The idea of a packed promenade, crowded with busy shoppers and completely empty of cars may seem like a holdover from rustic 19th century Europe — but many present day examples can be found right here in the United States — in college towns like Madison, WI, big cities like Denver CO, and lots of places in between. In recent years, proposals to change Mill Ave. here in Tempe have been introduced to modify University Dr. to Rio Salado Pkwy. into just that type of pedestrianized shopping mall, closing it to all automobile traffic outside of emergency vehicles.
As two students who frequent the potentially affected area, we explore the feasibility of such a proposal to continue to grow the downtown Tempe economy. Our research focuses upon several different areas — exploring positive and negative cases of street pedestrianization (whether in Europe, the United States, or other countries), the impact a permanent street closure in Tempe would have both on personal traffic and on the city’s robust public transit system, potential security concerns, opinions of the business community on the proposed change, and the political feasibility of passing the proposal through the Tempe City Council.

Regional governments provide access to safety, health, and welfare through consistently good services. This analysis examines the underlying motives and mechanisms for achieving these goals. A current trend in governance is to outsource technology software and development to private sector efficiency. To achieve this claim and in attempt to save money the physical employee workforce is being replaced by technology. The government interaction in this philosophy is not being met with the same diversity and flexibility of the private-sector. This missed opportunity is the result of not accompanying software or governance practices with the principles of entrepreneurship including performance measures, marketing, and collaborative process design. The linkage of these three key principles provides the potential to reinvent government communication and interaction leading to successful endeavors for the public it serves and employees it aims to recruit and retain. This is an applied research thesis with foundation in a working body of regional government. The Maricopa County Planning and Development Department (MCPPD) provided the resources and project objective to discover the root causes of e-Governance challenges. The framing was constructed under recent theoretical trends of New Public Management Theory and Joined-Up Governance approaches to government administration. Extensive data collection was then performed to inform a remedy to these contemporary e-Governance issues. The premise of this thesis is to understand theory and practice of
e-Governance and apply methods to measure and propel that perspective to an operationally adaptable framework applicable to regional government.

Since 1979, Phoenix has been organized into 15 theoretically self-contained urban villages in order to manage rapid growth. The major objective of the village plan was to decrease demand for personal vehicle use by internalizing travel to the closest village core, or an adjacent village core, instead of expanding travel to one metropolitan core. Phoenix’s transition from a monocentric urban structure to a more polycentric structure has yet to be studied for its efficacy on this goal of turning personal vehicle travel inward. This paper pairs more conventional measures of automobile dependence, such as, use of alternative modes of transportation in place of private vehicle use and commute times, with more nuanced measures of internal travel between work and home, job housing ratio, and job industry breakdowns to describe Phoenix’s reliance on automobiles. Phoenix’s internal travel ratios were higher when compared to adjacent cities and either on-par or lower when compared to non-adjacent cities that were comparable to Phoenix in population density and size.

Informal public transport is commonplace in the developing world, but the service exists in the United States as well, and is understudied. Often called "dollar vans", New York's commuter vans serve approximately 120,000 people every day (King and Goldwyn, 2014). While this is a tiny fraction of the New York transit rider population, it is comparable to the total number of commuters who ride transit in smaller cities such as Minneapolis/St Paul and Phoenix. The first part of this study reports on the use of commuter vans in Eastern Queens based on a combination of surveys and a ridership tally, all conducted in summer 2016. It answers four research questions: How many people ride the vans? Who rides the commuter vans? Why do they ride commuter vans? Do commuter vans complement or compete against formal transit? Commuter van ridership in Eastern Queens was approximately 55,000 with a high percentage of female ridership. Time and cost savings were the main factors influencing commuter van ridership. Possession of a MetroCard was shown to negatively affect the frequency of commuter van ridership. The results show evidence of commuter vans playing both a competing and complementary role to MTA bus and subway transit. The second part of this study presents a SWOT analysis results of commuter vans, and the policy implications. It answers 2 research questions: What are the main strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of commuter vans in Eastern Queens? and How do the current policies, rules and regulations affect commuter van operation? The SWOT analysis results show that the commuter van industry is resilient, performs a necessary service, and, with small adjustments that will help reduce operating costs and loss of profits have a chance of thriving in Eastern Queens and the rest of New York City. The study also discusses the mismatch between policy and practice offering recommendations for improvement to ensure that commuter vans continue to serve residents of New York City.