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NEWS WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 10, 2010 / THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN / KANSAN.COM
CAMPUS
Students help improve transportation in Kansas
BY BRENNA LONG blong@kansan.com
blong@kansan.com
Yilei Huang remembers when cars didn't clog the roads of his hometown in China. But that was in grade school.
Huang, a Ph.D. student from Jiujiang, China, has seen the problems caused by billions of cars on the roads, both in China and the United States.
And now Huang is learning how to fix these problems in the University's urban planning graduate program. This semester, eight graduate students will be working on
plans to improve transportation in Wichita and Lawrence. The projects are based on proposals that the two cities sent to Marcy Smalley, a lecturer in the School of Architecture, Design and
Planning. The semester-long project requires the students design improved transportation plans for their assigned city. At the end of the semester, they will hand their plans over to the transportation boards, Smalley said.
"When I started in urban planning, it was all about completing the interstate," Smallley said. "Today, transportation planning is about managing the system we have."
CREATING A BIKER-FRIENDLY LAWRENCE
"Nothing we do is isolated anymore. Everything is so connected and really kind of delicate."
Jonathan Hurst-Sneh can feel the frustration from the cars behind him as he peddles down the road on his bike and hears horns honking around him.
John Elias, a second-year graduate student from Atchison, said the transportation network had influenced the way cities had grown. Car-oriented cities face public transportation difficulties and cause environmental problems.
"The way our cities are laid out affects our vehicle miles traveled and climate change," Kassie Shelton, a second-year graduate student from Wichita, said. "Nothing we do is isolated anymore. Everything is so connected and really kind of delicate."
Two students in the urban planning program are focusing on the problems posed by different types of transportation on the same roads in Lawrence. Nicholas Pappas, a
The class' two main projects are highlighted below.
KASSIE SHELTON Wichita graduate student
"I find it difficult to ride my bike sometimes with the narrow roads, and now the pot holes," Hurst-Sneh, a senior from Overland Park, said.
Deborah Fraser/KANSAN
Marcy Smallley (left), lecturer in the School of Architecture, Design and Planning, meets with urban planning student Kassie Shelton, a second-year graduate student from Wichita. The class is working on a project to create transportation plans for the cities of Lawrence and Wichita.
second-year graduate student from Albuquerque, N.M., and Jessica Mortinger, a second-year graduate student from Hays, are working with a design plan called
complete streets, making roads accessible for all users. Historically, the city invested in automobile and freight roadways, but Pappas and Mortinger are hoping to accommodate pedestrians and bicyclists.
"Money for sidewalks and bike trails doesn't grow on trees; cities have to fund it," Mortinger said. "You have to find a balance between planning ideally with unlimited resources and where you put your first priorities based on the realistic funding."
Hurst-Sneh said he found the bike paths in Lawrence helpful and that connections to business areas such as 6th Street would entice more people to bike.
MONEY AND
"In the bike lanes, 99 percent of the time no one is going to bother you," he said. "It's more comfortable riding in the lanes because it's just you and your bike."
EXPERIENCE
PUTTING WICHITA ON THE GRID
Huang, Elias and Shelton are
Deborah Fraser/KANSAN
Mortinger calculated that each student would spend about 200 hours working on the projects by the time they handed their proposals to the cities in May.
"If these studies were being done by consulting firms, it would probably be worth $75,000," Marcy Smalley, a lecturer in the School of Architecture, Design and Planning said.
The students won't leave with money in hand, but earn experience instead.
"This, more than any other coursework, makes us welcome to the real world." Jessica Mortinger, a second-year graduate student from Haysaid.
Ellas said the project gave him the opportunity to see what he likes and dislikes about planning, and Shelton said the experience would teach project management skills that would come into play eventually.
In this stage of the process, the groups are spending time gathering data from transportation agencies and sketching potential plans. The Wichita group will be visiting their site Feb. 12 to meet with the transportation board.
three of the six students focusing on how to make the Wichita public transit system run on a grid, instead of the current hub-and-spoke system. The grid design would cover the entire city, as opposed to the hub-and-spoke system, which runs all the lines through downtown.
"It is now kind of like the KU buses; they are all obviously routed through KU" Shelton said. "It would
be a really big shift for them."
In a Wichita survey from last year, only 12 percent of the population reported using public transportation, but 22 percent said they would if it was more convenient, Elias said.
Another aspect of the Wichita project will address park-and-ride lots for residents of local suburbs
and Huang is working on ways to create greater efficiency with intelligent transportation systems. As a civil engineer, he uses technology to improve transportation networks by making signs to alert drivers of congestion or the time it will take to reach downtown. The system can even time traffic lights to be green for the buses as they pass through
intersections.
"We are just starting to make a game plan of what we want to do," Shelton said. "There's a lot of work to be done, but we're just excited to get started and see where it takes us."
— Edited by Katie Blankenau
ASSOCIATED PRESS
A protester participates in a rally opposing the U.S. and South Korean government's policy against North Korea near the U.S. embassy in Seoul, South Korea, Tuesday. The word "MD" means U.S. missile defense system.
INTERNATIONAL
North Korea could rejoin U.S., China in nuclear disarmament discussion
ASSOCIATED PRESS
SEOUL, South Korea - A senior U.N. envoy pressed ahead Wednesday with international efforts to get North Korea back into nuclear disarmament talks, during the world body's first high-level visit to the reclusive state in nearly six years.
In Beijing, top nuclear negotiators from North Korea and China were to meet again today, a day after discussing how to restart the six-nation nuclear talks aimed at ridding Pyongyang of its atomic weapons program in return for aid, according to South Korea's Yonhap news agency.
The meeting in China was believed to have focused on the North's calls for U.N. sanctions to be lifted and a peace treaty signed with Washington formally ending the Korean War before it returns to the disarmament talks, Yonhap reported, citing unidentified diplomatic sources in Beijing.
The flurry of diplomacy heightened speculation that there could be a breakthrough to jump-start the stalled talks, which include the two Koreas, the U.S.
"This is a sign that the resumption of the six-party talks is imminent," said Yang Moo-jin, a professor at the University of North Korean Studies in Seoul.
China, Russia and Japan.
The North's top negotiator "is expected to tell Chinese officials about North Korea's disarmament plan in a more concrete manner"
— probably in return for aid from Beijing, he said.
U. N. political chief B. Lynn Pascoe was greeted Tuesday by North Korean officials at an airport on the outskirts of Pyongyang, according to footage broadcast by APTN in the North's capital.
Pascoe said the aim of his visit was to find "ways we can cooperate better," according to the footage. "So it should be quite useful we hope."
Pascoe's trip was the first to North Korea by a high-level U.N. official since 2004, according to Seoul's Foreign Ministry. The envoy is reportedly bearing a letter from U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.
The four-day visit came a day after North Korean leader Kim Jong Il assured visiting top Chinese Communist Party official Wang Jiarui that Pyongyang is committed to the denuclearization of the Korean peninsula. The next day, Kim sent his chief nuclear envoy to Beijing for talks.