01697587

Component

Children who walk to school in their early years have a better chance of using active transportation in their adult life. Hence, creating walkable environments around schools plays an important role in the mode choice of children. This paper uses space allocation algorithms to measure the land area allocated to each road user. The estimation is conducted for the road network of the city of Laval, a suburb of Montréal, Canada. With the help of open and government-owned datasets representing the street surfaces and roadway characteristics, a typology of urban streets is developed using the space allocation results. A focus is then set on the pedestrian itineraries to school: using a school registration database of all elementary-level students, itineraries are calculated for all home—school pairs in the study area. This allows the characterization of shortest routes to school according to the types of street segments encountered along the way. Results show that for almost 20 % of schools, itineraries are concentrated on streets with little dedicated pedestrian infrastructure. Hence, the structure of students’ itineraries shows that not all paths to school can be carried out on residential streets with sidewalks, not even in the denser neighborhoods. To take the shortest path to school, students must often resort to using either multimodal arterials, which usually provide sidewalks but might end at dangerous intersections, or car-oriented streets. Further research efforts will work towards improving the detection and classification of public street space, notably by integrating information on parking spaces.

This paper was sponsored by TRB committee ANB10 Standing Committee on Transportation Safety Management.

19-04044

English

6p

2019

Transportation Research Board 98th Annual Meeting

Digital/other

Figures; Maps; References

Algorithms; Highway design; Land areas; Pedestrians; Routes; Schools; Sidewalks; Spatial analysis; Students; Urban highways

Laval (Canada)

Design; Highways; Pedestrians and Bicyclists; Safety and Human Factors

Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting 2019 Paper #19-04044

TRIS, TRB, ATRI

Dec 7 2018 9:32AM