Give your input! UT-Austin Masterplan Update

The University of Texas is asking the UT Community to help update the campus masterplan!!!  See the message below, and follow the link to give your input in the digital interface.

Faculty, staff, and students:

University Operations, the School of Architecture, and other campus stakeholders invite you to become part of the process for updating our main campus master plan. The master plan is our guide for creating the future campus addressing buildings, mobility and transportation, landscapes, water and power conservation, and many other aspects necessary to maintain a sustainable campus environment.

Your feedback at this stage of the process is highly desired.  We’re especially interested in feedback from our graduating seniors as this is your opportunity to impact our campus’ future. Please visit the campus master plan Web site (http://www.utaustinmasterplan.com) created by our internationally recognized campus planning firm, Sasaki Associates, to learn more.

On the GET INVOLVED: My Campus page (http://utaustin.sasakistrategies.com/get-involved-mycampus/) you may provide information that will help direct future plans for everything from bike paths to new buildings.

Your feedback is important to us, so thank you in advance for participating.

Go!  Tell them what you think!

Daily Texan: Bicyclist hit-and-run raises safety concerns

Take a look at the Daily Texan Article addressing the recent bicyclist hit-and-run accident on Guadalupe.

UT Mobility Space Project UPDATE Apr 2012

With the semester nearing its end, the Mobility Space Project researchers are now working on compiling their work.  Since our last update:

• We sent in an application for future funding through the Knight News Challenge.  You can read about is on this blog post, or go to the tumblr page here.
• We identified devices we decided would be productive to test for this period of research.  Unfortunately, two of the devices we were interested in came from a company in France, and the lead time was too long for us to make use of them in this semester’s time.
• We’ve been testing one type of device (a heart rate monitor in conjunction with a GPS tracking device) on two different subjects.  Below are a couple screen shots of the information we can pull from this device.
• We also met with UT Parking and Transportation Services to share with them our ideas, and gauge their interest in employing a digital data collection system.  To attempt to wrap up our work in a just a few words, we have been looking for a tool (digital) that compiles information (both existing and newly acquired) into an easily digestible format from which we can learn about how to more safely negotiate and craft our physical transportation environment (our mobility space).  We think that this tool could combine various static & dynamic layers like those shown in this diagram,And could end up looking something like this (please note, the information show here is not real data):For a group like PTS:  we understand that it is an extremely difficult thing to consider all the different things going on in the transportation space – we want this tool to aid sourcing that knowledge, and to help support decisions being made.  Jeri Baker, Blanca Juarez, and Sam Cortez attended this meeting, and kindly gave us feedback.  Jeri and Blanca mentioned ways that they could see the system being useful: Jeri talked about it being a tool for future long-term campus planning (where to site future buildings, roadways, sidewalks, etc.); Blanca though it could help to determine where to place crosswalks, how to craft bus routes, and how to mediate city construction projects that effect commuter paths to the University.  Sam mentioned that the more live information this system could hold, the better.  Jeri mentioned housing this system within the University; Blanca mentioned perhaps the Texas Transportation Institute.

We’re expecting the final report to come out by the end of May – this time is really exciting to us, because we’re able to take all of our had work from this semester and last, and finally be able to share concrete ideas about the possibilites that we see with this project!