Engineering Commons^™

Evaluating How The Quality Of Pedestrian Infrastructure Affects The Choice To Walk, Gregory Rowangould, Alexis Corning-Padilla

Publications

While the benefits of walking are well understood, the physical design of sidewalks and their maintenance needs generally receive much less attention in both research and practice than the infrastructure used by other modes of transportation. As a result, we know comparatively little about how the design of sidewalks and quality of the overall pedestrian environment affect the decision to walk. In our study we conducted a household travel survey to collect data on walking frequency and attributes related to sidewalk quality and the quality of the walking environment in Albuquerque, New Mexico. We used summary statistics and statistical modeling …

Sustainable And Equitable Financing For Pedestrian Infrastructure Maintenance, Gregory Rowangould

Publications

In many communities, pedestrian infrastructure is discontinuous, inaccessible to those with physical disabilities, and poorly maintained. Correcting these problems would be a first step in providing infrastructure to achieve the active travel and related transportation goals of many communities. One nearly universal challenge to maintaining sidewalks in a state of good repair and addressing environmental justice concerns is an adequate, sustainable, and equitable source of funding. Municipal governments across the country maintain and repair their streets and roadways; however, most require residents to maintain and repair public sidewalks adjacent to their property. These policies are difficult to enforce and may …

Safety Ramifications Of A Change In Pedestrian Crosswalk Law: A Case Study Of Oregon, Usa, Yue Ke, Konstantina Gkritza

Lyles School of Civil Engineering Faculty Publications

Pedestrians are some of the most vulnerable road users as they are not protected by safety devices, and must also share the road with vehicles traveling at dangerous speeds, particularly during road crossings. In 2011, the state of Oregon changed their traffic laws to be more accommodating to pedestrians by giving right of way to pedestrians using a crosswalk, regardless if whether the crosswalk is marked or unmarked. This paper estimates a panel logit model to evaluate the efficacy of the law in preventing pedestrian fatalities. Pedestrian fatalities are shown to decrease over time, with smaller likelihood of a fatality …

How To Estimate Pedestrian Demand, Kelly Clifton, Patrick Allen Singleton, Christopher D. Muhs, Robert J. Schneider

TREC Project Briefs

There is growing support to improve the quality of the walking environment and make investments to promote pedestrian travel. Such efforts often require analytical non-motorized planning tools to estimate levels of pedestrian demand that are sensitive to environmental and demographic factors at an appropriate scale. Despite this interest and need, current forecasting tools, particularly regional travel demand models, often fall short.

To address this gap, Oregon Metro and NITC researcher Kelly Clifton worked together to develop a pedestrian demand estimation tool. For generations, planners have been using statistical models to forecast travel demand, but these models have traditionally been auto-centered. …

Development Of A Pedestrian Demand Estimation Tool, Kelly Clifton, Patrick Allen Singleton, Christopher D. Muhs, Robert J. Schneider

Civil and Environmental Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

Most research on walking behavior has focused on mode choice or walk-trip frequency. In contrast, this study is one of the first to analyze the destination choice behaviors of pedestrians. Using about 4,500 walk trips from a 2011 household travel survey in the Portland, OR, region, we estimated multinomial logit pedestrian destination choice models for six trip purposes. Independent variables included terms for impedance (walk-trip distance); size (employment by type, households); supportive pedestrian environments (parks, a pedestrian index of the environment variable called PIE); barriers to walking (terrain, industrial-type employment); and traveler characteristics. Unique to this study was the use …

Development Of A Pedestrian Demand Estimation Tool: A Destination Choice Model, Christopher D. Muhs, Kelly Clifton, Patrick Allen Singleton, Robert J. Schneider

Civil and Environmental Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

There is growing support for improvements to the quality of the walking environment, including more investments to promote pedestrian travel. Planners, engineers, and others seek improved tools to estimate pedestrian demand that are sensitive to environmental and demographic factors at the appropriate scale in order to aid policy-relevant issues like air quality, public health, and smart allocation of infrastructure and other resources. Further, in the travel demand forecasting realm, tools of this kind are difficult to implement due to the use of spatial scales of analysis that are oriented towards motorized modes, vast data requirements, and computer processing limitations.

To …

Examining Consumer Behavior And Travel Choices, Kelly J. Clifton, Christopher Devlin Muhs, Sara Morrissey, Tomás Morrissey, Kristina Marie Currans, Chloe Ritter

Civil and Environmental Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

This study represents a first attempt to answer a few of the questions that have arisen concerning multimodal transportation investments and the impacts of mode shifts on the business community. This research aims to merge the long history of scholarly work that examines the impacts of the built environment on non-work travel with the relatively new interest in consumer spending by mode of travel. This empirical study of travel choices and consumer spending across 89 businesses in the Portland metropolitan area shows there are important differences between the amounts customers spend on average at various businesses by their mode of …

Quantifying Benefits Of Traffic Signal Retiming, Christopher M. Day, Thomas M. Brennan Jr., Hiromel Premachandra, Alexander M. Hainen, Stephen M. Remias, James R. Sturdevant, Greg Richards, Jason S. Wasson, Darcy M. Bullock

JTRP Technical Reports

Improvements in the quality of service on a signalized intersection or arterial can be interpreted as a reduction in the user cost of service, which is expected to induce demand based on economic theory. This report presents a methodology for measuring and interpreting changes to user costs, and determining whether demand was induced. High-resolution signal event data and Bluetooth device MAC address matching are demonstrated in three case studies with the purpose of quantifying the impacts of changes in signal timing plans. In the first case study, 21 months of vehicle volume data are used to test whether demand was …