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What's it like to bike in Tempe? ASU researchers want to show you

March 8, 2023

Interdisciplinary team pairs storytelling, data visualization to promote sustainable transportation

When Thomas Czerniawski rides his bicycle to work every day among a sea of cars, he wonders if he might be crazy. In Tempe and the larger Phoenix metropolitan area — a region designed around car infrastructure — it sure can seem that way.

However, he’s far from alone. With the development of Culdesac, a car-free community being built in Tempe, there will soon be many more people living in the area who share a passion for sustainable modes of transportation like biking.

“I want to see our cities facilitating a shift to more sustainable, healthy, cost-effective modes of transportation,” says Czerniawski, an assistant professor of construction engineering in the Del E. Webb School of Construction within the School of Sustainable Engineering and the Built Environment, part of the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering at Arizona State University.

Czerniawski wanted to use his skills in computer vision, building information modeling and construction management to improve the bicycling experience in his city. By forging new interdisciplinary connections with Assistant Professor Huê-Tâm Jamme and Associate Professor Deborah Salon — ASU urban and environmental planning researchers who are also bicyclists — he is leading a research project to do just that.

In a yearlong project, they’re gathering stories from Tempe bicyclists of all experience levels and pairing their anecdotes with a “digital twin” of the city that can be viewed in virtual reality. Their goal is to share what it’s like to ride a bicycle in the city with stakeholders and potential new bicyclists.

With Tempe infrastructure improvement projects underway and the first cohort of Culdesac residents preparing to move in to more than 700 units planned in the car-free development, their experiment is well-timed to make an impact in the community.

Their work, a project titled “Transforming Tempe into a Bicycling Oasis Through Data-Driven Planning,” is being supported by the Zimin Institute for Smart and Sustainable Cities at ASU. The institute shares a similar vision of people-centered cities that are safer, more sustainable and personally enriching through the use of advanced technology and human connections.

“The project represents an intriguing fusion of technology development and deployment, data science, public safety and public policy,” says Greg Raupp, the Zimin Institute director and a professor of chemical engineering in the Fulton Schools. “The strong, diverse interdisciplinary project team, including active, external community partners Culdesac and the city of Tempe, is led by a project director who is incredibly committed and passionate about the project and working to solve a problem he confronts daily.”

Raupp notes the project is well aligned with a growing worldwide movement to plan, design, build and nurture vibrant micro-communities in larger cities.

“This project can put us at the forefront of realizing such a vision in our own backyard,” he says.

Understanding the transportation landscape through storytelling

Jamme lives in Phoenix and uses her bike and the light rail to get to work. While there are places she bikes that feel unsafe or especially challenging, Jamme finds the area around the ASU Tempe campus to be a pretty good place to bike — “but it’s definitely not yet the bicycle oasis that we’re hoping to build with this project.”

“The main challenge we hear when we talk to people and when we ride our bikes ourselves is that it doesn’t feel safe most of the time,” Jamme says. “It’s frustrating in a way because the weather is such that many months of the year it could be a very pleasant experience.”

Salon recalls positive experiences in other places she’s lived, including Tokyo, Paris and Davis, California — a place she calls the bicycling mecca of the United States. She says Tempe has nice spots for biking, but many routes can be unpleasant.

Living in Tempe since 2014, Salon often walks and rides her bike to work and on errands, but she also has a car out of necessity for her family of four.

“Cars are super useful and an incredible invention, but I think we overuse them. It would be nice if we had a world where we still had cars, but we also made it comfortable and convenient to get around even if you didn’t have a car,” Salon says. “That feels almost like a fantasy land compared to where we are right now in Phoenix.”

Salon’s personal experiences and her research focus on reducing automobile dependence have led her to look critically at the transportation landscape of her city and how it affects her community.

When Jamme joined the School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning at ASU in 2020 with a similar research focus, she started a collaboration with Salon to study the budding Culdesac development.

“Culdesac is branded as the first car-free neighborhood in the United States, and since it’s happening next door and it’s promoting a very different mobility experience than the dominant one, I was super interested in looking at it very closely,” Jamme says.

Separate from the Zimin Institute-funded project, they’re working on a long-term study to “get a sense of how living at Culdesac changes not only how they move around, but how they organize their lives without access to a private car in a very car-centric city,” Jamme says.

