Traveler Response to Transportation System Changes Handbook, Third Edition: Chapter 16, Pedestrian and Bicycle Facilities (2012)

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through buildings, most with tenants observed to cater primarily to middle- and upper-income per- sons (Robertson, 1988 and 1994). Other Equity Considerations and Summary. A broad-based attempt to examine societal distributions of effects of public health interventions to increase exercise through walking did not bear much fruit. A systematic review of 48 studies of such interventions found only six with “even a rudimentary eco- nomic evaluation,” and only 14 made any mention of how outcomes varied among socioeconomic or demographic groups. Three studies noted that effects did not vary significantly between socio- economic/ethnic groups, while four studies reported lower effectiveness for less educated, lower- income, African American, or English not “usual language at home” groups. Three trials involving pro- motion of walking in general reported higher response rates for men, while one individualized transportation mode shift marketing effort reported higher active transportation use increases among women (Ogilvie et al., 2007). The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) of 1990 was intended, among other objectives, to address inequities of physical access for people with disabilities. Accessible sidewalks provide physical access to nearby goods, services, and activities. For instance, as discussed above under “Societal Economic Impacts” (see “People with Disabilities Mobility Benefits”), construction of ADA-compliant bus stops along with critical links of sidewalk may be quite beneficial. Examples have been shown to be very cost effective where they allow a person with disabilities to reach conventional transit service instead of being reliant on ADA door-to-door paratransit service (Goodwill and Carapella, 2008). Although substantive equity discrepancies are noted above, pedestrian and bicycle facilities appear overall to benefit the full spectrum of society perhaps more broadly than any other provision of trans- portation. The challenge in NMT benefit analysis is to adequately account for all the different forms in which pedestrian and bicycle facilities provide benefit. No single category of benefit is likely to offer an impressive benefit-cost ratio on its own. It is the sum total over the uniquely wide range of NMT benefits that may justify investment in walking and bicycling. ADDITIONAL RESOURCES Logical points of departure for general information on pedestrian and bicycle action initiation, devel- opment, and implementation are the central websites established by governmental, professional, edu- cational, and advocacy organizations working in concert. Key sites include: • The Pedestrian and Bicycle Information Center (PBIC), funded by the U.S. Department of Transportation, Federal Highway Administration (FHWA), seeks “to improve the quality of life in communities through the increase of safe walking and bicycling as a viable means of transporta- tion and physical activity” per its http://www.pedbikeinfo.org website. This umbrella site, with pedestrian and bicycle components described next, is heavily but not exclusively focused on imple- mentation and safety. • The PBIC engineering component includes a section on designing for special populations at www.walkinginfo.org/engineering/pedestrians.cfm, which links to the Accessible Pedestrian Signal (APS) website at www.apsguide.org. The content of the APS site is a product of the National Cooperative Highway Research Program Project 3-62, “Guidelines for Accessible Pedestrian Signals.” • The PBIC pedestrian component at http://www.walkinginfo.org includes a searchable NMT resource library at www.walkinginfo.org/library, graduate level bicycle and pedestrian planning 16-406

course materials at www.walkinginfo.org/training/university-courses/masters-course.cfm, a compilation of case studies suitable for popular consumption (PBIC and APBP, 2009) at www.walkinginfo.org/case_studies, safety and public involvement courses at www. walking info.org/training/, a safety guide and hazard countermeasure selection system at www.walking info.org/pedsafe, a pedestrian safety guide focused on the needs of transit operators (Nabors, et al., 2008) at www.walkinginfo.org/transitguide, a guide for residents seeking safe and walkable communities at www.walkinginfo.org/residentsguide, and a walkability checklist suitable for layperson use at www.walkinginfo.org/checklist. • The PBIC bicycle component at http//www.bicyclinginfo.org includes a bicycle safety hazard countermeasure selection system (www.bicyclinginfo.org/bikesafe), which in turn includes case studies (http://www.bicyclinginfo.org/bikesafe/case_studies.cfm), a bikeability checklist amenable to layperson use (www.bicyclinginfo.org/checklist), a benefit-cost analysis tool for bicy- cle facilities (www.bicyclinginfo.org/bikecost), and a university course on bicycle and pedestrian transportation (Turner et al., 2006) at www.bicyclinginfo.org/univ-course. Bicycle library resources are included in the searchable collection at www.walkinginfo.org/library. • Useful web sites for obtaining pedestrian and bicycle materials directly from FHWA include, for the office of safety, http://safety.fhwa.gov/ped_bike/, for safety research, http://www. tfhrc.gov/safety/pedbike/, and for general bicycle and pedestrian programs, http://www. fhwa.dot.gov/environment/bikeped/. • The National Complete Streets Coalition—supporting policy to ensure