Hagen Hammons, a graduate student in community and regional planning, is the fifth student from PPPM who has been accepted into the National Park Foundation Transportation Scholars Program. “This may be more than any university in the country and is impressive given the fact we do not have a transportation planning or engineering program,” comments Associate Professor Marc Schlossberg.
The Eno Transportation Foundation and the National Park Foundation’s Transportation Scholars Program matches emerging professionals with substantial knowledge and expertise in transportation planning with parks with transportation-related issues, like pollution or congestion, that can be major detractors of the overall park visitor experience. Scholars build partnerships, work across jurisdictional boundaries, gain an appreciation for the need of alternative transportation projects in the national parks, and gain firsthand knowledge of National Park Foundation efforts to preserve our national treasures while working to solve the current transportation issue within the park.
Hammons’ assignment will be in the Chattahoochee River National Recreation Area north of Atlanta, Georgia. The park is embarking on a three-year planning effort to develop a park-wide trail plan that will replace the social trails with sustainable, accessible trails connecting with regional recreation and transit trails. According to Hammons, “I will develop and partially populate a system for collecting and analyzing GIS data, public comments, input from partners and cooperators, maps, and text alternatives that would be incorporated into an environmental assessment.”
Story featured in the Spring 2014 edition of the PPPM Newsletter