Pranjali Shah

AWARD

FIRST PLACE

Pranjali Shah

PARK IT. BUT WHERE? FRAMEWORK FOR IDENTIFYING CAMPUS LOCATIONS FOR BICYCLE SHELTER: A STUDY OF UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS, URBANA-CHAMPAIGN

Promoting bicycling over driving in the world of automobiles is a complex riddle to solve. The key to changing people’s attitudes towards biking lies in building user-oriented biking infrastructure (Jennifer Dill, 2014). One of the critical constituents of biking infrastructure that hasn’t received much attention in recent studies is long-term parking. The need for secured, weather-proof long-term parking becomes even more crucial for the biking community at university campuses and campus towns since biking is becoming a popular commute mode within campuses due to shorter distances. If installed at appropriate locations on the campus, such secured long-term biking shelters can prevent bike theft and weather damage. However, developing such a long-term parking facility requires an extensive study to determine the optimal location of the parking shelter. Most existing methodologies for identifying optimal locations are focused on large cities and are too complex to be applied directly to campuses that have a much smaller area and well-defined boundaries. Therefore, we recognize a need for a dedicated framework for campuses and propose a novel methodology that is comprehensive, data-driven, modular, simple yet extendable to any university campus or campus town. We show the effectiveness of our framework through a pilot case study for identifying long-term bike parking locations at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign campus. Our methodology consists of a GIS-based overlay model that incorporates and weighs various parameters affecting bike infrastructure safety and convenience. Our model brings context-based adaptability and data-based flexibility as an added benefit.

Pranjali Shah is a masters student in Urban Planning at the University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign (UIUC). Prior to that, she earned a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering followed by a masters in Infrastructure Engineering from India. At UIUC, she is associated with the Transportation SWATeam and works as Research Assistant at Smart Energy Design Assistance Center. Her interest in active and public transportation comes from her experience. She is interested in transportation planning, modeling, and sustainability studies, and looking for hands-on opportunities in this field.