roadway design and operation with full and appropriate provisions for pedestrians of all ages and abilities, bicy- clists, and public transportation services—provides guidelines, fact sheets, policy information, model legislation, news, and more at its http://www.completestreets.org website. • Safe Routes to School (SRTS) program information, ranging from getting started to training to submission of evaluation results, is provided by the National Center for Safe Routes to School at http://www.saferoutesinfo.org. • The Institute of Transportation Engineers (ITE) maintains a wiki, open to the public, that cov- ers pedestrian and bicycle resource links, ITE pedestrian and bicycle initiatives, an innovative practices discussion board, and a general topics blog, at www.ite.org/pbwiki. The Online TDM Encyclopedia maintained by the Victoria Transport Policy Institute and located at http://www.vtpi.org/tdm/index.php includes several periodically updated web documents useful for NMT planning. The relevant documents provide concisely summarized findings and generally pro- NMT guidance along with numerous referrals for additional detail, most with Internet links. The “Evaluating Nonmotorized Transport” document, subtitled “Techniques for Measuring Walking and Cycling Activity and Conditions,” has especially comprehensive coverage of NMT level of service (LOS), walkability, and NMT quality of service concepts and techniques (http://www.vtpi.org/tdm/ tdm63.htm). NMT accessibility and connectivity concepts and applications are covered in “Accessibility—Evaluating People’s Ability To Reach Desired Goods, Services And Activities” (http://www.vtpi.org/tdm/tdm84.htm) and “Roadway Connectivity—Creating More Connected Roadway and Pathway Networks” (http://www.vtpi.org/tdm/tdm116.htm). NCHRP Report 616: Multimodal Level of Service Analysis for Urban Streets, provides a literature review of bicyclist and pedestrian LOS perceptions, and presents bicycle and pedestrian LOS models structured for consistency with the Highway Capacity Manual (HCM). These are developed in a multimodal context suitable for “complete streets” evaluations (Dowling et al., 2008). 16-407

The paucity of easily available NMT count information is being addressed by the relatively new National Bicycle and Pedestrian Documentation Project (NBPDP), a cooperative bicycle and pedes- trian count and survey effort sponsored by the Pedestrian and Bicycle Council of the Institute of Transportation Engineers. Objectives include establishment of a consistent national NMT count and survey methodology, development of a national database of pedestrian and bicycle count informa- tion, and use of the information for analysis of correlations between various factors and walking/ cycling activity (Alta Planning + Design, 2008). Project resources can be accessed at http://bikeped documentation.org/. A TRB Bicycle and Pedestrian Data Subcommittee (ABJ35(3)) was formalized in July, 2011, with the goal of developing standardized national NMT data structures to facilitate access- ing, sharing, and integrating national bicycle and pedestrian information in support of traffic man- agement, travel demand modeling, safety studies, and NMT planning and research. There are several summary reports and papers encapsulating individual studies and drawing con- clusions about interrelationships between pedestrian and bicycle policy, promotion, and facility provision and prevalence of walking and cycling and associated physical activity. TRB Special Report 282 examines the connection between U.S. physical activity levels and the built environ- ment, using syntheses derived from both transportation and physical activity research results (Committee on Physical Activity, Health, Transportation, and Land Use, 2005). The committee report draws from seven specially commissioned papers on topics ranging from research methods to institutional factors, including a Critical Assessment of the Literature on the Relationships Among Transportation, Land Use, and Physical Activity (Handy, 2004) as well as examinations of social mar- keting approaches, safety and security concerns, and physical activity trends. A succinct equivalent focused on children, highly condensed but information-rich, is provided by a review of the literature prepared by researchers at the University at Albany (SUNY), New York (Davison and Lawson, 2006). A collaboration by Saelens and Handy partially overlaps, but also serves as an update to, this child-focused review. It casts a large net and covers both adult- and child-focused papers published in 2005 and up to May 2006. Conclusions are drawn from these papers and also from some nine reviews published between 2002 and 2006 (Saelens and Handy, 2008). It thus also offers an update to the adult-focused synthesis found in SR 282. A 39-author international review, Improving health through policies that promote active travel: A review of evidence to support integrated health impact assessment, offers a concise further update from a public health perspective and also addresses environmental impacts and hazards (de Nazelle et al., 2011). A systematic review of results of promotional/informational interventions to promote walking has been prepared at the Scottish Physical Activity Research Collaboration (SPARC), of the University of Strathclyde. Although a number of the studies covered include other active transportation, the presented summary of results focuses on walking exercise metrics (Ogilvie et al., 2007). The full text and supplement are available from SPARC at http://www.sparcoll.org.uk/SPARColl