01698194

Component

Urban planners and designers believe that the built environment at various geographic scales affects pedestrian activity, but have limited empirical evidence at the street scale, to support their claims. The authors are just beginning to identify and measure the qualities that generate active street life, and this paper builds on the first few studies to do so. This study measures street design qualities and surrounding urban form variables for 881 blocks in Salt Lake County, Utah, and relates them to pedestrian counts. This is the largest such study to date and includes suburbs as well as cities. At the neighborhood scale, the authors find that D variables – development density, accessibility to destinations, and distance to transit – are significantly associated with the pedestrian activity. At the street scale, the authors find significant positive relationships between two urban design qualities – imageability and complexity – and pedestrian counts, after controlling for neighborhood-scale variables. Finally, the authors find that pedestrian counts are associated with seven of twenty streetscape features – historic buildings, outdoor dining, buildings with identifiers, the proportion of sky in view, street furniture, active uses, and accent building colors. This study provides guidance for streetscape projects that aim to create walkable places in typical auto-oriented, medium-sized cities.

This paper was sponsored by TRB committee ANF10 Standing Committee on Pedestrians.

19-00112

English

0000-0001-5055-7833

0000-0003-1130-9719

20p

2019

Transportation Research Board 98th Annual Meeting

Digital/other

Figures; Maps; References; Tables

Built environment; Neighborhoods; Pedestrian counts; Pedestrians; Streetscape; Walkability

Salt Lake County (Utah)

Design; Highways; Operations and Traffic Management; Pedestrians and Bicyclists; Planning and Forecasting

Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting 2019 Paper #19-00112

TRIS, TRB, ATRI

Dec 7 2018 9:48AM