Academic literature on the topic 'Puget Sound Unitarian Council'

In recent years, the primary sampling method used for household travel surveys has shifted steadily from random digit dial telephone contact to address-based sampling based on an initial contact by mail. One advantage in the use of address-based sampling is that researchers can control the geographic distribution of households that are invited to participate in the survey and can design a sampling plan that is based on publicly available data about the demographic and geographic distribution of households in the region. This paper describes how response rates from a previous survey were used to anticipate how response rates for a household travel survey for the Puget Sound Regional Council in Washington State would vary across census block groups as a function of the percentage of low-income households in those block groups. The anticipated response rates were used to vary the number of households invited to participate from each block group to obtain a more representative sample. An analysis of the resulting Puget Sound survey data estimated a model for predicting final response rates as a function of published population statistics for the block group level. In addition to income, block group factors found to be significant predictors were household size distribution, owner versus renter fraction, vehicle ownership distribution, and commute mode shares for the nonauto modes. The transferability of the method was tested with data from a subsequent household travel survey done in Anchorage, Alaska. A model based on Puget Sound data only was used to predict response rates in the Anchorage data with success.

Integrated transportation planning is an emerging transportation planning concept that is intended to help seek those policies, programs, and projects that meet a given set of transportation goals and objectives for the minimum total social cost. Its elements include analysis of a full range of alternatives, the use of benefit-cost analysis to compare alternatives, public involvement in the development and evaluation of alternatives, analysis of uncertainties in forecasts of future conditions, and continuous monitoring of transportation system performance. The theory and methods of integrated transportation planning for implementation by a metropolitan planning organization developed for the Puget Sound Regional Council are discussed. The discussion includes how integrated transportation planning fits into the strategic planning process, the similarities and differences between integrated transportation planning and the current transportation planning process, and the analytic issues raised by implementing integrated transportation planning.

With the development of and advances in smartphones and global positioning system (GPS) devices, travelers’ long-term travel behaviors are not impossible to obtain. This study investigates the pattern of individual travel behavior and its correlation with social-demographic features. For different social-demographic groups (e.g., full-time employees and students), the individual travel behavior may have specific temporal-spatial-mobile constraints. The study first extracts the home-based tours, including Home-to-Home and Home-to-Non-Home, from long-term raw GPS data. The travel behavior pattern is then delineated by home-based tour features, such as departure time, destination location entropy, travel time, and driving time ratio. The travel behavior variability describes the variances of travelers’ activity behavior features for an extended period. After that, the variability pattern of an individual’s travel behavior is used for estimating the individual’s social-demographic information, such as social-demographic role, by a supervised learning approach, support vector machine. In this study, a long-term (18-month) recorded GPS data set from Puget Sound Regional Council is used. The experiment’s result is very promising. The sensitivity analysis shows that as the number of tours thresholds increases, the variability of most travel behavior features converges, while the prediction performance may not change for the fixed test data.

On 12 April 2013, the Makah Tribal Council Chairman and the District Commander of the 13th Coast Guard District (D13) signed into effect the “Memorandum of Agreement between the United States Coast Guard and the Makah Indian Tribe Regarding Interoperability and Coordination”. The purpose of this “Makah-USCG MOA” is to establish terms by which the two parties will coordinate and collaborate in the fulfillment of their mutual trust responsibility. The MOA's focus is to enhance consultation, improve leveraging of resources within each party's authorities, and improve collective all-hazards prevention and response posture in the Makah Treaty Area. Such an agreement between a federal agency and an Indian tribe is authorized by Executive Order 13175 - Consultation and Coordination with Indian Tribal Governments, signed in 2000 and is consistent with the 2011 Department of Homeland Security Tribal Consultation Policy. This groundbreaking document represents a 20 year relationship between key members of the Makah Tribe and the oil spill response members of CG D13 and Sector Puget Sound, and the trust developed over that period while working together to mutually support each party's oil spill prevention, preparedness and response readiness, as well as the desire to help and support each other by harmonizing efforts. With recent legislation such as the 2010 Coast Guard Authorization act, authorizing resources to engage tribes into training, exercises and other spill response preparedness activities particularly in the Northwest, it became clear there was a need to memorialize the strong supportive working relationship between the Makah and the CG, and provide some structure to our planning and development efforts. The MOA lays out a minimum of semi-annual meetings during which the two parties discuss overarching items of mutual interest and determine a work list of concrete, achievable goals to complete within the next 6 month period. An initial work list of common interest issues and responsibilities are outlined in the MOA, and fall into three general categories: Prevention; Preparedness and Response. The MOA also addresses the importance of Communication with the goal of enhancing mutual situational awareness via improved communication protocols between the Coast Guard and the Makah Tribe.

Don goldsberry had been speaking for only a few minutes at the Game Commission’s April 1972 hearing, and already Elizabeth Stanton Lay couldn’t believe her ears. Branding killer whales with dry ice? Burning their skin with lasers? Confining them to pools for research and profit? What kind of men were these? After listening to representatives from the Audubon Society, Friends of the Earth, and the Washington Environment Council voice their opposition, the sixty-year-old Lay rose to speak. “I have never before heard such a frank statement of what seems to me a totally inhumane attitude toward living creatures,” she declared. Marine mammals could do without the type of “research” Namu Inc. proposed. Whales were disappearing around the world, she reminded listeners, and the same could happen to orcas in Puget Sound. “When I was a very little girl, we used to see blackfish out in the bay, and we loved it,” she recalled. Now locals rarely saw the great creatures, except when men like Goldsberry trapped them behind nets. Lay was never one to stand idly by. Named after Elizabeth Cady Stanton, organizer of the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention on women’s rights, she would have made her namesake proud. Born in Tacoma in 1911, she had grown up in the nearby town of Rosedale on Henderson Bay and earned a history degree from Reed College in Portland, followed by a master’s degree in political science from the University of Washington. She studied in Geneva, worked as a journalist in Washington, DC, and served in the new Federal Security Agency during World War II. From the mid-1940s to the mid-1950s, she worked as a historian for the US military, living in Paris, Frankfurt, and Seoul and producing a two-volume account of the Berlin Airlift. By the time of the Game Commission hearing, Lay had retired to Rosedale, where she played the organ at her Christian Science church, promoted forest preservation, and fought to stop orca capture. Her interest in the issue may have started with young Ken Gormly’s 1968 account of the catch in Vaughn Bay.