Wenwen Zhang

Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey | Rutgers · Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy

Background: Accurately capturing individuals' experiences with greenspace at ground-level can provide valuable insights into their impact on children’s health. However, most previous research has relied on coarse satellite-based measurements. Methods: We utilized CVH and residential address data from Project Viva, a US-based pre-birth cohort, trac...

Introduction Protective associations of greenspace with Parkinson’s disease (PD) have been observed in some studies. Visual exposure to greenspace seems to be important for some of the proposed pathways underlying these associations. However, most studies use overhead-view measures (e.g., satellite imagery, land-classification data) that do not cap...

Introduction: Many women experience suboptimal cardiovascular health (CVH) during midlife. Greenspace exposure has been inversely associated with cardiovascular disease outcomes and risk factors, but the majority of studies use satellite-based assessment of greenspace and limited evidence exists regarding overall CVH. Methods: We performed a longit...

Introduction: Research on greenspace and cardiovascular health (CVH) in children is limited, and most previous studies rely on coarse satellite-based measurements of greenspace, which do not capture exposure as individuals experience it. Street View imagery (SVI) enables measurement of greenspace from a ground-level perspective and captures specifi...

Urbanization has altered land surface properties driving changes in micro-climates. Urban form influences people’s activities, environmental exposures, and health. Developing detailed and unified longitudinal measures of urban form is essential to quantify these relationships. Local Climate Zones [LCZ] are a culturally-neutral urban form classifica...

We analyze the effect of a bicycle lane on traffic speeds. Computer vision techniques are used to detect and classify the speed and trajectory of over 9,000 motor-vehicles at an intersection that was part of a pilot demonstration in which a bicycle lane was temporarily implemented. After controlling for direction, hourly traffic flow, and the behav...

The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in a sudden shift to working at home. People stopped commuting to their jobs. We fielded two surveys in New Jersey during the pandemic and included questions on what respondents did with time saved from not commuting as well as which activities they wished to see continue after the pandemic subsides. Key results inclu...

The COVID-19 pandemic has significantly influenced daily routines around the world, with a dramatic increase in the uptake in working at home, enabled by computer and communication technologies. This study examines who can work from home during the pandemic and whether this behavior will persist post-pandemic. To do so, we conducted two representat...

This study aims to analyze the benefits of multiple methods to assess micromobility safety in a tactical urbanism experiment. Previous literature has found that user safety can be subjective and suggests that it may be best to use multiple methods of analysis, although very few have used more than one method. In this tactical urbanism experiment, w...

Transit providers have used social media (e.g., Twitter) as a powerful platform to shape public perception and provide essential information, especially during times of disruption and disaster. This work examines how transit agencies used Twitter during the COVID-19 pandemic to communicate with riders and how the content and general activity influe...

This paper investigates the feasibility of developing national empirical models to predict ambient concentrations of sparsely monitored air pollutants at high spatial resolution. We used a data set of cooking organic aerosol (COA) and hydrocarbon-like organic aerosol (HOA; traffic primary organic PM) measured using aerosol mass spectrometry across...

Land use regression (LUR) models are widely applied to estimate intra-urban air pollution concentrations. National-scale LURs typically employ predictors from multiple curated geodatabases at neighborhood scales. In this study, we instead developed national NO2 models relying on innovative street-level predictors extracted from Google Street View [...

Privately-owned automated vehicles (PAVs) can relocate themselves elsewhere after arriving at destinations, thereby inducing empty vehicle mile traveled (VMT) and more greenhouse gas emissions. This paper examines travelers’ preferences for PAV relocation, using stated preference surveys distributed in the Seattle and Kansas City regions in the U.S...

The COVID‐19 pandemic altered daily activities. Many consumers reverted to on‐line grocery shopping and home delivery. We analyze factors associated with the decision to grocery shop on‐line and whether this will persist post‐COVID using data collected via a representative on‐line Qualtrics panel in the State of New Jersey (N = 1419). Around half o...

In this study, app store reviews from two major micromobility companies are investigated using machine learning techniques to identify the factors that influence rider satisfaction. The Latent Dirichlet Allocation model is applied to over 12,000 rider-generated reviews to identify twelve topics discussed within the reviews. These topics cover areas...

The technology of Shared Automated Vehicles (SAVs) has advanced significantly in recent years. However, existing SAV studies primarily focus on the system design, while limited studies have examined the impacts of exogenous variables, especially urban form, on SAV performance. Therefore, it remains unclear what key urban form measurements may influ...

E-scooter is an innovative travel mode that meets the demand of many travelers. A lack of understanding of user routing preferences makes it difficult for policymakers to adapt existing infrastructures to accommodate these emerging travel demands. This study develops an e-scooter route choice model to reveal riders' preferences for different types...