This has given Jamme and Salon a group of potential storytellers in the form of future Culdesac residents and current staff, many of whom are passionate about biking. They’ve also connected with the Tempe Bicycle Action Group and other cyclists through their work.

With the Zimin Institute-funded project, they’re aiming to use their connections to collect stories from bicyclists ranging from new to experienced, hesitant to dedicated, and individuals to families with children. The researchers are also interested in how different types of streets from quiet neighborhood lanes to main arterial roads with or without bike lanes affect the cyclists’ experiences.

Using technology to empower the cycling community

Czerniawski has realized the importance of data in communicating bicycling challenges when attending Tempe public forums.

“There’s usually a lot of enthusiasm, but a lot of what is shared is not very quantitative, and I find that takes away from the credibility,” he says. “This has inspired me to combine (Salon and Jamme’s) community engagement, which collects these kinds of stories, the things that really matter to the people on the ground, and my lab’s quantitative approaches where we’re imaging and collecting bike counts and the like so we can support the stories in a way that gives them more impact.”

Czerniawski is exploring several strategies for data collection and visualization to help share the biking experience more effectively.

One of the more innovative methods uses lidar laser scanning to capture a 3D image of the city. The system he developed combines SLAM-based mobile mapping with the speed and mobility of electric scooters. Czerniawski and his lab’s student researchers ride an electric scooter while wearing the backpack-sized lidar system and zigzag all around Tempe to capture as much scanned data as they can during the spring.

Lidar systems capable of capturing an entire city can cost up to a million dollars and require a massive system mounted to the back of a truck. The system deployed by Czerniawski’s team is much smaller and a fraction of the cost, which “has opened the gates to academics to perform city-scale scanning” that was only available to municipalities with large budgets, but rarely done.

The lidar data can be used to create a digital model of the city in great detail, something known in Czerniawski’s field as a digital twin. A crude example of a digital twin is the 3D models of buildings displayed on Google Earth.

Alongside the digital twin, the team is capturing video as a final form of data collection that can be viewed on virtual reality headsets to experience a bike route as realistically as possible.

Czerniawski is also developing a computer-vision-based bike counting technique to more accurately quantify the number of people affected by certain issues in the bicycling infrastructure, which would also contribute to the quantitative data needed to meaningfully impact policy.

Combining these techniques with Jamme and Salon’s work has led to something different than what any of the researchers experience in their typical work.

“When I’ve worked with travel behavior researchers who are engineers, I’ve always felt like the research wasn’t truly interdisciplinary in a way where there was real value added. Whereas with Thomas, this is interdisciplinary research,” Salon says. “This guy has amazing skills that are really different from other skills that we have, and we each bring something to the project. I think it makes the project a lot better.”

Creating an impactful experience

While the team is just getting started with the data collection and interview process, they envision the outcome of their work to be an interactive presentation to city stakeholders and community members in the ASU Decision Theater in the fall.

Czerniawski sees the possibility to show the barriers and enablers to people deciding to use a bicycle for transportation, the impact of infrastructure development on the biking experience, and many other opportunities based on the stories people tell them.

“We’re going to collect video of a few key areas of the city that pop up during our interviews with the community,” Czerniawski says. “We will combine the data and the stories to paint a picture of the routes and their issues as well as offer people the opportunity to just experience a route and explore.”

The team hopes that by providing as close to a firsthand experience of biking in Tempe as possible, they can help even one person to use their bike more often, or even help decision-makers be more sympathetic to bicyclists’ experiences to make better policies down the road.

“I feel like we’re creating a museum exhibit,” Salon says. “The idea of museum exhibits is often to give people experiences that they can’t have, that they wouldn’t just have naturally. Those experiences may be fun or may be scary, but certainly educational and hopefully lead you to have a greater understanding of the world and of other people’s experience in it.”

Top photo: The ASU research team reviews a bicycling map for Tempe. The team has noticed a common problem with bicycling in Tempe from their own experiences and from others they’ve talked to — it often feels unsafe or challenging to bike here. They hope to help bring attention to the issues and highlight the positive aspects of biking with their research project. Photo by Erika Gronek/ASU

Monique Clement

Lead communications specialist , Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering

480-727-1958

ASU religious studies faculty on the global springtime festivals you may not know about


March 8, 2023

Spring is coming, and with it, the idea of flowers, picnics and new beginnings. It's also a time for holidays and festivals. 

