The Importance of Teaching GIS in Engineering

This paper offers researchers in transport engineering a method for reducing urban traffic congestion by planning for pedestrians. The method is designed for cities where GIS data is unavailable. Showing how this data can be obtained is one of the major contributions to the field. Other contributions are: using density data instead of infrared imagery to populate housing units with the number of inhabitants, performing network analysis instead of buffer analysis, eliminating homogeneity errors of the density dataset and offering a quantitative way of evaluating new investments in pedestrian infrastructure. The method is applied on a case study, namely the Romanian city of Timisoara. The conclusions present some applications of this technology and underline the importance of teaching it in engineering.