No description available.

Thesis (M. S.)--Economics, Georgia Institute of Technology, 2008. / Committee Chair: Thomas Boston; Committee Member: Maurizio Iacopetta; Committee Member: Patrick McCarthy.

Thesis (M. S.)--Civil and Environmental Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, 2009. / Committee Chair: Guensler, Randall; Committee Member: Rodgers, Michael; Committee Member: Ross, Catherine. Part of the SMARTech Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Collection.

By using the Collier Heights neighborhood in the west side of Atlanta as a case study, this thesis will examine questions which arise at the intersection of architecture and racial equality. Research will focus on the years between 1952, when Collier Heights was annexed into the City of Atlanta, and 1968, the last year of major development in the area. According to one historian, Collier Heights is regarded as "the country's preeminent mid-century African American developed suburb." This statement can be attributed to numerous factors including its importance in the realm of African American cultural heritage, community planning, and social history. As well, its architecture is noteworthy for its exceptionally intact collection of mid-twentieth century houses, which were built from custom design and stock plans.

Loans originated to borrowers with lower incomes and/or lower credit scores are classified as subprime. The spatial distribution of subprime loans is alarmingly concentrated in minority-dominated and low-income areas. Beginning in mid 2006 the subprime mortgage market began to see elevated levels of delinquent and defaulted loans. The causes are many but generally traced to the beginning of the reset periods for adjustable rate mortgages and the evaporation of demand for securitized subprime mortgages. As delinquent and default rates in subprime mortgages rise, areas with a concentration of high-risk borrowers are at risk to decline. The decline can be measured across four different groups of factors that indicate the health of a community. The four groups are: physical, institutional, socioeconomic and the residential body. The residential body factor group refers to the citizens of a community and their civic involvement. The analysis uses binary logistic regression to identify communities that are commonly associated with subprime mortgage defaults. Subprime loans in the ten-county Atlanta Metropolitan Area are the focus of the study. The analysis treats each census tract in the ten counties as an individual community. The sample loans are geocoded to the census tract level allowing defaulted loans to be tied to communities and their characteristics. The data is collected from a variety of sources including the U.S. Census Bureau, the Atlanta Regional Commission and RR Donnelley s Credit Risk Management database. The results indicate that the probability of subprime mortgage defaults are associated with higher vacancy rates, population loss, declining property tax revenues, depreciating property values, and declining owner reinvestment in their properties. Potential spill over impacts to the community include higher crime rates, decreased school funding and degradation of public infrastructure.

By the dawn of the twenty-first century the City of Atlanta was facing a crisis of water quantity and water quality. It was involved in two-decades worth of litigation with the states of Alabama and Florida over access to surface waters that originate within Georgia, a legal dispute that threatened to severely reduce the city’ ability to provide water to its growing metropolitan population. In addition, city officials were in the beginning stages of a four-billion dollar, court-ordered program of improvements to its wastewater infrastructure that was intended to reduce the amount of pollution that spewed into its local rivers and streams. This dissertation examines the origins of these water-related problems by exploring the challenges that Atlanta’s public officials, engineers, and activists faced in planning and implementing an effective environmental policy, with particular emphasis placed on the era of post-World War II metropolitan development. Specifically, it focuses on the city’s historical efforts to achieve the comprehensive management of the area’s water resources, the technological systems adopted and solutions proposed, and the political and social milieu that facilitated or hampered these endeavors. Comprehensive water resources management was a neglected and delayed policy approach that was undertaken in the City of Atlanta only after overt threats of federal intervention. This study argues that although the area’s mid-century regional planners advocated for intergovernmental cooperation in order to manage Atlanta’s limited water supplies, their recommendations were undermined by fragmented local governance, timid political leadership, and public indifference. It further suggests that Atlanta’s water supply managers, through increases in the scale and scope of their operations and a reluctance to increase customer rates, facilitated and encouraged greater water consumption, which, in turn, placed intense burdens on both the natural hydraulic cycle and the city’s wastewater facilities. Lastly, it argues the citizen activists as well as state and federal regulators have utilized the federal court system as a blunt planning instrument when Atlanta’s leaders displayed their seeming incapacity to handle the environmental strains of uncoordinated metropolitan development.

