Abstract

Features and qualities of the built environment have large impacts on public health. Areas of concentrated poverty and communities of color are historically disinvested due to their lack of political power and are thus more likely to be built environments that cause social, mental, and physical harm. Public buses in New York City provide a vital, supplemental connection for neighborhoods without access to the subway and for those with mobility challenges, but bus infrastructure puts pedestrians at the bottom of the user hierarchy.

This thesis is an investigation of how the impending shift toward electrification warrants those who design and build cities a fleeting opportunity to shake the antiquated hierarchy of our public realm and create rights-of-way that encourage micro-mobility, biking, vehicle sharing, mass transit, and most importantly, a human-scale pedestrian experience. It includes the development of an analysis framework that applies to multi-modal transit nodes and holistically integrates tenants of equitable urban design based on best practices of public space analysis and wayfinding. The framework is applied to a case study in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.