ITS Berkeley

Since motor vehicles are a major air pollution source, urban designs that decrease private automobile use could improve air quality and decrease air pollution health risks. Yet, the relationships among urban form, air quality, and health are complex and not fully understood. To explore these relationships, we model the effects of three alternative development scenarios on annual average fine particulate matter (PM2.5) concentrations in ambient air and associated health risks from PM2.5 exposure in North Carolina's Raleigh-Durham-...

Engagement in healthy lifestyle behaviors likely reflects access to a diverse and synergistic set of food and physical activity resources, yet most research examines discrete characteristics. We characterized neighborhoods with respect to their composition of features, and quantified associations with diet, physical activity (PA), body mass index (BMI), and insulin resistance (IR) in a longitudinal biracial cohort (n=4143; aged 25–37; 1992–2006). We used latent class analysis to derive population-density-specific (<vs.≥1750 people per sq...

Understanding how the built environment at a neighborhood scale is associated with individuals' walking has been a common research objective in public health and city planning. In contrast to the extant literature, we examine whether a neighborhood's location defined at a regional scale is associated with walking and whether this association is separately identifiable from the association of the neighborhood built environment and walking. The findings indicated that walking for commuting purposes was associated more strongly with neighborhood location than with the neighborhood built...

Slat noise during aircraft landing is already a barrier to the development of quieter commercial airplanes. Investigations have been made by several research groups to understand the mechanism of slat noise generation. Most of the published works related to slat noise consider clean idealized geometries, whereas real slats contain some imperfections to enable its operation. The influence of a protrusion on the slat...