High Occupancy Toll (HOT) lanes were recently proposed for I-85 in Atlanta as a way to relieve congestion and provide a reliable commute time for single occupant drivers that are willing to pay a toll. It is important to evaluate the air quality impacts of such a proposal to meet environmental regulations, such as the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and Transportation Conformity Regulations. The goal of this study is to understand how vehicle mass emissions change as a result of implementing HOT lanes on I-85 in Atlanta . This is done by considering a number of factors affect mass vehicle emissions, such as vehicle activity, vehicle speeds, vehicle age distributions, and vehicle class distributions. These factors are incorporated into a base scenario, which models the current condition on I-85 with HOV lanes, and a future scenario, which models the implementation of HOT lanes on this corridor. The base scenario mainly uses data from a data collection effort by Georgia Tech during the summer of 2007 on the I-85 corridor, while the future scenario makes alterations to these data using information from other cities that have already implemented HOT lanes. The MOBILE-Matrix modeling tool, which was recently developed by Georgia Tech [16], was used to run the emissions analysis using the input factors from these data sources. This tool calculated mass emissions for five pollutants: HC, NOx, CO, PM2.5, and PM10. The results show very small increases in mass emissions for NOx, CO, PM2.5, and PM10, and very small decreases in mass emissions for HC. Therefore, the implementation of HOT lanes on I-85 in Atlanta is unlikely to violate the Transportation Conformity Rule. For NEPA purposes, this analysis could be used to make the case that air quality impacts are not significant, and therefore further detailed analyses are not required.

This thesis examines the marginal cost of congested travel to a variety of businesses by observing time spent in congestion and estimating excess labor costs based upon the relevant value of time. The fleets in the scoping study represented commercial deliveries of goods and services, government agencies, and transit systems. Observations on limited-access expressways within the 13-county Atlanta metropolitan region were used in the analysis. Vehicles were monitored by using a passive GPS assembly that transmitted speed and location data in real-time to an off-site location. Installation and operation during the observation period required no interaction from the driver. Over 217 hours of good freeway movement during 354 vehicle-days was recorded. Rates of delay, expressed as a unit of lost minutes per mile traveled, were calculated by taking the difference in speeds observed during congestion from an optimal free-flow speed of 45 mph and dividing that by the distance traveled per segment. The difference between the 50th and 95th percentile delay rates was used as the measure for travel unreliability. Daily average values of extra time needed per fleet vehicle to ensure on-time arrivals were derived, and the median buffer across all fleets was 1.65 hours of added time per vehicle. Weekly marginal costs per fleet vehicle were estimated by factoring in the corresponding driver wages or hourly operation costs (for transit fleets). Equivalent toll rates were calculated by multiplying the 95th percentile delay rate by the hourly costs. The equivalent toll per mile traveled was representative of an equal relationship between the marginal costs of congestion experienced and a hypothetical state of free-flow travel (under first-best rules of marginal cost pricing). The median equivalent toll rates across all fleets was $0.43 per mile for weekday mornings, $0.13 per mile for midday weekdays, $0.53 per mile for afternoon weekdays and $0.01 per mile for weekday nights and weekends.

This paper examines the issues of equity, as applicable to the HOV-to-HOT conversion project planned for the I-85 North corridor in the Metropolitan Atlanta Region. A review of literature is undertaken to describe the typology of transportation equity issues within the wider context of environmental justice, and to highlight socio-economic factors and local and national transportation funding factors that influence people's travel choices and their mobility and accessibility options. Demographic data on the I-85 corridor peak period commuters in Metropolitan Atlanta is analyzed, in addition to results of focus groups polling current Metropolitan Atlanta interstate commuters on the topic of managed lanes during 2008. The thesis makes a conclusion that a final decision about the equity impact of the I-85 HOV-to-HOT conversion is likely not possible without undertaking a Metropolitan area-wide analysis. Some of the equity findings that emerge indicate that there are no significant income differences between the the HOV lane users and general purpose lane I-85 commuters; that there are differences between median incomes of block groups represented by current I-85 commuters (both HOV lane users and general purpose lane users) and median incomes of block groups typical for the base geography; and that investing in Xpress bus service improvements would primarily serve those households with more vehicles than drivers, unless improvements to reverse commute options and feeder bus networks are made. The focus group findings suggest that current interstate highway users in Metropolitan Atlanta, originating in the suburbs, are generally accepting of the HOT concept and recognize the value of travel time savings.