Sustinability Indicators

for seminar we had to design a "field study" on "sustinability indicators" for Chiang Mai. Our group was assigned to study Traffic as an indicator of sustainability. We spent a long time trying to narrow and thinking about alternatives and then i said "x y z too long too type" and they were like "WOW yeah! where did that come from! thats perfect!" and i felt quite smart.
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Today we did half the data collection for ou field project. In short we are assessing the change in traffic as you move from the primary roads on the premiter of a neighborhood to the residential ones into its center. We are analyzing traffic through qualitative observations, total flow (vec / time), flow composition, and volume. Total flow is # vec. That pass a transect in 5 minuites. Composition is broken into human powered, two wheel, and four wheel vehicles. Volumembient noise we got by playing a song on an ipod, and holding the headphones at arms length while slowing cranking down the volume. The bare mimmum volume where the song could be heard was the “noise level” or the area. We are taking four data points on each of three sizes of roads (enough to average them and come up with average flow levels ext. for each raod size!). We will then compare the three areas! The plan seems to be working PERFECTLY. I can’t even tell you how geeked out I am about our project. Not only is it perfect timing (exactly on for the time we have to collect data) it also provides the exact project experience we want, makes sense, works scientifically (at least mostly) and best of all its also useful and real! The neighborhood is a historic cultural area in Chiang Mai, and the two “intermediate’ and ‘large’ roads we are using in our study are charted for expansion under a new city plan. (This plan would mean bulldozing hundreds of homes and reformatting the city – basically damaging the cities culture and displacing many people in the name of development but for the gain of “selfish” high ups – as a local movement leader put it). Our study would provided data on what might be projected to happen to the character(istics) of those roads if they were expanded to the “primary artery” road size – as the plan indicates! It –shows- what it means to be a “neighborhood” and what it means to be on the edge of a high traffic street.

The findings of our study, in summery, are posted up on the ISDSI website.