Welcome to Behavior & Urban Systems (BUS), Nebiyou Tilahun’s research group, based in the Department of Urban Planning and Policy at the University of Illinois Chicago.  Our group is interested in travel behavior, accessibility, and the social and economic dimensions of urban transportation.

Activities

Recent Papers

Tilahun, N., Persky, J., Shin, J., & Zellner, M. (2021). Place Prosperity and the Intergenerational Transmission of Poverty. Review of Regional Studies, 51(2), 208-220.

Ermagun, A., & Tilahun, N. (2020). Equity of transit accessibility across Chicago. Transportation Research Part D: Transport and Environment, 86, 102461.

Freeman, V. L., Boylan, E. E., Tilahun, N. Y., Basu, S., & Kwan, M. P. (2020). Sources of selection and information biases when using commercial database–derived residential histories for cancer research. Annals of Epidemiology, 51, 35-40.

Chicago Region Metropolitan Accessibility Explorer

We released the Metropolitan Chicago Accessibility Explorer, an interactive web based platform to visualize transit, walking, bicycle, and automobile accessibility in the Greater Chicago Metropolitan Area.

In the News/Related

Crain’s Chicago Business cites the Accessibility Explorer: Transit deserts limit job prospects

Cook County’s 2040 long range transportation plan, Connecting Cook County, uses data from the Accessibility Explorer in its discussion of Promoting Equal Access to Opportunities.

Edited Volume

Seeing Cities through Big Data, consisting of selected peer-reviewed papers from the Big Data and Urban Informatics workshop, and co-edited with Vonu Thakuriah and Moira Zellner, is now available from Springer.

Big Data and Urban Informatics Conference

Along with colleagues, we organized the 2014 NSF sponsored Big Data and Urban Informatics Workshop.  The proceedings from this workshop can be accessed here.