01697760

Component

Research continuously suggests the built environment provides opportunities as well as barriers to active travel and physical activity. Individuals residing in densely-populated neighborhoods with a mix of land uses tend to walk more. While insights into how neighborhood-level built environment features impact individual-level behavior continue to inform urban policies, research centered on measuring active travel at a neighborhood scale is needed to estimate the population-level impact of policy, systems, or environmental changes on transportation-related physical activity. To date, a nascent body of research has sought to create the requisite tools for measuring area-wide levels of active travel, albeit by applying existing vehicle-based methods. The authors' study advances current practice by introducing a pedestrian-oriented approach to classifying streets based on a measure of local destination accessibility along a given street segment, or its network utility, and pedestrian count data collected from multiple randomly-selected sites in four neighborhoods across Massachusetts. As a proof of concept, in one study area, data collected with automated counters using the authors' pedestrian-based street stratification method were expanded in order to create area-wide estimates of seasonal average daily pedestrian counts that were in turn used to estimate average daily pedestrian miles traveled. An area-wide pedestrian activity estimate, which resulted from a method that can establish pre/post-intervention statistics of neighborhood-level pedestrian travel and physical activity needed to inform evidence-based policies.

This paper was sponsored by TRB committee ABJ35 Standing Committee on Highway Traffic Monitoring.

19-02908

English

3p

2019

Transportation Research Board 98th Annual Meeting

Digital/other

References

Built environment; Classification; Measurement; Neighborhoods; Nonmotorized transportation; Pedestrian counts; Pedestrians; Policy; Streets; Walkability; Walking

Massachusetts

Pedestrians and Bicyclists; Planning and Forecasting

Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting 2019 Paper #19-02908

TRIS, TRB, ATRI

Dec 7 2018 9:36AM