urban planners and environmental scien­tists. However, it has rarely been...

This volume is the result of an invited symposium titled "Integrated Land-Use and Environmental Models: A Survey of Current Applications and Research" that was held in October 2000 at Arizona State University. The idea for the symposium arose from a belief held by many academics that we are at the watershed of a new generation of models that are mo...

This paper examines the distinctions between empirical and simulation models using the metaphors of argument and narrative. It argues that all argumentation is contextualized within a narrative that is either inferred or communicated. It provides another semantic structure for urban models that applies elements of systems-dynamic method to construc...

The authors examine how assisted housing units with householders belonging to different racial/ethnic groups receiving Section 8 vouchers and certificates effect change in housing quality of adjacent structures. Rather than relying on traditional measures of housing value as surrogates of quality, an aggregate index of housing quality was obtained...

Land trusts have been widely recognized as a successful method for preserving agricultural land, historic buildings, scenic views, trails, wetlands, and wildlife areas of biological importance in the United States. In Mexico, such land trusts are practically unknown. In the Mexican‐U.S. border region, where landscapes are rapidly deteriorating and...

This paper provides an assessment of the trends in hazardous waste shipments across the U.S.‐Mexican border. These wastes are generated in the maquiladoras (assembly plants) operating in the northern border of Mexico and are expected to be shipped back to the United States under the conditions imposed by the Environmental Cooperation Agreement. How...

The watershed is advocated as an appropriate unit for ecological planning. Watersheds, or river drainage basins, can be understood through an ecological chorography. The upper San Pedro River basin of southern Arizona (USA) and northern Sonora (Mexico) is used as an example. This watershed is currently facing significant growth pressures. Rapid urb...

The authors examine the locational patterns of three subsidized housing programs—conventional project-based, section 8 assisted rental, and shelter plus care supported housing for the severely mentally ill and homeless—in Phoenix, Arizona. They demonstrate that these programs are reinforcing the existing concentrations of the three types of subsidi...