Integrating rule-based visualization and street sustainability evaluation

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cenqi Zhu, University of Florida

PRESENTATION DESCRIPTION

Long-term sustainability is an important consideration for transportation systems. This importance has been highlighted by a growing number of efforts that use Complete Street and Green Street principles aiming to address sustainability goals such as supporting vulnerable road users, improving access for carless households, reducing emissions in the transportation network, and helping manage stormwater and protecting local water systems. A sustainable street should adequately fulfill three legs of sustainability - movement, ecology, and community needs.
While there have been several methods developed to measure sustainable streets, most of them have focused on post-construction measures or engineering aspects and not as much on the conceptual street design phase, the lack of which could lead to the selection of less sustainable alternatives and higher costs in the long term. On the other hand, it is widely accepted that the use of 3D visualization is critical to communicating conceptual street design to help understand the street space and the surrounding context for both professionals and the public. In this study, we explore the development of a framework that seeks to integrate these two important aspects of street design - sustainability measures and rule-based 3D modeling and visualization during the conceptual design process of urban streets.
To this aim, we reviewed several existing transportation sustainability systems and selected to adopt sustainability measures from the NYSDOT GreenLITES as more suitable to fulfill sustainability goals during the design phase and easier to integrate with rule-based visualization. Using the CityEngine rule-based modeling, we created four conceptual street design scenarios and evaluated them using the adopted sustainability measures and scoring point system based on their suitability to achieve sustainability goals of movement, community, and ecology.
The results show the four 3D design scenarios ranked by their street sustainability scores. They demonstrate proof of concept for the proposed approach and illustrate how rule-based modeling and visualization can be integrated with quantitative measures into a street sustainability evaluation framework. This framework can be used to assess the degree of street design sustainability during the conceptual design phase of a street project and it can be customized to achieve sustainability goals based on communities’ local context. This approach contributes to the advancements in visual communication by integrating sustainability measures and ruled-based 3D modeling. This work can serve to establish an initial model that can be expanded with additional criteria such as safety, traffic performance, and other transportation-related measures to grow into a more comprehensive visual evaluation framework.

SPEAKER BIOGRAPHY

Cenqi Zhu is a Ph.D. student in the Urban and Regional Planning department of the university of Florida with a master's degree in Landscape Architecture. She specializes in interactive 3D visualization design and urban analysis.

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