Shared micromobility such as electric scooters (e-scooters) has the potential to enhance the sustainability of urban transport by displacing car trips, providing more mobility options, and improving access to public transit. Most published studies on e-scooter ridership focus on cities and only capture data at one point in time. This study reports...

We compare synthetic population-based travel demand modeling with the state of the art travel demand models used by metropolitan planning offices in the United States. Our comparison of the models for three US cities shows that synthetic population-based models match the state of the art models closely for the temporal trip distributions and the sp...

The technology of Shared Automated Vehicles (SAVs) has advanced significantly in recent years. However, existing SAV studies primarily focus on the system design while limited studies have examined the impacts of exogenous variables, especially urban form, on SAV performance. Therefore, it remains unclear what key urban form measurements may influe...

Few studies predict spatial patterns of bicycling and walking across multiple cities using street-level data. This study aims to model bicycle and pedestrian traffic at 4145 count locations across 20 U.S. cities using new micro-scale variables: (1) destinations from Google Point of Interest data (e.g., restaurants, schools) and (2) pixel classifica...

Automated Vehicles (AVs) have gained substantial attention in recent years as the technology has matured. Researchers and policymakers envision that AV deployment will change transportation, development patterns, and other urban systems. Researchers have examined AVs and their potential impacts with two methods: (1) survey-based studies of AV prefe...

Although continental urban areas are relatively small, they are major drivers of environmental change at local, regional and global scales. Moreover, they are especially vulnerable to these changes owing to the concentration of population and their exposure to a range of hydro-meteorological hazards, emphasizing the need for spatially detailed info...

With an increasing number of smart cities initiatives in developed as well as developing nations, smart cities are seen as a catalyst for improving the quality of life for city residents. However, current understanding of the risks that may hamper successful implementation of smart city projects remains limited due to inadequate data, especially in...

The coming of automated vehicles (AVs) and Mobility-on-Demand (MoD services) is expected to reduce urban parking demand and correspondingly alter the urban parking landscape in a significant way. Multiple modeling efforts have already demonstrated that Shared AVs (SAVs) have promising potential to decrease urban parking demand. However, previous st...

The coming of automated vehicles (AVs) and Mobility-on-Demand (MoD services) is expected to reduce urban parking demand and correspondingly alter the urban parking landscape in a significant way. Multiple modeling efforts have already demonstrated that Shared AVs (SAVs) have promising potential to decrease urban parking demand. However, previous st...

By asking how much street length can be reached from a given origin within a specified distance limit, and by defining distance in different ways as a function of the physical or cognitive effort required to move in cities, the analysis of reach produces measures that effectively characterize street density, connectivity, and the associated urban p...

Land Use Regression (LUR) models of Volatile Organic Compounds (VOC) normally focus on land use (e.g., industrial area) or transportation facilities (e.g., roadway); here, we incorporate area sources (e.g., gas stations) from city permitting data and Google Point of Interest (POI) data to compare model performance. We used measurements from 50 comm...

This research examines whether transit-oriented development (TOD) contributes to housing value resilience in Atlanta, Georgia. We developed two spatial hedonic models using property sale records to examine whether being located in TOD areas contributes to the resilience of housing prices during and after the Great Recession, compared to being locat...

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...

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...

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...

Peponis, Bafna, and Zhang (2008) proposed three measures of street connectivity—metric reach, directional reach, and directional distance—to evaluate the potential of access to individual road segment in a given street network. A Java program has already been developed at Georgia Tech as an ArcGIS plug-in for calculating the above measures. Althoug...

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...

There are numerous hedonic price studies on analyzing factors influencing housing values, among which the proximity to transit, has been widely identified. However, little has been understood about what factors impact the resilience of housing values when an economic recession occurs and whether the proximity to transit facilities plays a role. Thi...

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...

Historically urban planners have been educated and trained to work in a data poor environment. Urban planning students take courses in statistics, survey research and projection and estimation that are designed to fill in the gaps in this environment. For decades they have learned how to use census data, which is comprehensive on several basic vari...

The Atlanta Fire Rescue Department (AFRD), like many municipal fire departments, actively works to reduce fire risk by inspecting commercial properties for potential hazards and fire code violations. However, AFRD's fire inspection practices relied on tradition and intuition, with no existing data-driven process for prioritizing fire inspections or...

The Atlanta Fire Rescue Department (AFRD), like many municipal fire departments, actively works to reduce fire risk by inspecting commercial properties for potential hazards and fire code violations. However, AFRD's fire inspection practices relied on tradition and intuition, with no existing data-driven process for prioritizing fire inspections or...

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...

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...