The 2023 Meddin Emerging Researcher Scholar is Casey Auch
We’re happy to announce Casey Auch as NABSA’s 2023 Meddin Emerging Researcher Scholarship recipient! Casey Auch is a recent Masters graduate from Tufts University in the Greater Boston area studying Environmental Policy and Planning. Casey’s research aims to further explore the gender gap in bikeshare by measuring how characteristics of the built environment may impact bikeshare demand by female riders.
She has spent the last two years studying urban planning and policy with a focus on sustainable transportation. Her masters thesis employs greater Boston as a case study to investigate the relationships between characteristics of the built environment and gender parity at bikeshare stations. So far, she has found a significant relationship between bikeshare demand by female riders and job access by transit, transit frequency, and residential density.
Her thesis states that urban design philosophy and related research suggest the built environment can strongly influence personal mode choice and suggests that land use diversity; household and employment density; and the street network design at a trip’s origin and destination have substantial impact on a person’s decision to use bikeshare or another mode of transportation. Her research also serves as an example of how to incorporate gender mainstreaming into local transportation planning and emphasizes the value of gender disaggregated data.
Her goal is for planners to use this type of research to help design safer streets for multimodal transportation and site bikeshare stations near transit to advance equity and promote bikeshare use by women.
She hopes to expand her research by evaluating measurements of the built environment at station locations across bikeshare networks in North America, where gender data is available.
NABSA looks forward to learning more from Casey’s research over the coming year.
The Meddin Emerging Researcher Scholarship is offered annually for emerging researchers in the field of shared micromobility. Click here to learn more about the scholarship and how to apply for it in the future.