City Studio - Advances toward the “20-Minute City” vision for Tempe

January-May 2019

City Studio is an Arizona State University (ASU) course developed to allow ASU and the City of Tempe to collaborate on Tempe’s 20-Minute City project. ASU worked with Tempe staff to develop the City Studio class. The project promotes an educational experience to students, while providing Tempe valuable data and analysis for their 20-Minute City project. The City Studio class established baseline measurement for the full city, providing an informed understanding of how many residential units are accessible in 20-minutes by walking, biking, or riding transit. The City staff and City Council will use the baseline measurement to establish a target for ongoing transportation system management and prioritization of transportation infrastructure projects. City Studio included a total of eight students from different academic backgrounds, working together to analyze data, and they were led by a transportation planning professor and a geographic information science (GIS) professor. The team utilized GIS software to measure the accessibility from residences to target destinations within 20 minutes of travel via walking, biking, and public transit. The integration of different transport modes in this project highlights the importance of a multimodal perspective on transportation planning. City Studio identified the residential units accessible to specified destinations within the designated travel allowance utilizing five networks: pedestrian network using all streets and paths, pedestrian network only using streets with sidewalks, bicycle network using all streets and paths, bicycle network using only low stress streets and paths, and the public transportation network. On average, 88% to 69% of residential units in the City of Tempe can access important destinations via walking, bicycling or riding public transit for 20 minutes.

Please use the link here if the pdf embed does not load: Project presentation

Mehak Sachdeva
Mehak Sachdeva
Urban Science Faculty Fellow

My research interests include spatial statistical methods with applications in the social, urban and environmental sciences.