Current Issue
This special issue presents a diverse collection of articles that collectively illuminate the critical intersection of infrastructure, public health, and spatial justice within North Carolina. The first study evaluates the connectivity of public transportation at the state’s five busiest airports, revealing a significant misalignment between bus schedules and airport operating hours. The authors find that current bus schedules do not cover the full duration of working hours at any primary airport, a gap that disproportionately affects “captive riders”—employees and low-income travelers who cannot afford expensive ride-share options and rely on affordable mass transit for economic access. Shifting from transportation to environmental resilience, a second article offers a harrowing geographic account of Hurricane Helene’s impact on Asheville, specifically the catastrophic failure of the city's water infrastructure following a “1000-year weather event”. This narrative details how torrential rains and landslides compromised the North Fork reservoir and treatment plant, leaving the city without potable water for nearly two months and forcing a reevaluation of floodplain development and green infrastructure to mitigate future climate risks.
Complementing these infrastructure analyses, two studies utilize advanced data visualization to address deep-seated social disparities. One paper employs Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to analyze the relationship between cancer mortality rates and socioeconomic factors across North Carolina, identifying high-mortality clusters in rural western and eastern counties. This research validates the socio-ecological model of health by demonstrating statistically significant associations between higher cancer death rates and lower household incomes, higher diabetes prevalence, and limited access to healthy food sources, often termed food deserts. similarly focused on data-driven equity, the final paper details the development of the Forsyth County Neighborhood Opportunity Atlas (FCNOA), a digital dashboard designed to benchmark spatial justice. By aggregating over 50 variables—ranging from economic well-being to justice and social capital—this tool allows stakeholders to visualize neighborhood-level disparities, thereby moving beyond anecdotal evidence to inform more equitable budgeting, programming, and policy decisions.
