These were some of the questions that students from Feinstein High School pondered during a $200,000 research project financed by the University of Rhode Island’s Transportation Center. Sixty students presented their findings during a public forum on “Understanding the Activity Patterns of Teenagers in Providence,” at URI’s Kingston campus earlier this week. Juniors and seniors participated; freshmen and sophomores will be involved in a spring project.

The forum was the result of a partnership between URI, the Providence Plan and Feinstein High School, and the goal was twofold: to understand the travel patterns of Rhode Island teenagers and to teach students about how transportation planners use data to make decisions.

Feinstein was chosen because of the school’s mission: to give students’ real-world experience through internships, job shadowing or research projects. This work will help fulfill the state’s new graduation requirements, which call for seniors to demonstrate mastery of specific skills through a senior project or something similar.

In the fall, the students were broken into groups of six and each one was asked to tackle one of the following issues: transportation, crime and safety, land use, housing and immigration. The crime and safety team analyzed what kinds of crime occur around locations in Providence, the housing group studied the issue of affordable housing and the immigration team looked at the changing demographic face of Providence. This team, for example, created a map that illustrated the racial and ethnic diversity of Feinstein since its creation.

“We gave students plenty of freedom to be creative,” said Farhard Atash, a professor of planning at URI. “With transportation, we asked them to look at the benefits of the Route 195 relocation project. How will it improve traffic? What is the best use of the open space freed up by this project?”

The students suggested turning the vacant land into a “people’s park,” with space set aside for recreation and artwork.

Talia McCray, an assistant professor of business administration, came up with the idea of enlisting Feinstein students in a research project on urban transportation issues. The URI research team of McCray, Atash, Charles Collyer, a professor of psychology, and Donald Cunnigen, an associate professor of sociology, will present their findings on teenage transportation patterns in the fall of 2007.

“We explained that transportation has many different dimensions, from policy to engineering,” Atash said. “We brought in people from statewide planning and someone from RIPTA to talk about public transportation issues. We invited two engineers to talk about bridge design.”

URI also asked students to map out where they travel on any given day, how they get there and how long they stay. The students were trained to design surveys, conduct interviews and analyze spatial data using the geographic information system, a software system.

The three-month project culminated with Tuesday’s public forum in the Memorial Union Ballroom at URI. Each team used charts and sophisticated maps to highlight their findings on a variety of issues, such as the challenge of busing students through Kennedy Plaza, the RIPTA hub.

“This is a really great program,” said Steven Astacio, a Feinstein senior. “I really appreciate how they taught us to do analysis, how to do our own presentations. They gave us a lot of freedom to learn on our own and to chose our own topics. Plus, this was a great way to experience what college is like.”

Natasha Torres, who has applied for early admission to URI, said the project inspired her to explore new fields of study:

“I would never have had the chance to find out about crime in my neighborhood,” she said. “This project was fun because the URI people weren’t much older than we are.”

Meanwhile, URI will analyze the travel data collected by Feinstein students for its report on the travel habits of teenagers.

As Atash said, “We are interested in how teenagers make decisions — where do they go and how do they get there — so that down the road, if people have to make policy decisions, we can help them.”