Interest in school transportation has emerged in response to concern over the reduced levels of physical activity among children and youth. Recent Canadian policies emphasize population health intervention to encourage active travel among this younger population; urban planners and public health professionals have also highlighted the importance of the neighbourhood built environment. However, this “child-youth friendly” turn in policy and planning practice, particularly in Canada, has arguably occurred in advance of conclusive and generalizable knowledge about the relationship between the built environment and children’s travel. Within this context, this thesis is the first quantitative research that examines school transportation mode choice behaviour in the largest Canadian city, the City of Toronto. At first, a Behavioural Model of School Transportation was outlined. This exercise was followed by three empirical studies that explored school travel by children and youth, using travel data from Transportation Tomorrow Survey. The first of these three studies investigated the association between the built environment and the likelihood of walking or being driven, for journeys to and from school. The next study focused on a measurement issue; the potential influence of the modifiable areal unit problem on statistical modelling of the built environment - mode choice relationship was examined. Lastly, the potential influence of travel interactions among household members, the built environment, and unobservable spatial dependency (i.e., spatial auto-correlation), on school travel outcome of children and youth, were examined. The results indicated that caregiver availability may influence travel mode choice. The built environment near both home and school locations was associated with the likelihood of walking. In addition, the correlates of mode choice were different between children and youth, which perhaps, reflects a child’s cognitive development with age as an independent traveller. These findings suggest the need for neighbourhood-wide improvement in the built environment, and age-specific population health interventions at schools and in the communities.

Master of Landscape Architecture / Department of Landscape Architecture/Regional and Community Planning / Mary Catherine (Katie) Kingery-Page / Human happiness is often overlooked in urban revitalization. Many studies have proven the benefits of regular exercise for overall health and happiness. Active transportation adopted as a major form of transportation has the potential to provide similar benefits. Wichita, Kansas, like many other mid-sized, American cities, prioritizes the car over the pedestrian. Currently, the plans for Douglas Avenue, the major thoroughfare, includes only minimal bicycle infrastructure, shared lane symbols (City of Wichita 2013). Lack of focus on the pedestrian and bicyclist only reinforces the auto-dominated downtown. Douglas Avenue is a missed opportunity and needs a re-envisioned strategy based upon current needs. I hypothesized that better understanding the lived biking experience of Downtown Wichita would help me to develop design recommendations that address current streetscape issues as they occur in daily life. This exploratory study documents the experiences of a small group of people who bicycle in or through downtown Wichita on a regular basis. First, participants recorded their experience visually and verbally by using GoPro cameras during a typical bike ride. Next, each participant reviewed their video with me, clarifying their comments and the overall experience. Dominant themes included: urban environment, bicycling infrastructure, road/traffic, safety and motorist behavior. The analysis of the bike rides and follow-up reflections were mapped over each participant’s route to reveal positive, negative, and neutral experiences categorized by theme. Final design strategies for selected areas (determined through analysis of experiences) were then produced based upon feedback and streetscape best practices. Bicyclists of Wichita are faced with many stressful situations during their daily routes. I have realized that downtown Wichita has more than a design problem to fix—an entire bicycle culture must be developed. I learned that while each participant was unique, they wanted the same things: safety, a pleasurable ride, and to be respected by motorists. Not all bicyclists’ needs can be answered through design; however, this proposal can help to create a safer and more pleasurable bicycling experience in downtown. An improved bicycle network provides humans with increased health, freedom to move, encourages and strengthens social connections, and provides a resilient form of transportation.

Master of Science / Department of Civil Engineering / Yacoub M. Najjar / Asset Management is a relatively new term in the transportation world. It involves a systematic approach to maintaining, upgrading and operating all transportation assets (including infrastructure) cost-effectively. With the Government Accounting Standards Board's Statement 34 (GASB 34) requiring all transportation entities to report all capital assets on their annual reports as well as the development of new software and technologies, Asset Management is becoming easier to implement and quickly becoming an important part of the transportation industry. In Kansas the Department of Transportation has developed and successfully utilized an Asset Management system for all assets including bridges, roadways, drainage structures and signs. Kansas counties however, do not have the funds and personnel to implement and maintain an Asset Management system similar to that of the KDOT. Asset Management systems have only been developed by counties with large populations, but even they have not reached the full potential of the system. This thesis discusses the importance of creating and maintaining an effective Asset Management system. Kansas counties were surveyed and asked a series of questions about their asset management systems, or lack thereof, as well as the successes and failures of these systems. The counties were asked how they prioritize maintenance, what software they are using, and what assets they have inventoried. The results of the questionnaire showed that counties with large populations have shown interest in implementing Asset Management systems and many have worked to implement such a system. Conversely, counties with small populations that do not have the resources have not implemented Asset Management systems. Recommendations for implementing appropriate Asset Management systems are made to counties in the three population ranges: i) less than 5,000, ii) between 5,000 and 50,000, and iii) greater than 50,000. These include software recommendations and creating inventories of all county assets including culverts, signs and pavements.

