Project: #366 Smart and equitable parks: quantifying returns on investments based on probabilistic mobility-dependent correlates of park usage using cyber-physical system technologies Progress Report - Reporting Period Ending: Sept. 30, 2022 Principal Investigator: Katherine Flanigan Status: Completed Start Date: July 1, 2021 End Date: June 30, 2022 Research Type: Applied Grant Type: Research Grant Program: FAST Act - Mobility National (2016 - 2022) Grant Cycle: 2021 Mobility UTC Progress Report (Last Updated: Oct. 3, 2022, 12:19 p.m.) % Project Completed to Date: 100 % Grant Award Expended: 100 % Match Expended & Document: 100 USDOT Requirements Accomplishments The overarching goal of this proposal is to explore urban park use and correlates of use related to mobility services (i.e., their quantitative linkage to economic growth through equitable access to essential services) using cyber-physical system (CPS) technologies in order to bring to light ways in which city officials and planners can quantify data-driven returns on potential investments to parks and mobility services and implement changes that will uniformly distribute these benefits. Task 1: Prepare the testbed by selecting park/surrounding community (in collaboration with the City of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh Parks Conservancy, and Metro21), building Urbano nodes in lab, rigorously testing Urbano nodes in lab, deploying Urbano nodes in testbed community, and configuring the web application for visualization and descriptive analysis. Note: collecting data towards the beginning of the project is a high priority to ensure that the collected data can fully capture correlations to changes in weather, operational, and usage patterns over the course of the project. (50% done) Task 2: Focus on the first primary intellectual contribution, which is the formalization of the data-driven probabilistic spatio-temporal network reliability problem that accounts for stochastic link and nodal weights. Focus on the second intellectual contribution, which is the formalization of a lower limit state function that accounts for a community’s system-wide failure as defined as any subset of a community’s population not being able to access and/or benefit sufficiently (if at all) from its surrounding community’s resources. This lower limit state function is integral to accounting for equity in the system performance metric. (50% done) Task 3: Focus on the third primary intellectual contribution, which is the application of the theoretical framework to the testbed using sensed data (which will have been collected for about 7 months at this point). Use GIS map data from testbed to model the community’s network topology and transportation properties. The majority of the effort in the final quarter will be spent processing pedestrian and environmental data to probabilistically characterize the linkage and nodal weights, which serve as inputs to the analytical framework. Summarize findings in a final report and present recommendations to collaborating partners and stakeholders (i.e., City of Pittsburgh and Pittsburgh Parks Conservancy). Demonstrate to the City how their recommendations, as well as the public’s recommendations (using, for example, the open-source Kurb platform and OpenStreetsPGH), can be assessed via returns on investments using the developed framework. (25% done) This project has provided interdisciplinary training for one PhD student and one MS student (via independent study). The MS student has since transitioned to being a PhD student. Throughout the course of the project, we accomplished several milestones: 1) We finalized the legal material needed to begin the deployment. We faced unprecedented obstacles getting this off of the ground. CMU legal wanted to be very involved in this process (something they are not doing with other similar projects) which slowed down our progress of getting the sensing system deployed by about 9 months. 2) Despite having the deployment delayed by paperwork that was outside of our control, the sensing system was built out and immediately deployed once final permission was given. The sensing network collects data in a privacy-preserving way, and tracks the movement of pedestrians/bikers across both the North and South halves of Mellon Park in Pittsburgh, PA. We are in the process of open-sourcing the design for community use. 3) We developed a robust and automated system for measuring time-dependent accessibility with emerging mobility options. 4) The developed method for measuring time-dependent accessibility with emerging mobility options is used within a developed framework for assessing probabilistic spatio-temporal network reliability that accounts for stochastic link and nodal weights was successfully developed. While the final report outlines how this is used for the case of understanding the accessibility of parks, it has wide-reaching impacts in a variety of application areas. The results have been disseminated to the Pittsburgh Parks Conservancy. Impacts This project acknowledges that the effectiveness of parks and greenways is highly dependent on their ability to connect residents to essential services and their surrounding community, and respects that the reliability of these key transportation linkages should not be limited to just severe disasters. It should also consider everyday disturbances (e.g., delays in public transportation and bad weather) that can be measured using emerging wireless sensing technologies to guarantee an acceptable level of service, even when the capacity of certain roadways and pathways is degraded by various physical and operational problems. The theoretical framework developed during this reporting period represents a new conception of urban resilience, where the once tacit proposition that regular operating conditions are satisfactory is itself challenged and replaced by the notion that a city's normal state of affairs may not adequately compare to some desired state, and that targeted investments in transportation infrastructure can help drive the system to its desired state. Other Development of a data-driven probabilistic spatio-temporal network reliability framework that accounts for stochastic link and nodal weights. This includes formalization of a lower limit state function that accounts for a community’s system-wide failure as defined as any subset of a community’s population not being able to access and/or benefit sufficiently (if at all) from its surrounding community’s resources. This lower limit state function is integral to accounting for equity in the system performance metric. Development of a wireless embedded sensing platform capable of increasing the information gained from passive infrared sensors (PIR), which the team uses in this project to measure pedestrian traffic. While solutions exist that can accurately obtain full information about pedestrian traffic (e.g., computer vision-based platforms), they are very privacy invasive. PIR sensors are fully privacy preserving, but include a great deal of uncertainties. Through this work, a wireless sensing system was developed that can use PIR sensors to detect the direction of travel by integrating multiple sensors, detect the velocity of travel, and detect multiple people passing simultaneously. A full prototype was developed and installed for the case study in Mellon Park. Outcomes New Partners This work was extended to a NSF CIVIC Innovation Challenge proposal, which brings in collaborators from the University of Pittsburgh School of Education and the University of Michigan School of Education. Kyle Bartell, from Sit On It Detroit, is also a collaborator now. Sit On It Detroit is a social enterprise in Detroit, MI that builds reclaimed wood street seats and public furniture that often times incorporate lending libraries. Co-founders Kyle Bartell and Charles Molnar started Sit On It Detroit when they saw a need in the community not only for a place for people to sit at bus stops, but also to have more access to books. Kyle Bartell was using public transit every day and noticed the lack of seating at many bus stops. He saw this as an opportunity to bring together many of his interests in transit advocacy and urban planning and make an on-the-ground impact. He hopes that his benches bring attention to larger public transit issues facing the city, and help to improve the quality of life for transit riders and the general public. Parts of this project are also now featured in CMU CEE's 12-200 CEE Challenges - Design in a Changing World, sophomore-level project course. Issues We faced unprecedented obstacles getting final permission to install the sensing network off of the ground, despite clear promises from the City that this would not be an issue and that we have permission. CMU legal wanted to be very involved in this process (something they are not doing with other similar projects) which slowed down our progress by nearly nine months. Karen Lightman and I have been corresponding with legal on a nearly weekly basis to get this through. We are baffled because we have not seen any projects face these logistical and legal challenges before.