class notes

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“How does the traffic design of Georgia State’s campus compare to the traffic designs of other campuses?” – sources

Partner: Mohammed Ahsan

Part I:

Scholarly Article:

  • Improving Pedestrian Safety: A University Campus Study. Procedia – Social And Behavioral Sciences, 96(Intelligent and Integrated Sustainable Multimodal Transportation Systems Proceedings from the 13th COTA International Conference of Transportation Professionals (CICTP2013), 2756-2766. doi:10.1016/j.sbspro.2013.08.309

  • link: http://eds.b.ebscohost.com.ezproxy.gsu.edu/eds/detail/detail?vid=4&sid=0264eaae-9dee-4c7c-a114-522a58dce551%40sessionmgr103&hid=120&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWRzLWxpdmU%3d#AN=S187704281302435X&db=edselp

  1. This source is scholarly because it is “peer-review[ed] under responsibility of Chinese Overseas Transportation Association (COTA).”
  2. I think this source would add to my ethos because it is peer-reviewed and the authors are associated with several engineering and transportation organizations.
  3. The information on this site could be useful for gathering secondary data on how other college campuses have been improving the safety of pedestrians.

Popular Culture / News Source:

  • Perez, L. (2009). CITY BIKE PATH EXTENSION HAS ECKERD WORRIED ABOUT SAFETY; Part of the path would follow the Bayway’s south side, across the school’s main entrance. The St. Petersburg Times (St. Petersburg, FL).
  • link: http://eds.b.ebscohost.com.ezproxy.gsu.edu/eds/detail/detail?vid=8&sid=0264eaae-9dee-4c7c-a114-522a58dce551%40sessionmgr103&hid=120&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWRzLWxpdmU%3d#AN=edsgcl.215489713&db=edsgov
  1. This article is popular because it comes from the “Times Publishing Company”
  2. Newspapers are generally pretty credible, so I think this source would add to my ethos.
  3. This article could be useful because it discusses how college campuses are not necessarily 100% in control of traffic design, since the surrounding city can make transportation design decisions for them.

Personal Site:

  • By Ian Nestler, AIA, LEED AP BD C. (n.d.). Campus Garages Change Perceptions – Parking. Retrieved November 03, 2016
  • link: http://www.parking.org/2016/01/18/tpp-2013-08-campus-garages-change-perceptions/
  1. This source is personal as it is more of a forum of individuals who share their professional opinions in various parking related issues. The author of this article is choosing to focus on parking garages.
  2. This site would most definitely add to my ethos, as it focuses on the conversations and interactions between individuals who are experts in their field, in this case architecture and traffic. The author of this particular is Leed certified in building design and construction, and a part of the American Institute of Architects.
  3. This site describes the use of and designs of parking garages on many college campuses, I could compare the things discussed here with the parking garages of GSU, and analyze the advantages and disadvantages.

Governmental Site:

  • Kubly, Scott, NE Campus Parkway Protected Bike Lane Project. Seattle’s Department of Transportation
  • link: http://www.seattle.gov/transportation/campusparkwaypbl.htm
  1. The source is governmental as first of all, the .gov tag is in its url. Secondly, it is the site of the Seattle department of transportation, which is part of the government of the city of Seattle.
  2. This article adds to my ethos because it governmental sites are generally trustworthy when it comes to reporting non-crucial information, such as traffic distribution.
  3. The site is not really all that helpful, as it mostly describes the details of a project to add bike lanes to the campus area of the University of Washington. However it can be used in comparison to GSU’s sorry bike lane situation.

Part II:

  • Ian Nestler (2013) states that “the Southwest Parking Garage at the University of Florida, Gainesville—became one of the country’s first LEED Gold Certified campus parking garages. Unfortunately, it was also one of the last, as the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) has since stopped certifying garages” (Sustainability section, para. 1).
  • Nestler, I. (2013, August). Campus Garages Change Perceptions. International Parking Institute.

Part III:

  • Paraphrasal: A paring garage at the University of Florida, Gainesville became one of the first and last parking garages to be certified before the USGBC stopped certifying them.
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Quotes from “Possible Worlds: Henri Lefebvre and the Right to the City”

“[Lefebvre] hoped that an analysis of space, and specifically of the “lived spaces” that people actually experience, would be able to apprehend human life as a complex whole and avoid reducing our understanding of experience to small fractions of life, such as class status, gender, race, income, consumer habits, marital status, and so on.”

  • I think people today have gotten really used to the idea of reducing people to statistics – we think of people (that we don’t know personally) less as complex human beings and more as shallow representations of numerical values.

“To take an archetypical example, when a developer buys a plot of land, he or she acquires property rights that confer extensive control over what that land will become. According to the regime of property rights, the role of that land in the everyday life of the surrounding community need not be considered. Those who inhabit the area need not play a role in decisions about the land. A property rights regime works to separate the land from the surrounding community of users, and it abstracts the land from its role in the web of urban social connections.”

  • I guess this is striking to me because I never really considered how owning land can totally separate you from the land surrounding it. I suppose you could take this to mean or imply that homeless people are more entwined with their community than the landowners of that community.

“As I discuss above, Lefebvre sees “the urban” not merely as urbanization, but as a society beyond capitalism, one characterized by meaningful engagement among inhabitants embedded in a web of social connections.”

  • I really love this idea that a utopia should be catagorized by the meaningful interactions between people, that a society is “perfect” not because of how well-off the inhabitants are, but because of the happiness they’ve found amongst one another.