Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Author

Golnaz Sarram

Date

2020

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Department

Civil Engineering

Committee Chair

Stephanie Ivey

Committee Member

Shahram Pezeshk

Committee Member

Roger Meier

Committee Member

Aaron Robinson

Abstract

In transportation planning, public engagement is an essential requirement forinformed decision-making. This is especially true for assessing abstract concepts such aslivability, where it is challenging to define objective measures and to obtain input that canbe used to gauge performance of communities. This dissertation focuses on advancing adata-driven decision-making approach for the transportation planning domain in thecontext of livability. First, a conceptual model for a customer-centric framework fortransportation planning is designed integrating insight from multiple disciplines (chapter1), then a data-mining approach to extracting features important for defining customersatisfaction in a livability context is described (chapter 2), and finally an appraisal of thepotential of social media review mining for enhancing understanding of livability measuresand increasing engagement in the planning process is undertaken (chapter 3). The resultsof this work also include a sentiment analysis and visualization package for interpreting anautomated user-defined translation of qualitative measures of livability. The packageevaluates users satisfaction of neighborhoods through social media and enhances thetraditional approaches to defining livability planning measures. This approach has thepotential to capitalize on residents interests in social media outlets and to increase publicengagement in the planning process by encouraging users to participate in onlineneighborhood satisfaction reporting. The results inform future work for deploying acomprehensive approach to planning that draws the marketing structure of transportationnetwork products with residential nodes as the center of the structure.

Comments

Data is provided by the student.

Library Comment

Dissertation or thesis originally submitted to ProQuest

Notes

embargoed

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