Master of Science / Department of Industrial & Manufacturing Systems Engineering / Malgorzata J. Rys / Emergency Medical Systems (EMS) are designed to handle emergencies. Fortunately, most emergencies faced have only one patient. The every day system is not designed to respond to emergencies in which there are many casualties. Due to natural disasters and terrorist attacks that have occurred over the past decade, mass-casualty disaster response plans have become a priority for many organizations, including EMS. The resources available for constructing such plans are limited. Physical simulations or practices of the plan are often performed; however, it is not until a disaster strikes that the capabilities of the plan are truly realized. In this paper, it is proposed that discrete-event simulations are used as part of the planning process. A computer simulation can test the capability of the plan under different settings and help planners in their decision making. This paper looks at the creation of a discrete-event simulation using ARENA software. The simulation was found to accurately simulate the response to the Greensburg tornado that occurred May of 2008. A sensitivity analysis found that the simulation results are dependent upon the values assumed for Volunteer Injury Rate, Injury Level, Information Dissemination Rate and Transportation Decision variables. When a disaster occurs, the local resources are overwhelmed and outside aide must be called in. Decision rules for when to request more outside ambulances and when to release them to send them home are evaluated. The more resources that are made available, the quicker patients receive medical care. However, when outside ambulances are called in, they are putting their home area at risk because it no longer has complete (or any) ambulance coverage. As the percent of coverage decreases, the amount of time that victims spend waiting for ambulances also decreases. Many decision rules were evaluated, resulting in various combinations of ambulance wait times and average percent coverage. It is up to Disaster Planners to determine how much of an additional wait can be assumed by the disaster victims to prevent outside districts from taking on unwarranted risk of low coverage.

Les coûts élevés de collecte de données ne rendent souvent possible que l’échantillonnage d’un sous-ensemble de la population d’intérêt. Il arrive également que les données collectées renferment des renseignements personnels et sensibles au sujet des individus qui y figurent de sorte qu’elles sont protégées par des lois ou des pratiques strictes de sécurité et gouvernance de données. Dans les deux cas, l’accès aux données est restreint. Nos travaux considèrent deux angles de recheche sous lesquels on peut se servir de la génération de données fictives pour concevoir des modèles d’analyse où les données véritables sont inaccessibles. Sous le premier angle, la génératon de données fictives se substitue aux données du recensement. Elle prend la forme d’une synthèse de population constituée d’individus décrits par leurs attributs aux niveaux individuel et du ménage. Nous proposons les copules comme nouvelle approche pour modéliser une population d’intérêt dont seules les distributions marginales sont connues lorsque nous possédons un échantillon d’une autre population qui partage des caractéristiques de dépendances interdimensionnelles similaires. Nous comparons les copules à l’ajustement proportionnel itératif, technologie répandue dans le domaine de la synthèse de population, mais aussi aux approches d’apprentissage automatique modernes comme les réseaux bayésiens, les auto-encodeurs variationnels et les réseaux antagonistes génératifs lorsque la tâche consiste à générer des populations du Maryland dont les données sont issues du recensement américain. Nos expériences montrent que les copules surpassent l’ajustement proportionnel itératif à modéliser les relations interdimensionnelles et que les distributions marginales des données qu’elles génèrent correspondent mieux à celles de la population d’intèrêt que celles des données générées par les méthodes d’apprentissage automatique. Le second angle considère la génération de données qui préservent la confidentialité. Comme la désensibilisation des données est en relation inverse avec son utilité, nous étudions en quelles mesures le k-anonymat et la modélisation générative fournissent des données utiles relativement aux données sensibles qu’elles remplacent. Nous constatons qu’il est effectivement possible d’employer ces définitions de confidentialité pour publier des données utiles, mais la question de comparer leurs garanties de confidentialité demeure ouverte. / The high costs of data collection can restrict sampling so that only a subset of the data is available. The data collected may also contain personal and sensitive information such that it is protected by laws or strict data security and governance practices. In both cases, access to the data is restricted. Our work considers two research angles under which one can use the generation of synthetic data to design analysis models where the real data is inaccessible. In the first project, a synthetically generated population made up of individuals described by their attributes at the individual and household levels replaces census data. We propose copulas as a new approach to model a population of interest whose only marginal distributions are known when we have a sample from another population that shares similar interdimensional dependencies. We compare copulas to iterative proportional fitting, a technology developed in the field of population synthesis, but also to modern machine learning approaches such as Bayesian networks, variational autoencoders, and generative adversarial networks when the task is to generate populations of Maryland. Our experiments demonstrated that the copulas outperform iterative proportional fitting in modeling interdimensional relationships and that the marginal distributions of the data they generated match those of the population of interest better than those of the data generated by the machine learning methods. The second project consists of generating data that preserves privacy. As data privacy is inversely related to its usefulness, we study to what extent k-anonymity and generative modeling provide useful data relative to the sensitive data they replace. We find that it is indeed possible to use these privacy definitions to publish useful data, but the question of comparing their privacy guarantees remains open.

