The Village of Ardsley is a small municipality in Westchester County serving a population of just over 5,000 people. The Village seeks to reduce its environmental impact by lowering the emissions produced by its municipal transportation fleet without negatively impacting its services. The Village's goal is to reduce vehicle emissions from its municipal fleet through policy changes that lower its reliance on fossil fuels. To understand the problem and identify feasible solutions, the team a) conducted a literature review, industry research, and interviews with village representatives, b) surveyed comparable municipalities on the benefits and challenges of electric vehicle adoption, and c) prepared a vehicle inventory report. The team provided the Village with a final report containing recommendations for decreasing its municipality’s vehicle emissions—ensuring its current fleet is performing efficiently, establishing infrastructure that supports emerging vehicle technologies, implementing a plan for future vehicle purchases, and providing recommendations for alternative policies that can reduce emissions.

Brooklyn Community Board 17 (CB17) is working with Brooklyn Level Up (BKLVLUP), a community development corporation and community land trust, to preserve homeownership and prevent displacement in East Flatbush. The client engaged the Capstone team to analyze existing conditions in the neighborhood, including demographics, land use and zoning, existing housing stock, and recent development. The team also researched potential engagement strategies and reviewed case studies of strategies used to prevent displacement and maintain housing affordability in neighborhoods facing similar issues. Based on its findings, the team provided recommendations, including both zoning and non-zoning strategies, to improve access to stable homeownership and affordable rental housing, as well as specific engagement strategies for CB17 and BKLVLUP to utilize as they continue working toward a neighborhood rezoning and a more stable, equitable East Flatbush.

Grounded Solutions Network is a nonprofit that works to cultivate equitable communities by advancing long-term affordable housing solutions, and it supports a national membership base of organizations actively engaged in furthering shared equity homeownership. Grounded Solutions provides technical assistance services to a range of clients—such as community-based organizations, foundations, and municipalities—to facilitate the development of new shared equity projects such as community land trusts. Given that Grounded Solution’s membership is national in scope, members face differing political and financial challenges in their shared equity work. The Capstone team collaborated with Grounded Solutions to streamline the organization’s approach to conducting feasibility assessments. Through workshopping sessions with Grounded Solutions, the team identified key challenge areas that its members encounter and refined those categories based on findings from shared equity literature and feedback received from stakeholder interviews. In culmination, the team produced a toolkit consisting of a guidebook and an interactive data explorer tool.

The New York City Department of Transportation (NYC DOT) is responsible for installing and maintaining over 200 million linear feet of pavement markings, which are used on paved roadways to direct and inform drivers and pedestrians, and ensuring that the pavement markings are in a state of good repair in order to maintain the safe, efficient, and environmentally responsible transportation of people and goods. NYC DOT utilizes a predictive model to identify, inspect, and refurbish worn markings on a subset of city streets. Currently, only 70 percent of locations predicted to be worn are ready for refurbishment, and 14 percent of the agency’s refurbishment work is done on locations not predicted to be worn. NYC DOT tasked the Capstone team with improving the predictive model with refined criteria to increase its accuracy and efficiency in Brooklyn. The Capstone team recommended refining current factors, such as using the paint application month, instead of year, of previous markings, and adding potential new factors including snow plow use, street flooding, concentrations of construction sites, and environmental factors.

The Capstone team identified a problem within the NYC delivery worker community: current motion sensor on-bike alarms fail to notify workers of security breaches to bikes locked on the street while workers are making in-building deliveries (which typically last one to ten minutes). It is estimated that fifty percent of delivery workers in NYC fall victim to e-bike theft, yet delivery work is subject to minimal regulation and workers have almost no workplace protections. The Capstone team created a solution called Tandem, with the goal of providing delivery workers protection from theft. Tandem’s 4G LTE-enabled motion-sensor alarm helps NYC food delivery workers avoid the cost of e-bike replacement by: 1) providing motion-sensor phone alerts so that workers have a sufficient window of time to return to their bikes during theft attempts, and 2) streamlining communications within the delivery worker community through GPS sharing of bike locations to social networks in case of attempted thefts.

The Jersey City Department of Infrastructure, Division of Transportation Planning (DTP) oversees the planning and development of a well-functioning and safe transportation system. Jersey City’s 2019 Let’s Ride JC Bicycle Master Plan called for more than 20 miles of shared-use bike and pedestrian paths (“greenways”) but did not consider how those greenways would connect to each other and to Jersey City sidewalks, bike lanes, and parks. To close the gap, DTP engaged the Capstone team to evaluate and recommend potential greenway connections. The team gained a thorough understanding of the context of Jersey City’s planned and existing greenways through a scan of existing conditions and prior greenway plans, and through public engagement that included key stakeholder interviews, a community survey, and two public workshops. The team also gleaned greenway planning best practices through a comprehensive literature review and greenway case study analysis. These research efforts allowed the team to create a scoring tool to evaluate proposed connections and recommend priority projects, informing the Jersey City Greenway Connectivity Plan.

Manhattan Community Board 4 (MCB4) commissioned a Capstone Team to explore strategies for improving connectivity and accessibility to the Far West Side (defined as 14th Street to 59th Street, West of 11th Avenue, Manhattan). The team joined MCB4 stakeholders on four site visits comprising the study area, led five focus groups composed of residents, real estate professionals, and government and community-based organization (CBO) leaders, and conducted landscape analyses using publicly available qualitative and quantitative data. The team identified three key focus areas on the Far West Side with either a unique challenge or unrealized potential to better promote access and connection. In addition, the team provided study area-wide recommendations to help MCB4 shape its future policy agenda and guide subsequent planning initiatives to increase inclusivity, safety, and accessibility along the Far West Side.

The Capstone Team used geographic regression discontinuity to understand the causal relationship between Opportunity Zone (OZ) designation and crime in New York City. The Team restricted its study to the effect of OZ designation on arrests and complaints for property and violent crime. In its final report, the Team reported its initial findings that suggest OZ designation has a limited effect on property and violent crime. In every quarter for two years after the policy change, a small and statistically insignificant difference occurs in property and violent crime arrests and complaints between census blocks in OZs and adjacent census blocks just outside OZs. However, when adjusted for seasonality, including fixed effects for the quarter when the crime incident occurred, the team observed a statistically significant pattern of increasing violent crime arrests and decreasing violent crime complaints inside OZs. However, the effect of OZ designation on violent crime complaints loses statistical significance in the second year and using the polynomial model. There is no such observable pattern for property crime arrests or complaints.