Seri Park
University of Nevada-Reno, NV·Engineering
Many children walk to school because they live too close to qualify for a school bus. These children are called "involuntary walkers." Whether their routes are safe depends on local bus policies and on the built environment: the sidewalks, crossings and street designs around schools.
- Fields
Engineering
Public Health & Epidemiology
Social Science
- Topics
pedestrian safety
involuntary walkers
school bus policy
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Jul 2027
What they work on
- Document school bus provision policies and develop built environment readiness (BER) measures that score route-based street design and neighborhood walkability for children who must walk to school.
- Test whether BER varies within and between school zones by community characteristics, using geospatial analysis of routes to schools in Nevada.
- Build regression models that estimate how BER features and school bus policies affect child pedestrian crash rates while accounting for age, in order to identify modifiable risk factors.
- Develop evidence-based strategies with school districts, cities, counties and the Regional Transportation Commission for prioritizing pedestrian improvements and for Safe Routes to School workshops.
- Explore how digital infrastructure such as sensors and data science can improve urban mobility, through data analytics, optimization and GIS and Unity3D modeling in a summer program at Seoul National University.
More about the research
No federal rule requires school bus service, and no study has documented how bus policies create involuntary walkers or how this links to crashes. The research here studies how transportation policy and street design shape safety and mobility, and also runs an international research program on smart-city mobility.
Why it matters
School-aged children who must walk to school without a bus face daily traffic risks, and these risks differ from community to community. Pinpointing which street-design features and bus policies drive crashes could help school districts, cities and transportation planners decide which sidewalk, crossing and street improvements to fund first. It could also inform age-appropriate street designs and Safe Routes to School education that may reduce crashes among children.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Hamed Tabkhi
University of North Carolina at Charlotte, NC·Computer Science
Develop a semi-supervised transformer model that detects unusual or threatening behavior in real time from surveillance video. Use identity-neutral visual features so that no personally identifiable information is needed.
Yichang Tsai
Georgia Institute of Technology, GA·Engineering
Develop a crowdsourced multi-run methodology that assesses horizontal curve safety network-wide from low-cost mobile devices, handling the variation introduced by different vehicle types, suspension properties and driver behaviors.
Guang Wang
Florida State University, FL·Computer Science
Build cross-domain data curation tools for MobilityNet that combine real mobility datasets from different sources to reduce data bias.
The school
University of Nevada-Reno: 11 labs on PI Pages, $194M a year on research, 186 research doctorates a year.
Reach out
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