Publications.aspx. A comprehensive literature review with interpretation of Safe Routes to School (SRTS) programs and outcomes, addressing both travel and safety effects, is found in Appendix A of an SRTS statewide mobility assessment (Phase I) prepared for the Washington State Department of Transportation (Moudon, Stewart, and Lin, 2010). A major synthesis effort by Pucher, Dill, and Handy assesses both peer-reviewed and other respon- sibly documented domestic and international research, supplemented by secondary data for 14 case study cities, in order to draw conclusions concerning infrastructure, programs, and policies with the potential to increase cycling. Pedestrian programs and effects on walking are not covered (Pucher, Dill, and Handy, 2010). Findings are organized employing an easy to use typology similar to this chapter’s “Response by Type of NMT Strategy” section. Finally, this time with the full rigor of a meta-analysis, Ewing and Cervero have revised and expanded their earlier “Travel and the Built 16-408

Environment—A Synthesis” (Ewing and Cervero, 2001), adding walk trip and transit trip elasticities to updated elasticities for vehicle miles of travel (VMT). This research, “Travel and the Built Environment: A Meta-Analysis,” draws from and provides a tabular summary of over 50 quantita- tive studies (found suitable for the analytical approach) to derive and interpret these new elasticities for an array of land use and site design parameters. Many additional studies were used in synthesis. Bicycle trips are not covered (Ewing and Cervero, 2010), thus these two 2010 works on adult NMT travel effects serve in complementary fashion. The 2010 SRTS compendium described previously fills in at least the school commute component for children and adolescents. The Nonmotorized Transportation Pilot Program is applying a “before and after” quasi-experimental design in an attempt to assess the behavioral changes and related effects which occur in response to NMT system enhancement demonstration programs in four urban areas, with a fifth area as a control. The interim Evaluation Study and Report to Congress are available (Krizek et al., 2007, Federal Highway Administration, 2007) and the full evaluation is to be developed following the “after” survey scheduled for 2010. Another ongoing project well worth tracking is the University of Washington pre/post case/control study of changes in travel and physical activity following the 2009 opening of light rail tran- sit (LRT) in Seattle. The study, based on 1,000 persons living either less than a mile from the new stations or living farther away, is investigating the hypothesis that transportation-related walking and physical activity will increase for persons close to stations (TransNow, 2009). NCHRP Project 08-78, “Estimating Bicycling and Walking for Planning and Project Development,” for which research commenced in 2010, will combine an evaluation of state of the practice NMT data collection and travel forecasting techniques with original research to develop transferable methods and travel demand models suitable for various levels of walking and bicycling assess- ment. The results are to be documented in a guidebook providing step-by-step direction to pedes- trian and bicycle practitioners and demand forecasters. Section 5 of the project’s Interim Report provides an overview of existing bicycle and pedestrian demand estimation practice, and Section 6 examines data needs and resources (Kuzmyak et al., 2011). The Healthy Development Measurement Tool developed by the Department of Public Health of the city of San Francisco allows a user to assess how a development project performs in terms of an extensive list of indications including public transit service parameters and prevalence of NMT facilities. It is found at www.thehdmt.org. The I-PLACE3S scenario planning tool provides estimates of transportation, phys- ical activity and obesity, emissions, and energy use impacts—along with return on investment—of alter- native land development characteristics, transit service coverage and accessibility, and street network connectivity. It may be accessed at either http://www.kingcounty.gov/transportation/HealthScape. aspx or http://places.energy.ca.gov/places (American Public Health Association, 2010, Lawrence Frank & Co., SACOG, and Mark Bradley Associates, 2009). Examples of resources available on NMT safety and design, in addition to those listed above in connection with PBIC website resources, include: A Review of Pedestrian Safety Research in the United States and Abroad (Campbell et al., 2004), Pedestrian Road Safety Audit Guidelines and Prompt Lists (Nabors et al., 2007), the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials Guide for the Planning, Design, and Operation of Pedestrian Facilities (AASHTO, 2004), and the AASHTO Guide for the Development of Bicycle Facilities (AASHTO, 1999). Updating of the latter guide is in progress, and post-1999 on-street bicycle facility design innovations are also available in the NACTO Urban Bikeway Design Guide (NACTO, 2011). A comprehensive street design and retrofitting manual incorporating complete streets and livable communities concepts with a full range of pedestrian and bicycle configurations is available in the Model Design Manual for Living Streets produced by Los Angeles County (and sponsors) in late 2011. It is available from http://www.modelstreetdesignmanual.com. A broad community design focus with a public health emphasis is offered in Making Healthy Places: Designing and Building for Health, Well-being, 16-409