MODELING INCREASED FOOT TRAFFIC - EAST SOMERVILLE, MA

ACADEMIC PROJECT/PARTNERSHIP WITH CITY OF SOMERVILLE - 2023

For this project, I worked on a team of five graduate students across Harvard and MIT. Our task was to model the anticipated increase in pedestrian activity based on the city of Somerville’s plans for a large transit-oriented development project. The goal was to identify how much pedestrian demand would increase for each street in and around the site in order to inform the city’s decision-making regarding pedestrian and street improvements.

We did this by modeling scenarios pre- and post-development in terms of gravity (estimating flows between origins and destinations based on distance and attractiveness of destinations) and betweenness (the degree to which a particular path is likely to serve as a connection between different origins and destinations for pedestrians).