Master of Landscape Architecture / Department of Landscape Architecture/Regional and Community Planning / Hyung Jin Kim / A significant decline of mental and physical health exists within college students today (ACHA, 2014; Gallagher, 2006). Recently, to promote mental health, restorative landscapes have emerged as a trend in healthcare environments by formalizing the healing properties of nature within a designed environment. Humans have been shown to undergo a measurable relief of stress, improved attention, and an improved overall sense of well-being when exposed to a restorative landscape setting. Opportunities exist for university campuses to more advantageously employ the mental health benefits of restorative landscapes. Furthermore, to address physical health, the university campus holds unique opportunities to increase students’ physical activity through promotion of active lifestyles using active modes of transportation. Campus streets, based on their lack of affordances to promote mental and physical health as well as their inherent connectivity to key campus buildings and spaces are investigated as a site for a designed solution. A recent trend of campus street conversions to pedestrian malls is identified and explored as a tool to facilitate creation of a restorative and active campus. The project, based in two fundamental research questions, investigates how campus street design can improve the collective mental health of college students, and how campus street design can promote physical health. Literature review analysis reveals theories and principles of restorative landscape and campus design. The project unites these findings with case study analysis to form a framework to facilitate the design of restorative environments within a university campus. Pragmatic evidence of built environment interventions has been synthesized from literature review and case study analysis into an additional framework to increase physical activity through active transportation. Kansas State University’s campus has been identified as a suitable case for a design proposal. Planning and design decisions at three nested scales are made to illustrate how the frameworks may be applied to reclaim a campus street as an active and restorative “garden street.” In the context of declining mental and physical health among college students, the synthesis of principles related to restorative landscape design and active transportation presents a valuable structure to mitigate declining mental and physical health of students.

Master of Agribusiness / Department of Agricultural Economics / Michael W. Babcock / Today’s rail industry is the outcome of years of regulatory and technological change. Since the passage of the Staggers Rail Act of 1980 the industry has seen consolidation through mergers and acquisitions. The rail industry in Montana has a rich rail history that includes the completion of a northern east-west route over 100 years ago that provided a commerce route from the interior of the US heartland to the ocean ports in the Pacific Northwest. In those hundred years the rail traffic across Montana has seen dramatic change. In the past, those routes have provided access for Montana freight; today those routes primarily serve the needs of consumers and industries far beyond Montana. While the state’s economy is primarily agricultural, the largest user of rail transportation is the energy industry. This leaves the agriculture industry with a lower priority for access, providing a quandary for rail service for the grain industry in the state. In a state where more than eight national and regional rail carriers once operated, Montana is now only serviced by a small handful, one of which operates over 80% of the rail miles within its borders. Furthermore that carrier provides service through those regions that are almost strictly agricultural, needing the greatest access to the most cost effective means of transportation for the bulk movement of grain. The objectives of this thesis are to develop a model to measure railroad costs and competition; determine the principal cost determinants and measure intramodal competition by comparing the rates in a captive market (Montana) to one with more intramodal competition (Kansas).

Master of Agribusiness / Department of Agricultural Economics / Vincent R. Amanor-Boadu / Over the last few years there have been many changes to the container export industry. There are a variety of reasons for these changes including exchange rate fluctuations, fuel and energy price fluctuations and their effects on bulk freight rates. The pressure to enhance and remain competitive has also increased amid these rapid changes. An effective strategy is for companies to focus attentions on costs they can control. In the container freight industry, one of these costs is reducing the “paper” aspects of operations and increasing its “electronic” aspects. This thesis focuses specifically on evaluating FileBound®, document management software, for the purpose of going “paperless” in a Container Freight, Non-Vessel Operating Common Carrier (NVOCC) and freight forwarding company. Going paperless has many advantages: increased efficiency, paper and printing cost savings, time savings, storage cost savings, environmental benefits, efficient file retrieval, and enhanced customer service. By adopting the FileBound® technology, the case study company hopes to achieve most of these benefits, allowing it to reduce overall costs, and especially, reduce the number of employees managing physical documents and move people into sales and marketing. The critical assumption of the study was that the electronic processes contributed to time savings and it is from these time savings that most of the other benefits emanated. Therefore, a time study was conducted to determine the time savings resulting from using FileBound® in comparison to the current method in the file completion process. The data collected was analyzed using regression analysis to determine the factors that influenced time savings, if any, and their statistical significance. There are three specific activities involved with the process of completing a transaction in the container freight business: booking, instruction and bill of lading. The analysis was conducted for each of these steps in the process. The results show that the different methods, FileBound® or manual, were not statistically significant on determining the time it took to complete the file. That being said, this thesis recommends that a mixture of both the FileBound® and manual method be used to take advantage of the potential cost savings.

