INTRODUCTION The Safe Routes to School (SRTS) program is designed to encourage active and safe transportation for children to school. This report examines the potential broader impact of these programs on communities within 0.5 mile (0.8 km) of schools. METHODS We used a geographic information system to generate estimates of the land area within 0.5 mile of public schools in 4 U.S. Census-def...

Urban development has expanded rapidly in Las Vegas, Nevada, over the last fifty years. To assess urban land use change in the area, a sub-pixel change detection approach has been used to map urban extent and its temporal changes by determining sub-pixel level impervious surface areas from Landsat satellite remote sensing data in conjunction with digital orthophotography. Sub-pixel percentages ...

The delimitation of urban space is conceptually elusive and fuzzy. Commonly, urban areas are delimited through administrative boundaries. These artificial, fixed boundaries, however, do not necessarily represent the actual built-up extent, the urban catchment, or the economic linkage within and across neighboring metropolitan regions. For an approach to spatially delimit an urban corridor—a gen...

Urban warming is sensitive to the nature (thermal properties, including albedo, water content, heat capacity and thermal conductivity) and the placement (surface geometry or urban topography) of urban surface. In this research, the pattern and variation of urban surface temperature is regarded as one kind of landscape, urban thermal landscape, which is assumed as the presentation of local surfa...

Nighttime light data from the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) Day/Night Band (DNB) provides a unique data source for mapping and monitoring urban areas at regional and global scales. This study proposes an object similarity-based thresholding method using VIIRS DNB data to map urban areas. The threshold for a target potential urban object was determined by comparing its simila...

With forecasting the settlement of more than 66 percent of the population of the world in cities over the next 10 years, the world is becoming a global city. So many problems would be involved in the future of urban management. Researchers presume good governance as the best solution for their management problems of metropolitans Therefore, considering the components of the theory of good gove...

Due to the inherent discrete nature of sensing, interpolation is a key activity in sensing. Interpolation in urban computing faces an unprecedented inference issue that was not present in large scale traditional sensing environments. Obstacles such as buildings and walls are prevalent in urban sensing, and it is important to consider them in urban sensing interpolation. This paper introduces an...

Detailed analysis of continuous time-series data from regions undergoing rapid urbanization can accurately reveal spatial variations on short time scales. This study used the city of Changchun in Jilin Province, China, as a case study to analyze total and annual changes in area—especially decreases in rural settlement area—as well as regional differences in these changes and driving forces of r...