Security & Privacy Archives

Bicycle Parking Security and Built Environments.

Chen, Peng; Liu, Qian; Sun, Feiyang. (2018). Bicycle Parking Security and Built Environments. Transportation Research: Part D, 62, 169 – 178.

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Abstract

The lack of secure bicycle parking is a serious but often neglected issue that discourages bicycling. Classical environment criminology theories try to explain the pattern of bicycle theft but provide limited insights into the relationship between crime and the built environment. This study examines the association between built environment factors and bicycle theft using a zero inflated negative binomial model to account for data over-dispersion and excess zeros. The assembled dataset provides variables pertaining to the road network, land use, bicycle travel demand, and socio-demographics. The key findings are as follows: (1) Bicycle theft is more likely to occur in areas for commercial purposes, areas with a high population or employment density, and areas with more bike lanes or sidewalks. (2) Bicycle theft is likely to occur at sites with more bike racks or bus stops. (3) Bicycle theft is more likely to occur at mid-blocks than at intersections. (4) Bicycle theft is more likely to occur in neighborhoods with a greater percentage of socially disadvantaged people and in neighborhoods where residents' median age is lower. (5) The likelihood of losing a bicycle is lower in areas with more bicycle trips. In general, the number of bicycle thefts increases in dense areas with more targets and decreases with greater natural guardianship provided by more passersby. With respect to policy implications, governments and transport planners should implement a geographically-differentiated surveillance strategy, encourage bicycling, improve the visibility of bike racks to the public, and promote surveillance and natural guardianship in densely developed areas.

Keywords

Bicycle Parking; Cycling; Bicycle Theft; Sociodemographic Factors; Bicycles; Environmental Aspects; Built Environment; Environment Criminology; Urban Design; Zero-inflated Negative Binomial Model; Crime; Theft; Risk; Opportunities; Behavior; Travel

Cybersecurity in the Built Environment (Cyber-BE)

The Cyber-BE Lab integrates the latest in academic research on policy, communication, and organization with industry expertise on IoT security, risk mitigation and building operations. Cyber-BE offers a holistic understanding of IoT in the built environment. We support the organizational, communication, and policy innovations that will help minimize IoT risk through:

Advancing social scientific research to better understand and apply smart technology in the built environment
Delivering usable guidance and tools to address the policy, organizational, and communication challenges that industry practitioners face
Building a community of practice of IoT security practitioners and researchers

The lab leads include Laura Osburn, Senior Research Scientist at the Department of Construction Management, Jessica Beyer, Lecturer and Research Scientist at the Jackson School of International Studies, and Chuck Benson, Director of IoT Risk Mitigation Strategy at the University of Washington.

Urban Form Lab

The Urban Form Lab (UFL) research aims to affect policy and to support approaches to the design and planning of more livable environments. The UFL specializes in geospatial analyses of the built environment using multiple micro-scale data in Geographic Information Systems (GIS). Current research includes the development of novel GIS routines for performing spatial inventories and analyses of the built environment, and of spatially explicit sampling techniques. Projects address such topics as land monitoring, neighborhood and street design, active transportation, non-motorized transportation safety, physical activity, and access to food environments.

Research at the UFL has been supported by the U.S. and Washington State Departments of Transportation, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and local agencies.

The Urban Form Lab is directed by Anne Vernez Moudon, Dr es Sc, a leading researcher and educator in quantifying the properties of the built environment as related to health and transportation behaviors. Philip M. Hurvitz, PhD, a veteran of geographic information science and data processing, leads data management and GIS work.

Safety and Health Advancement through Research and Education (SHARE) Lab

SHARE Lab (Safety and Health Advancement through Research and Education Laboratory) embarks on innovative research that promotes the wellbeing of the construction taskforce and/or reduces occupational injuries and illnesses for the construction industry.

The lab is housed in the Department of Construction Management at the University of Washington and is a part of the Pacific Northwest Center for Construction Research and Education (PNCCRE). The mission of the lab is to promote construction safety and health through evidenced-based innovative research, education, and practices. In particular, the SHARE lab is specialized in creating new knowledge, learning resources, and practical solutions using technology interventions such as wearable sensors, visualization, serious gaming and tablet computers.

Projects completed at the lab include: sensor based physiological status monitoring on construction workers, video gaming development for the training and education of construction safety, information communication technology for field safety inspection, machine-learning based solutions for retrieving and classifying safety resources, and Total Worker Health.

SHARE Lab’s work is supported by domestic stakeholders as well as national institutions and global corporations.

Center for Education and Research in Construction

The Center for Education and Research in Construction (CERC) is a locus of research, scholarship and discovery in the University of Washington’s Department of Construction Management and allied disciplines of architecture, engineering and real estate. Focused on the people and practices of a dynamic, innovative construction industry, CERC develops new concepts and innovative solutions as well as improves methodologies for design, construction and operations.

With labs focused on Safety and Health, Project Delivery and Management, Virtual Design and Construction, Infrastructure Development, and Sustainable Built Environments, the CERC faculty are not only experts and researchers in a wide array of topics, but also lead the field in translating that expertise into excellent construction education practices and pedagogy to train tomorrow’s construction professionals.

CERC develops and delivers continuing education for professionals within the built environment disciplines. Examples of past and ongoing partnerships include those with Skanska and the National Electrical Contractors Association. In addition, the Center supports the Department of Construction Management (CM) by hosting meetings of the program’s advisory council (CIAC), graduate and undergraduate classes, and teaching laboratories.

With generous support from the local construction industry, the Department of Construction Management took on an ambitious project to develop a research and education center at the old naval base at Sand Point located in Magnuson Park, Seattle, WA near the University of Washington’s main campus. The facility features more than 25,000 square feet of space on two levels, providing a home for the Center for Education and Research in Construction.

