Portolio of David Elkan-Gonzalez
On behalf of Wellesly Public Schools, I spent much a semester working with a team of 5 to analyze and provide suggestions to improve the sustainability of the town's school transportation system. As a sustainable design project, we began with mountains of research. We travelled the roads, toured the schools, observed the bussing procedures, and interviewed bus drivers, parents, teachers, and students. We made personas and sent out surveys. The survey actually yielded an incredible amout of data, as it got nearly 1300 responses.
Once all of this data was complied we began identifying key challenges and coming up with solutions. One of my favorite ideas was the family biking. Bikes take massively less space than cars, and of course are much cleaner. For most of the year biking is a pretty easy alternative for Wellsley students, but very few do. In fact the majority of Wellsley Students are driven to school. There are several reasons for this, but two important ones were a lack of biking infrastructure. and a connection parents felt with their children by driving them to school. Our family biking suggestion aimed to maximize on the strong family values in Wellsely and called for an advertising campaign as well as key changes to improve the bikeability of Wellesley for students. In
Team Size: 5
Project Duration: 14 weeks
Year Completed: Senior Year
Key Skills: Sustainable Design
Transportation Sustainability Analysis
addition to making the transportation more sustainable this would help with traffic congestion, a major problem in Wellesley.
When we had narrowed our large list of solutions down to our most promising ideas, we assembled our data about the impact of the Wellsely Public Schools Transportation, as well as our most promising potential solutions. We presented this information in front of a commitee of key individuals involved in Wellesley Public Schools, including the superintendent, several principals, and members of the parents commitee. Perhaps as significant as our analysis for the school system was the sheer amount of data we collected in our research. This data will be useful for the school system in applications above and beyond the greening their transit system.
We presented our findings and suggestions at a seminar in front of many key members of the community.
This rather upsetting graph demonstrates the breakdown in transportation methods used by students in Welesley Public Schools