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ARCHITECTURE & ENGINEERING >>
Surveying the I
The effort is part of a federally funded project by the Pioneer
Landscape
UMass Amherst’s LARP Program Aims to Create a More Sustainable Future
t’s called Valley on Board.
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BY JOSEPH BEDNAR
[email protected]
Valley Transit Authority (PVTA) that involves a comprehensive assessment and strategic planning of transportation routes, ser- vices, and facilities throughout the region, one that aims to inform
the design of a sustainable transit system to support economic vitality across the Pioneer Valley into the future.
One goal of Valley on Board (VoB) is to develop a route redesign that will serve the PVTA and the Pioneer Valley for at least 20 years into the future while achieving goals such as increased ridership, improved efficiency, and enhanced accessibility and equity of the system.
Since the summer of 2021, graduate students under the guid- ance of Camille Barchers, assistant professor of Regional Planning at UMass Amherst, have been working with the PVTA on the VoB initiative.
“They did many, many public participation activities to get people’s feedback across the region about what they wanted, what’s working, what’s not working. And they also did mapping of routes to find what areas are served and what areas can be served better,” said Robert Ryan, professor and chair of Landscape Architecture and Regional Planning (LARP), the innovative, cross-disciplinary department at UMass whose graduates — and, often, current students — are impact- ing communities everywhere in disciplines like urban planning, sus- tainable living, climate resilience, transportation planning, and others.
“Landscape architects are licensed by the state to do work on designing landscapes — it could be with a building, without a building, campus-planning work, stormwater management, schoolyard design,
Robert Ryan stands on the green roof of the John W. Olver Design Building.