There are many different celebrations from around the world that take place near the spring equinox. To learn more about them, where they originated and their cultural significance, we turned to the religious studies faculty members in the School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies Blooming pink flowers on a tress branch against a bright blue sky. Photo courtesy Pexels Download Full Image

Holi

Holi is one of the major Hindu festivals. It is celebrated on the full moon of the Hindu month of Phālguna, which falls in March and thus corresponds with the many spring festivals celebrated around the world.

“The festival is associated with the triumph of good over evil and commemorates in particular the victory of god Vishnu over the demon Hiranyakashipu,” said Alexander Henn, professor of religious studies. “The ceremonies are popular in all of India and have a typical carnivalesque character.”

A traditional celebration consists of bonfires and dancing around decorated poles to music from drums, cymbals and horns. It is popularly known as the festival of colors in modern celebrations, but it is also called the festival of love and is highlighted by symbols of love and fertility.

“Today, the festivities are celebrated by people dancing and frolicking in droves in the streets, smearing and drenching each other with colored powder and water and indulging in food, drink and joy,” said Henn.

Passover

Passover is celebrated on the 15th day of the Hebrew month of Nisan, which is the first month of Aviv, or spring. The holiday commemorates the enslaved Jewish peoples’ exodus from Egypt.

“The central ritual would be the slaughtering, the preparation and the eating of the Passover lamb, or the Passover sacrifice, which was basically done by family units,” said Joel Gereboff, associate professor of religious studies. “Today, the central element has become eating matzah as part of Passover observance, which is bread without any levain, such as yeast.”

The story of Passover comes from the final plague in the 10 plagues of Egypt, in which Jewish people sacrificed a lamb and smeared its blood over their door so the angel of death would pass over their home and would only take the lives of the first born of Egyptian households. 

“Passover differs from many Jewish holidays in that it is very family centered,” Gereboff said. “Every family is different, but many will come together and tell the story of Passover and will cook and eat this big meal together. Food plays a major role.”

Ramadan and Eid al-Fitr 

Eid al-Fitr, which means “the festival of breaking fast,” is celebrated to mark the end of an entire month of fasting during the month of Ramadan, the ninth month of the Islamic calendar.

“Fasting, or sawm, during Ramadan is considered one of the Five Pillars of Islam, the others being the declaration of faith, shahada, ritual prayer, salat, almsgiving, zakat and pilgrimage to Mecca, hajj,” said Han Hsien Liew, assistant professor of religious studies. “During this month, all able-bodied Muslims are required to fast from sunrise to sunset every day.”

According to the Islamic tradition, the holiday began after the Prophet Muhammad migrated to Medina, after escaping persecution by his tribesmen, the Quraysh, in Mecca. It is typically celebrated by Muslims visiting family and friends, dressing in their best clothes, cooking up feasts in the evening and offering charity.

Mosques will also hold special prayer services to commemorate the festival.

“Eid al-Fitr is also known as the ‘minor festival,’ the ‘major festival’ being Eid al-Adha, or the festival of sacrifice, celebrated about two months later,” Liew said. “During Eid al-Adha, animals such as cattle, sheep or goats are ritually sacrificed and a huge feast is prepared from the meat for family and friends. Despite being referred to as the ‘minor festival,’ Eid al-Fitr is usually more festive than Eid al-Adha due to the month of fasting that precedes it.”

Vesak

Vesak is celebrated by Buddhists to commemorate the Buddha’s birth, attainment of enlightenment and death. 

According to Huaiyu Chen, associate professor of religious studies, the Vesak celebration originated in Sri Lanka in 1950, at the first conference of the World Fellowship of Buddhists. 

It is usually celebrated on the day of the full moon in May in South and Southeast Asia, but in East Asia, it is sometimes celebrated on April 8 on the lunar calendar. 

While the holiday is celebrated differently across Buddhist cultures, a typical celebration consists of Buddists gathering in temples.

“(The Buddists) offer flowers, incenses, candles, lamps and sing hymns paying homage to the Buddha, Dharma and Sangha,” Chen said. “Buddhists will eat vegetarian food and practice releasing lives, such as birds, animals, fish and turtles, attend Dharma talks by monks and observe precepts.”

Dharma is the teachings of the Buddha and the study of Buddhists. Sangha is the building of a community through Buddhist ideals and values.

Rachel Bunning

Communications program coordinator, School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies