Ongoing Internship Positions: See attached descriptions.

Ongoing volunteer opportunities: Click here.

Exciting Short-Term Projects:

Programmer for Live/Realtime Leader Board Development for Commuting Challenge

The Metropolitan Area Planning Council (MAPC) currently hosts an online survey that tracks once-a-month commuting data for Boston-region workplace competition. We are looking for someone who can upgrade the site’s back end to produce a realtime Leader Board for respondents to see and to be posted online. Code for the existing survey posted at https://github.com/MAPC/greenstreets. The check-ins take place on, or near, Walk/Ride Days, which fall on the last Friday of every month, and the challenge runs eight months, from March through October, 2013.

The Leader Boards would rank companies by percentage of staff who log their commutes online, for various size and sector categories. They might also show the distribution of the check-ins in various ways, as well as which companies have the most switches to "greener" commuting.

Longer term, once a month, project:

Data Analyst for Green Commuting Challenge 

Analyze once-a-month commuting data for Boston-region workplace “green commute” competition and to develop monthly leader boards that will be posted online. Export CSV files from website, add to existing MS Access or mySQL database, perform QA, run existing queries, develop new queries for novel analysis, and visualize results in charts, graphs, and narrative form. The analysis will take place on the weekend or Monday following the last Friday of every month, from March through October, 2013. Database will be provided by the Metropolitan Area Planning Council (MAPC). This is a unique opportunity to work with a detailed, spatially explicit dataset on travel demand and commute patterns.

Research Topics:

Researcher into Approaches to Commuter Mode-Shift Data Collection

We would like to look into how the internet, mobile devices, and social networking are used, or could be used, to gather information about peoples' commutes and / or encourage mode-shift. We would like to look at what collection means have already been developed, and consider whether we could modify for the specific needs of Walk/Ride Day check-ins and competitions.

Mining Walk/Ride Day Data and Exploring Impact and Extended Mode Shift

Walk/Ride Days were begun in 2006. From the start, data was collected about participants. In 2012, a Corporate Challenge was held, which increased online check-ins more than 10-fold, recording more than 15,000 commutes. This data has been analyzed to a limited extent, and no followup has been done with any of the respondents, to look at the short and long term impact of Walk/Ride Day on commuters.