Leveraging New Technologies to Assess Active Travel and Complete Streets with Examples from Atlanta, GA

Date and time: September 5, 2025 | 11:00 pm – 12:30 pm (CDT)

Speaker: Subhrajit “Subhro” Guhathakurta, PhD

Archive: Flier | Slides (PDF) | Slides (PPT) | Chat Q&A | Recording

About the talk

Complete streets, a transportation policy designed to make streets safe and accessible for all individuals, regardless of their abilities or mode of travel, have garnered significant attention from scholars and practitioners. Although state and local planning agencies emphasize the need for consistent inventory data and facility rating systems at the network level, the lack of cost-effective data collection methods has been a major challenge. This talk will present a novel methodology for detecting and evaluating several complete street elements that have been challenging to inventory at the street segment level, including sidewalk width estimation, on-street parking detection, bike lane assessment, and transit access. The objective is to develop scalable approaches for scoring complete streets using publicly available data, as well as data extracted from Street View and aerial images, utilizing deep learning. The inventory will be validated against a few existing but limited databases on complete street elements that stakeholders maintain. The proposed system will provide insights into how complete streets influence travel behavior, expecting more complete streets to induce street vitality by positively increasing foot and bike traffic.

Speaker

Subhrajit “Subhro” Guhathakurta, PhD

Georgia Institute of Technology

Subhrajit “Subhro” Guhathakurta is Harry West Chair Professor in the School of City and Regional Planning and Director of the Center for Urban Resilience and Analytics. He also directs the new Interdisciplinary Master of Science in Urban Analytics program at Georgia Tech. He is the immediate past Chair of the School of City and Regional Planning at Georgia Tech. Prior to his appointments at Georgia Tech, he served as the Associate Director of the School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning as well as a founding faculty member of the School of Sustainability at the Arizona State University. He co-edited the Journal of Planning Education and Research (JPER) from 2011 to 2015 and is serving on editorial boards of several leading planning journals including as an Associate Editor of the Journal of the American Planning Association. Prof. Guhathakurta has published widely in many planning domains including energy systems, urban heat, sustainable development, travel behavior, housing affordability, integrated urban models, built environment and health, and the use of geospatial technologies in urban planning. Prof. Guhathakurta is the past recipient of the Chester Rapkin Award for the best article in JPER. He was also awarded the Mercator Professorship by DFG (German National Science Foundation) to conduct research in the Technische Universität, Kaiserslautern, Germany. He has held visiting appointments at the Center for Advanced Spatial Analysis at the University College London; the International Institute of Information Technology, Bangalore; the Center for Sustainable Urban and Regional Futures at the University of Queensland in Brisbane; and served as a high-end expert for the Institute of Environmental Sustainability at Tongji University, Shanghai, China.

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