The NCSG will offer a GIS internship program this summer to local high school students. Applications are due by June 7 and the program will begin on June 24.

Should Maryland Adopt a California-Style SB 375 Policy? Smart Growth America's William Fulton provides observations about what Maryland can learn from California's experience.  View the webinar recording after the jump.

The University of Maryland Environmental Finance Center, with support from the Waterfront Partnership of Baltimore, Inc. and the Abell Foundation, recently completed a study on a prospective beverage container deposit program in Maryland. The study looked at potential impacts on recycling rates, employment, beverage sales, and greenhouse gas emissions. 

The Maryland Port Administration (MPA)/Maryland Department of Transportation (MDOT) announced today that it is providing funding to enhance the Mid-Atlantic Dray Truck Replacement Program, which is funded by a grant from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and administered by the Mid-Atlantic Regional Air Management Association (MARAMA) and the University of Maryland Environmental Finance Center.

This is a short, accessible article that provides a synopsis of findings from the research titled “Tool Development to Evaluate the Performance of Intermodal Connectivity (EPIC)” in collaboration with UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies. This research has examined various factors that can substantially influence transit users’ perception of service quality at bus stops and trains stations, and also what factors transit managers think important to improve customers' satisfaction. Recently, the project has developed a tool for transit agencies to identify service quality improvements at transit facilities, which has been presented in the American Planning Association (APA) National Planning Conference in Los Angeles, April, 2012. Publications related to this research are listed under " FURTHER READING" on page 15.

This particular poster presentation describes a web-based analysis tool that is hosted by the UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies and is publicly available to transit agencies interested in identifying which service quality changes (e.g. amenities, information, lighting, etc.) to transit stops/stations are most important for improving levels of transit users’ satisfaction.
 
This program is based on a series of research projects funded by California Department of Transportation since 2005 (see www.its.ucla.edu/research/EPIC/) in collaboration with researchers from multiple universities, including Hiroyuki Iseki from the National Center for Smart Growth.  This phase of research—TASC project—is groundbreaking in that it provides planners an analysis of the relative importance of various improvements, uses community-based input, and can be applied at the level of individual stops/stations, across a group of stops/stations, or across the transit system as a whole.  The program provides a graphical representation of users’ levels of satisfaction juxtaposed on top of the importance of various service qualities.  In short, it provides a clear indication of how best to invest increasingly scarce transit resources to improve customer satisfaction in attributes that matter to transit customers.
 
The poster focuses on a description of the process for using the tool – downloading the survey forms, conducting a user survey, uploading survey results, and downloading analysis results – and highlights examples of how the analysis can be performed at different levels of analysis to meet different needs.