Master of Regional and Community Planning / Department of Landscape Architecture/Regional and Community Planning / John W. Keller / The purpose of this document is to use an existing transit system as the standard by which another community can model their own. It begins with the discussion of a brief history of mass transit in the United States—focusing on the detail that competing automobile manufacturers began the demise of transit ridership in this nation. As the 1950s came to a close, the nation’s transit systems saw the peak of ridership. However, the post-war era brought about massive suburbanization and more automobiles per household. The American no longer needed to ride transit, except for those still living in the dense urban cores of cities like New York City. The document moves into the discussion of the fundamentals of mass transit. It explains the importance of population base, ridership, and funding. Depending on the type of system, a minimum population base is recommended in order to support the proper system. Ridership is a key focus of transit, for without it, a community is just wasting resources. Finally, funding is very important. No transit system can support itself on fares alone and still remain a viable alternative to the automobile. Transit systems must procure funding from a variety of sources including all levels of government in order to obtain sufficient revenue to operate successfully. The heart of the document focuses on the CyRide bus system in Ames, Iowa—serving the Ames community and Iowa State University since 1976. CyRide is a special system in that it serves a total population of only 54,000, but sees an annual ridership of 5 million. Their success is based on a longstanding relationship with the community complimented by staff that posses the passion to ensure the highest quality service day-in and day-out. This report discusses the fine details of how that system functions on all levels. The document concludes with the discussion of Manhattan, Kansas—a city with approximately the same population as Ames, and is home to Kansas State University, which as approximately the same student enrollment as Iowa State. Manhattan currently does not have a transit system, but is seeking to implement one in the coming years. The overall intent of this report is to draw conclusions based on the performance of CyRide and provide recommendations to the City of Manhattan regarding the implementation and operation of a transit system.

Master of Science / Department of Civil Engineering / Mustaque A. Hossain / Preventive maintenance strategies are applied to pavement to bring it back to appropriate serviceability when it starts to deteriorate soon after construction due to several factors, e.g., traffic loading, deterioration of pavement materials, and climatic effects. In recent years, more and more highway agencies are adopting preventive maintenance strategies and moving away from rehabilitation actions since rehabilitating pavements at near failure is not a cost-effective pavement management technique. A variety of preventive maintenance treatments or thin surface treatments are available to bring pavements back to appropriate serviceability for road users. The Kansas Department of Transportation (KDOT) has adopted several preventive maintenance treatments including thin overlay, ultra-thin bonded asphalt surface (Nova Chip), chip seal, and slurry seal. This thesis discusses the effectiveness of thin surface or preventive maintenance treatments applied in 2007 on 16 highway sections in Kansas. Three types of thin surface treatments, 25-mm Hot-Mix-Asphalt (1” HMA) overlay, ultra-thin bonded asphalt surface (Nova Chip), and chip seal, were examined in this study. These treatments were applied on three types of surface preparation, namely, bare surface, 25-mm surface recycle (1” SR), and 50-mm surface recycle (2” SR). Effectiveness of the thin surface or preventive maintenance treatments for mitigating typical distresses and enhancing pavement performance was evaluated by conducting before-and-after (BAA) comparisons. All data required for this study were extracted from the Pavement Management Information System (PMIS) database of KDOT. It was observed that transverse and fatigue cracking significantly decreased and rutting conditions were improved after the thin surface treatments were applied. Roughness conditions were observed to be better on the highway test sections treated with 25-mm (1”) HMA and Nova Chip, while the effects of chip seals on reducing roughness were not as obvious. Benefit and performance levels of the pavements were observed to rise after the thin surface treatments were applied. The Hamburg Wheel-Tracking Device (HWTD) test was conducted on core samples taken from the highway sections under this study. Laboratory test results showed that most projects exceeded the maximum rut-depth limit (20 mm) specified for 20,000 wheel passes, and the number of wheel passes to failure varied significantly among the projects. Cores from only three projects, two treated with Nova Chip and one with 25-mm (1”) HMA, carried 20,000 wheel passes without exceeding the maximum rut limit of 20 mm (0.8 inch). Pair-wise comparisons or contrasts among the treatments were also performed with the statistical analysis software, SAS. Air void of the HWTD test cores was found to be a significant factor affecting performance of thin surface treatments. The results also revealed that performance was significantly affected by the type of treatment and surface preparation.