Labs associated with CERC include:

PDM Lab
LCR Lab
ESC Lab
CTOP Lab
SHARE Lab

CTOP Lab supports the Internet of Things (IoT) project, studying devices which are increasingly a standard component of buildings. As these sensors are connected to the internet and networked to building technology (such as heating and lights), they introduce potential security vulnerabilities. Although technical solutions exist to counter security issues, implementation of these solutions are often impeded by the challenges that an organization’s Information Technology (IT) staff and a building’s Operations and Maintenance (O&M) staff have when they work closely together and share their knowledge about computer security and how buildings operate. These difficulties arise from different ways of working and different points of view about how technology works. These challenges, in combination with a policy environment that rarely regulates IoT devices, increases risk, leaving buildings vulnerable to attack.

This project will address these challenges by studying two critical areas: (1) how O&M and IT groups currently share their knowledge and skills in order to improve IoT security and (2) how public policies and an organization’s own rules regarding privacy and security impact how IT and O&M collaborate. The results of this study will generate knowledge around how IT and O&M professionals can work more effectively together to improve the security of our nation’s buildings and offer insights into how public policy may affect professional cybersecurity collaboration to manage IoT risk.

This project is a joint venture of the Communication, Technology, and Organizational Practices (CTOP) Lab as well as the Cyber-BE lab.

Ken-Yu Lin

Dr. Ken-Yu Lin is a P.D. Koon Endowed Associate Professor in the Department of Construction Management at the University of Washington (UW). She is the director for the Construction Management Occupational Safety and Health (CMOSH) program at the Northwest Center for Occupational Health and Health (NCOSH), a National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) funded Education and Research Center (ERC) in Region X. Dr. Lin also co-directs the SHARE (Safety and Health Advancement through Research and Education) Lab with her colleague Dr. Giovanni Migliaccio and serves on the Executive Committee for the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) Computing and Information Technology Division since 2014.

Dr. Lin is interested in research applications that contribute to smart safety and health in construction; construction education and training; and sustainable practices. Her technical backgrounds land in serious gaming and visualization; information and communication technology; intelligent sensing and monitoring; and ontologies and semantic approaches. Dr. Lin has been involved in research projects funded by the UW, Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), National Science Foundation (NSF), Hewlett-Packard (HP) Development Company, WA Department of Transportation (WADOT), NIOSH, and the Taiwanese National Science Council (NSC). She has published journal and conferences papers in major venues and is also the co-author of Construction Project Safety, a text book published by John Wiley and Sons in 2013.

CMOSH:Click here to see Dr. Lin being featured in Seattle’s Daily Journal of Commerce for her leadership role in the CMOSH program.

SHARE Lab: Dr. Lin co-directs with Dr. Migliaccio the Laboratory for Safety and Health Advancement through Research and Education (SHARE) in Construction Management, which is physically hosted at the UW Construction Education and Research Center (CERC). The mission of the lab is to promote construction safety and health through evidenced-based innovative research, education, and practices. In particular, the SHARE lab specializes in creating new knowledge, learning resources, and practical solutions using technology interventions such as wearable sensors, visualization, serious gaming and tablet computers. Research work is supported by domestic stakeholders as well as national institutions and global corporations.

Jan Whittington

Dr. Jan Whittington is Associate Professor of the Department of Urban Design and Planning, at the University of Washington, Seattle. Her research applies transaction cost economic theory to networked infrastructures, such as transportation, water, and communications systems, to internalize factors historically treated as external to transactions. Her publications include methodologies for greenhouse gas mitigation and resilience through capital investment planning, examination of the efficiency of public-private contractual arrangements for infrastructure, and the evaluation of online transactions for efficiency, security, and privacy. At the University of Washington, she is the Director of the Urban Infrastructure Lab, Associate Director of the Center for Information Assurance and Cybersecurity, and Affiliate Faculty at the Tech Policy Lab. She teaches infrastructure planning and finance, public finance, infrastructure mega-projects, science for environmental policy, planning for water, and land use planning. Her PhD (2008) is in City and Regional Planning from the University of California, Berkeley, where she was advised by economic Nobel laureate Oliver Williamson. Prior to her academic career, she spent 10 years with infrastructure giant Bechtel Corporation, as a strategic planner and environmental scientist. She holds bachelor degrees in Biology and Environmental Studies from the University of California, Santa Cruz (1987). Her master’s degree is in City and Regional Planning, from California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo (1993).

Dean Heerwagen

Heerwagen’s abiding intellectual and professional interest is the identification of how buildings can be created to serve the occupants who will live and work within them. Thus, the principal goal of his work has been to characterize, first, the range and natures of activities which occupants wish or need to accomplish in buildings and, second, the types of services which should be present in buildings (i.e., to enable occupants to perform these activities). These services include, generally, means for ensuring the health and safety of building occupants, as well as means for supporting other human physical, physiological, and perceptual psychological requirements.

Throughout his teaching and research he has sought to acquire and communicate knowledge about how to design and construct buildings so that occupants have settings that satisfy these requirements. In his teaching, research, and writing he has concentrated on how the presences of heat, light, sound, and good air quality in buildings can be controlled so that occupants can be assured comfortable environments which operate efficiently. In his work he seeks to examine and describe how to create buildings whose internal environments are well-conditioned (i.e., to suit occupants’ needs and wishes). Basic examples of what he addresses include how to establish buildings that are thermally comfortable, well-daylighted, suitably quiet (while also enabling good communication by speech and music), and adequately ventilated. Necessarily, achievement of these performance attributes can rely, for instance, on various active control systems (e.g., mechanical and electrical systems) or on passive devices.