Senior Katie Enns always liked how geography and data could connect and how people could use maps to show trends, especially with environmental issues.

This summer, she did it herself.

Enns, an environmental studies major with minors in geographic information systems and computer science, spent the summer interning with the Chittenden Area Transportation Management Association. She worked with data from the group to map commuter emissions around campus.

Enns got involved with the group through her Communities of Practice program, which she was involved with last spring. The transportation association partners with UVM and works on transportation sustainability around Chittenden County. Among other things, Enns said, the transportation group’s effort is why students have free bus passes.

She came away from the internship with new insights into how people get to and from campus.

Over the summer Enns examined data from a 2019 survey the association gave to UVM employees.

“I looked at where people lived, how they were commuting to the main campus and then where there were instances of availability of public transportation that were being used,” she said. “So then I was sort of seeing, okay, well, how many people live within a reasonable distance to switch from driving alone to campus every day to walking, biking, taking the bus or using a park and ride?”

She looked at the average distances of the people that walked to campus and those who drove alone every day, and then she did the same for those who used busses, park and rides and bikes. The process let her estimate carbon emissions from everyone in the dataset

“What I ended up finding was that the majority of people can commute sustainably to campus,” she said. “They live within a distance to do that, for the most part.”

Katie found that 80% of the people in her dataset have the ability to commute sustainably. The remainder don’t, due either to urban sprawl or being too far away to carpool or take public transportation.

“This resulted in about 40% of emissions coming from sustainable commuters, and 52% coming from those who cannot commute sustainably,” she said.

Enns didn’t analyze any student data, but she thinks most of her peers walk or bike to campus. Some might be interested in taking the bus, she said, “but there are not a ton of bus stops in the student neighborhood area.”

How might those 20% of employees and people like them be able to commute sustainably? Enns thinks park and rides could be key.

“As for people who live really far out,” she said, “driving to a park and ride and then taking the bus in would be a really good way to reduce their carbon emissions.”

She pointed to how costly a long daily commute can be for the driver, too.

“You're using a lot of gas, you're spending a lot of money versus driving to a closer park and ride and taking the bus,” she said. “UVM faculty and staff get free bus passes, so that just totally eliminates the cost of that commute.”

One roadblock to encouraging bus use right now is that Green Mountain Transit Authority is switching bus line names from colors to numbers, Enns said, forcing people to relearn the familiar systems. But that shouldn’t be too much of a hassle.

After she finished analyzing all the data, Enns took the figures and plotted them on maps. She created a website that acts as a visual representation of the carbon footprint of employees’ commute.

Users can toy with some of the maps; dragging a slider across one of them let’s you compare then-current emissions with emissions levels resulting from changes in transportation Enns calculated. With other maps, she illustrates how close employees commuting unsustainably live to bus routes or park and rides.

“Prior to doing this internship, I knew I liked GIS but I didn’t really know how to use it in real-world applications,” she said. “And now I feel like I can see myself using it in almost anything, like any sort of data that can be analyzed and mapped in this way.”

Willow Zartarian is an Economics Major who likes to write and study numbers.