Students apply GIS skills to help city planners in Boston
Three students used geospatial analysis to help Boston planners improve transit connectivity, showing the power of experiential learning and real-world application.
How long does it take to get to work? How easy is it to buy groceries and return home? The City of Boston wanted answers to those questions and more that involve the mobility of its residents, and its planners looked to Virginia Tech for answers.
Junghwan Kim, assistant professor of geography in the College of Natural Resources and Environment, has spent years researching transit-based accessibility. His published research prompted questions about methodology from Heyne Kim, Boston’s transportation demand management planner.
Heyne Kim and other city planners in the nation’s largest cities know that questions like about ease of travel within a prescribed area – home to workplace or home to locations for necessary provisions, like grocery stores – are vitally important to planners of large cities because they directly affect the livability and economics of those municipalities. Ease of mobility for the public, whether through mass transit or individual means of transportation such as bike share, matters to citizens and their local governments.
When Boston city planners needed a fresh approach to understanding transit accessibility, Heyne Kim reached out to Junghwan Kim. The result was a collaboration that gave three undergraduates hands-on experience solving real-world challenges while shaping the future of urban mobility.
His course Geospatial Analysis of Mobility emphasizes project-based learning. When Boston asked for help, Junghwan Kim saw a perfect fit.
“I thought that it would be a very good opportunity for our students to get hands-on experience because one of the teaching philosophies is learning by doing,” Junghwan Kim said. “This is a good chance for them.”
When he invited volunteers from his class, seniors Brenna Demko and Will Prokopik and exchange student Lia Lee stepped forward.
Mapping Boston’s mobility
The students worked together to model Boston’s complex transit network, focusing on two key measures: connectivity and frequency. Using General Transit Feed Specification data and the R programming language, they built high-resolution transit models that estimate travel times and accessibility across the city.
“I'm creating some units, study units, and running some codes for the connectivity and frequency analysis,” Lee said. “It's about how much the neighborhoods are connected with the bus and bike system. They want to know how many destinations one grid cell could reach and how frequent the transit system is.”
Demko explained the process: “There are files produced by transit agencies that have a list of schedules and stops. We put that into R, and there's a package, R5R, that can show the number of trips you can make within 60 minutes, with only 15 minutes of walking.”
The team also analyzed Boston’s bike-sharing system, factoring in how station locations affect accessibility. The work produced maps that reveal patterns in transit connectivity, highlighting areas with strong access and neighborhoods that face challenges.
The students’ analysis will inform updates to Boston’s Mobility Score framework, a metric used to guide transportation planning and development decisions.
“The students’ work builds on Dr. Kim’s accessibility research, which introduces a new way of quantifying transit accessibility that considers both network connectivity and service frequency,” Heyne Kim said. “Their methodology uses transit data and an R package to estimate the geographic reach and consistency of MBTA [Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority] services. Most importantly, the students' work produces results that are more nuanced than the current framework.”
Heyne praised the collaboration for its flexibility and rigor.
“Overall, the partnership has been a great experience. In the professional world, our work can easily be constrained by money and time,” she said. “With Dr. Kim and his students, however, I had more freedom to reiterate and refine the methodology, and to broaden the work scope.”
Experiential learning at its best
For the students, the project was transformative.
Demko actively sought outside-the-classrooom learning opportunities, previously working with Associate Professor Lisa Kennedy on a project. When Junghwan Kim told his class he was looking for students to work on this project, Demko was quick to volunteer.
“I was so excited for this opportunity,” she said. “I really want to get out of my degree skills that I can use in a job. This project gave me experience with GIS and project management, and a greater understanding of what working on a job would be like.”
Lee, an exchange student from Seoul, agreed.
“I didn’t have this kind of practical experience in my university," Lee said. "Here, I can actually have a meeting with a transportation planner in Boston. It’s a great experience.”
Her degree at the University of Seoul will be in urban planning and design, so this project was a perfect fit for her interests of urban geography and data analysis.
Prokopik, an economics major with a GIS minor, said the project felt like professional work. He said taking advantage of a chance to work on a real world project was too good to pass. He plans to feature this work high on his resume as he begins the a job search looking for a post-graduation career.
“It’s been unlike any in-class project I’ve experienced. It almost feels like we’re working a job, which is pretty cool.”
Junghwan Kim emphasized the importance of these opportunities.
“This is not a simple class project. It is a real-world project. We are representing Virginia Tech, so we pursued professionalism with our motto, Ut Prosim,” he said.
The success of this collaboration has opened doors for future projects. Boston is already exploring additional work with Junghwan Kim’s lab, including AI-based analysis. The experience reinforces his commitment to connecting students with industry and government partners.
“My role is to find these kinds of opportunities and provide more hands-on experience,” he said. “This semester, I was eager to see this collaboration succeed, and I know the City of Boston has other projects they want to do with us.”
