A bicycle enthusiast, Kory Northrop@@http://directory.uoregon.edu/telecom/directory.jsp?p=findpeople%2Ffind_results&m=student&d=person&b=name&s=Kory+Northrop@@ found a way to mesh his passion for bikes and public policy to create an interactive online project about bicycling commuting trends across America.
Northrop, also a third-year University graduate student in environmental studies, recently won a national competition sponsored by the U.S. Department of Transportation.
The DOT asked students to take any public data they had published and make it look interesting to the average citizen. The projects were designed to tell a story that could potentially help policymakers and better inform the public about safety or economic issues.
“I feel like most of it’s not new, but it’s more just digging through mountains of data that they have that is hard to access,” he said. “I think that putting it in a visual format that allows you to compare states and look across years really easily is helpful.”
Northrop’s project uses interactive charts to make data — some of which date back to 2005 — more accessible. He divides his collected statistics into five categories: bicycle commuting, large-city statistics, bicyclist fatalities, government spending and comparison charts.
“The project allows you to kind of look at trends,” he said, “that you might not be able to do if you had to go into their database and extract the data one year at a time or one state at a time.”
Northrop credits professors Marc Schlossberg@@http://directory.uoregon.edu/telecom/directory.jsp?p=findpeople%2Ffind_results&m=staff&d=person&b=name&s=Marc+Schlossberg@@ and Jim Meacham@@http://directory.uoregon.edu/telecom/directory.jsp?p=findpeople%2Ffind_results&m=staff&d=person&b=name&s=Meacham@@ for helping inspire the project. Meacham teaches an advanced cartography class at the University, which Northrop took last winter.
“One of the things that was inspiring,” Meacham said, “was Kory was able to grasp cartography concepts with really innovative, visual digitalization techniques and apply those to the subject that is really important to him. He developed some of the most innovative graphics that I have seen by a student in my class, and I’ve been teaching it for nearly 20 years.”
Northrop’s project focused on how government funding affects bicycling commuting rates across the country.
“I think the work that I did shows that as government funding increased over the years, ridership increased as well,”@@hmmm@@ he said. “So there seems to be some correlation with the safety as well.”
He will head to Washington D.C. on Sunday to receive the award, where he is excited to meet with some of his fellow competitors and the judges of the competition. He hopes to get more feedback on the project to improve it, because he is looking to pursue the project further. He is also interested in transportation issues beyond biking and hopes to expand into working with various transit and pedestrian modes.
“It’s already received national attention for promoting better funding for better bicycling projects across the county,” Schlossberg said. “The larger impact of his work is helping create a way to better visualize existing data in a way that better decisions can be made.”