GIS Associate Adds Dimension to UGPTI

Robert Arthur, a professor of geography in the Department of Geosciences at North Dakota State University, brings his expertise in transportation research to the Upper Great Plains Transportation Institute. As an advanced research associate, Arthur will coordinate and manage Geographic Information Systems (GIS) for the Institute.

GIS will be used for managing data and for research purposes. He will promote GIS among academic and government departments to improve usage of transportation infrastructure, to explore safety issues in transportation, to catalog and maintain infrastructure, and to coordinate transportation and land-use planning.

He is particularly interested in traffic safety issues of urban and rural road networks. His research looks at geographical variables, environmental design, driver behavior and enforcement. The focus of his research is to understand the role that speed plays in collision occurrence.

Arthur will develop a GIS database to serve the Mountain-Plains Consortium transportation community that can be maintained and updated on an ongoing basis. This will entail the creation of a web-based product for efficient dissemination of information across the fivestate region.

For the past seven years he worked at the Van Horne Institute, a transportation institute based at the University of Calgary. There he focused on improving the penetration of Canadian transportation into the global economy. Arthur extensively researched the role of speed in traffic.

Published in international journals and conference proceedings, he wrote a chapter concerning the use of GIS in the research of traffic safety for a soon to be released book containing articles from authors worldwide. He has also written an instructor's manual for use with a human geography textbook.

At NDSU he teaches introductory and upper level courses in GIS, human geography, transportation geography and spatial analysis. He earned his bachelor of arts, master of science and Ph.D. (A.B.D.) in geography from the University of Calgary, Canada.