Greg Macfarlane

Greg Macfarlane

Assistant Professor of Civil Engineering

Brigham Young University

Biography

I am an assistant professor in the Civil and Construction Engineering department at Brigham Young University. I research transportation engineering and planning, with a specific emphasis in using modern passive data products to build models of travel behavior and land development.

Download my CV.

Interests
  • Travel Demand Modeling
  • Land Use Modeling
  • Passive Transportation Data
Education

  • PhD Transportation Systems Engineering, 2014

    Georgia Institute of Technology

  • MS Economics, 2014

    Georgia Institute of Technology

  • BS Civil Engineering, 2010

    Brigham Young University

Featured Publications

November 2020 Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science
Modeling the impacts of park access on health outcomes: a utility-based accessibility approach
Modeling the impacts of park access on health outcomes: a utility-based accessibility approach
April 2015 Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice
The influences of past and present residential locations on vehicle ownership decisions
The influences of past and present residential locations on vehicle ownership decisions

Recent Posts

Java systems and OpenTripPlanner for R
I am using the opentripplanner package, which requires a specific version of Java (1.8, to be precise). This is an older version of Java, and so I have more than one JDK on my system (MacOS 11.
Jun 4, 2021 2 min read
Covid and Transportation: Student Projects
For their term projects this semester, the students in my Intro to Transportation class wrote blog posts summarizing the effects of COVID on various dimensions of transportation. I think they did a great job overall; here are links to the blog posts by topic area:
Apr 16, 2021 1 min read
Covid and Highway Operations
This is a post written by the listed student authors as part of their term project for Introduction to Transportation Engineering in Winter 2020. As he entered the office on the morning of Friday March 13th, 2020, Brian Cromar, a Civil Engineer Technician for the Colorado Department of Transportation, was immediately sent home.
Apr 1, 2021 8 min read
Can Utah County Choose to Grow Sustainably?
Last week the Deseret News ran a contributed opinion piece by Andrew Skabelund^[Who was a friend and classmate of mine way back at Wasatch Elementary School!] in which he argued that the rapid development of Silicon Slopes in north Utah County comes at the cost of Utah County’s value as agricultural land.
Aug 16, 2020 1 min read
Can Utah County Choose to Grow Sustainably?
Transit Safety
I came across this graphic from an APTA Factbook(p. 20) which shows transit with an enormous safety advantage over automobiles. I was curious if I could update the data using information from the Bureau of Transportation Statistics.
Jun 2, 2020 6 min read
See all posts

Experience

 
 
 
 
 
Brigham Young University
Assistant Professor
Brigham Young University
Jan 2021 – Present Provo, Utah
Assistant professor in the department of Civil and Construction Engineering.
 
 
 
 
 
Transport Foundry
Analyst
Transport Foundry
Mar 2017 – Oct 2018 Raleigh, North Carolina
Worked on CityCast, a travel model built on modern data sources.
 
 
 
 
 
WSP
Technical Principal
WSP
May 2014 – Mar 2017 Raleigh, North Carolina
Developed travel demand models for public and private sector clients.

Recent & Upcoming Talks

Using Big Data to Evaluate Equitable Access to Community Resources.
Presented in a Sunday workshop entitled “Equity Considerations with Big Data in an Urban and Regional Transportation Planning Context”
Jan 9, 2022 1:00 PM

Recent Publications

Quickly discover relevant content by filtering publications.
Gregory S Macfarlane, Emma Stucki, Michael Copley (2021). Utility-Based Accessibility to Community Resources: An Application of Location-Based Services Data. North American Regional Science Council Annual Meeting.

Preprint PDF Slides

Gregory S. Macfarlane, Michael H. Sheffield, Logan S. Bennet, Grant G. Schultz (2021). The Effect of Transit Signal Priority on Bus Rapid Transit Headway Adherence. Transport Findings.

Preprint PDF Code DOI

Gregory S. Macfarlane, Christian Hunter, Austin Martinez, Elizabeth Smith (2021). Rider Perceptions of an On-Demand Microtransit Service in Salt Lake County, Utah. Smart Cities.

Preprint PDF DOI

Jeffrey Glenn, Madeline Bluth, Mannon Christianson, Jaymie Pressley, Austin Taylor, Gregory S. Macfarlane, Robert A. Chaney (2020). Considering the Potential Health Impacts of Electric Scooters: An Analysis of User Reported Behaviors in Provo, Utah. IJERPH.

PDF DOI

Gregory S. Macfarlane, Teresa Tapia (2019). Developing a Park Activity Location Choice Model from Passive Origin-Destination Data Tables. TRB.

Preprint

Gregory S Macfarlane, Josie Kressner (2018). Comparing the Daily Schedules in the NHTS from 2009 and 2017. In National Household Travel Survey Workshop, Washington D.C..

Preprint

Josie Kressner, Gregory S Macfarlane, Leta F Huntsinger, Rick Donnelly (2016). Using passive data to build an agile tour-based model: A case study in Asheville. In Innovations in Travel Modeling Conference, Denver.

Preprint

Gregory S Macfarlane, Laurie A Garrow, Juan Moreno-Cruz (2015). Do Atlanta residents value MARTA? Selecting an autoregressive model to recover willingness to pay. Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice.

Poster DOI

Candace Brakewood, Gregory S Macfarlane, Kari Watkins (2015). The impact of real-time information on bus ridership in New York City. Transportation Research Part C: Emerging Technologies.

DOI

Gregory S Macfarlane, Juan Moreno-Cruz (2015). Public transport infrastructure and home price stability. In Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting.

Preprint PDF Poster

Stefan Binder, Gregory S Macfarlane, Laurie A Garrow, Michel Bierlaire (2014). Associations among household characteristics, vehicle characteristics and emissions failures: An application of targeted marketing data. Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice.

Preprint PDF DOI

Popular Topics

Accessibility church COVID Deep Learning Demo Parks Sprawl student work Sustainability tech

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