Advisee wins AAG HMGSG 2013 travel award

FSU Geography graduate student Brittany Wood received a competitive graduate student travel award based on her Association of American Geographers (AAG) annual meeting abstract entitled ‘Accessibility to SNAP Accepting Retail Food Locations.’  Brittany’s abstract was selected for funding by the AAG’s Health and Medical Geography Specialty Group, and the award will be given to her during their 2013 business meeting in Los Angeles.  Brittany successfully defended her Master’s thesis prospectus in October 2012, and her AAG abstract is related to her ongoing thesis work looking at food deserts and accessibility.

New commuting paper published in Applied Geography

Our latest work on commuting and jobs-housing balance has just been published in Applied Geography.  This paper works with a relatively new Census database known as LEHD to analyze commuting trends over the last several years. It uses the local Tallahassee area as a case study.  FSU graduate student Daniel Schleith was a coauthor on the study.

Commuting during the Great Recession – A presentation at the Transportation Research Board meeting 2013

With the program now posted, here is a link to our new paper which will be presented at the Transportation Research Board  (TRB) Annual Meeting (Washington, DC) in January of 2013. Coauthored with FSU graduate student Daniel Schleith, this paper reports on a spatial and temporal analysis of commuting patterns using a new U.S. Census data source. The study period covers the years of the Great Recession and explores transportation trends during the economic downturn.

The new hybrid

We’ve been driving a hybrid vehicle since the end of May 2012, .  So far, we’ve been averaging anywhere from 42-45 miles per gallon (MPG), with the official EPA estimate at 44. Given so much of the driving we do is in stop and go traffic, this is where the hybrid really shines.  If there are any downsides thus far, this car is not going to win any drag races, and moreover, the little green ‘econ’ button just begs for you to keep it engaged all the time (the econ button seems to cut the gas engine response a bit to wring out a few more MPG).  Also, it is currently summer, so we are wondering if MPG and/or performance might change a bit when temps drop in the fall. We’ll report back again soon with updates.