We can all get a feel for a neighborhood when we pass through it. People can qualify a neighborhood as beautiful or easy to get around, but quantifying the appeal of a neighborhood is far more difficult. A former UVM Transportation Research Center graduate student has developed a system for measuring the design of streetscapes and estimating their appeal for users. The result of this work has earned this student the designation of UVM University Transportation Center Student of the Year for 2014.
Chester Harvey graduated in 2014 from UVM where he received his Masters in Natural Resources from the Rubinstein School of Environment and Natural Resources. Chester was also a graduate research assistant at the Transportation Research Center and a graduate fellow in the Gund Institute for Ecological Economics. He now works for the TRC as a researcher, and will be honored, with students from around the country, at this year's Council of University Transportation Centers (CUTC) award dinner at the Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting in Washington DC. Each University Transportation Center nominates a student for the award.
The work that earned Chester the award focused on measuring livability through the use of an automated GIS tool that can quickly measure urban design characteristics on thousands of city blocks. He compared these measurements with results from a crowdsourced visual preference survey of streetscape images, conducted by researchers at MIT, to show consistent preference for streetscapes surrounded by closely-spaced, human-scale buildings and street trees. The research was a passion for Chester, whose expertise spans from highly technical GIS software to an understanding of urban planning. He has submitted several papers and presented at multiple conference on this research.
The research clearly has struck a chord, since Chester was also selected to receive the Charley V. Wootan Award, also presented by CUTC, for the best M.S. thesis nationally in transportation policy and planning. The Wootan Award was created in honor of Charley V. Wootan, former director of the Texas Transportation Institute at Texas A&M University System. This award and the Student of the Year Award follow Chester's selection as a recipient of the 2014 Thomas J. Votta Scholarship at UVM in his final year of study. Chester continues his work as a member of the research staff at the UVM Transportation Research Center working remotely from Washington, DC.