Making Streets into Complete Streets

Researchers created a manual to aid planners in adopting complete streets policies and designs

Bicycle Transportation

55 pagesThe proposals reviewed in this document were generated as a result of collaboration between the City of Salem and the University of Oregon Sustainable Cities Initiative. Fifty-one students in a Planning, Public Policy, and Management course entitled “Bicycle Transportation”, taught by Professor Marc Schlossberg, reviewed and examined critical elements of an urban bikeway system and proposed projects that would encourage increased bicycle ridership

Visualizing Accessibility with GIS

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/60283/1/visualaccess.pd

Visualizing Accessibility II: Access to Food

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/60303/1/SchlossbergEd.pd

Understanding School Travel: How Residential Location Choice and the Built Environment Affect Trips to School

This project investigates issues related to parents’ decisions about children’s school transportation. This has become an important area of research due to the growing concerns that increased reliance on private automobile in school travel has led to adverse health impacts on children and negative impacts on environment. This study examines school transportation in the context of where families live and how families make decisions about school travel in the process of choosing their residence. Using a middle-sized school district in Oregon State, we conducted a 5500-household survey and a number of interviews and focus groups. The study shows that parents considered school transportation in their residential location process; their intention to allow their children to walk or bike to school at this stage had significant impacts on later school travel behavior. While acknowledging school travel was not a priority when choosing a residential location, parents with strong preference for children walking or biking to school used residential location process consciously to live closer to school and in more walkable neighborhoods; but parents were also limited by housing opportunities around schools and in the community. This research suggests the needs for stronger coordination between community land us planning and school planning, and stronger emphasis on changing parents’ attitudes toward children walking or biking to school in programs around safe routes to schools

Connecting Sisters, Oregon

PDF, 56 pagesSituated in the northwest pocket of Deschutes County, Sisters includes varied outdoor recreation options, beautiful scenery, and top tier hiking and mountain biking trails. The city’s thriving downtown is bisected by East Cascade Avenue, which bustles with economic activity and serves as a throughway to Redmond, Bend, and central Oregon. The street is often congested with vehicular traffic, which keeps speeds slow and makes crossing for most pedestrians relatively easy, if not slightly uncomfortable. Crossing this primary street by bike, however, is more difficult, especially for less confident cyclists such as youth and the elderly. Parallel streets to East Cascade Avenue also enjoy robust commercial uses, contain extensive car parking for the entire downtown region, and run the risk of acting as alternative ‘through streets’ for motorists trying to avoid East Cascade. A downtown bypass road to the north of East Cascade Avenue, primarily for diverting freight trucks from the city center, is being planned and developed, and will likely reduce truck traffic through the heart of Sisters, making viewsheds of pedestrians and cyclists crossing East Cascade Avenue slightly easier, though congested conditions are likely to be the norm due to the popularity of Sisters as a regional destination and ‘on the way’ between central Oregon and the more populous regions to the west. Population and housing growth are expected to continue over the next decade, putting pressure on Sisters to both accommodate new residents and maintain a high level of community livability. Sisters Elementary School will soon be moving to join a middle and high school on a single campus area on the southwest side of town. New housing developments are occurring throughout the entire Sisters community and many students live in outlying communities in the region as well, creating automobile traffic to the school and through the community during school drop-off and pick up. Because of its small size, travelling within the city is relatively easy to do by foot, bike, or driving, though there could be more to explicitly support people on bike both in terms of infrastructure connectivity design and in encouraging its use. And with better support for cycling, both residents and tourists to the community stand to benefit. Below are some of the key ideas that can help move the community in this direction

Transportation Planning Through Mobile Mapping Technology

This report describes the development and testing of the Fix This Tool, a spatial, participatory, active transportation and built environment assessment tool created on an iPhone platform. The goal of this tool development was to create an instrument that could be widely distributed to communities across the country to develop a spatially based assessment of the micro-scaled elements of their local active transportation environment such that public officials and community members could focus energy in making appropriate improvements. The development of this tool emerged out of previous work with such tools built on a GIS platform and a workshop-based format to engage residents in data collection of their walking and biking environments. While this past work proved successful in both data collection tool use and in facilitating community conversations, the technological infrastructure had significant limitations in terms of being able to widely distribute the effort. In a GIS-based approach, GIS technicians must be present and when combined with community training and data processing, the cost of development, collection, and distribution is a significant limit to which communities could adopt such assessment tools for their own use. The Fix This Tool is designed to overcome these distribution and cost barriers by developing a tool that can be easily downloaded by community members using technology they already own. The report that follows outlines the philosophical positioning of a community-based data collection process, describes the tool itself, and provides some reflections between this smart phone based model and the previous GIS-based model of community-engaged active transportation assessment tools

Travel Behavior, Residential Preference, and Urban Design: A Multi-Disciplinary National Analysis

This report summarizes the findings of a national project to examine the travel behavior, social capital, health, and lifestyle preferences of residents of neotraditional developments (NTD) compared to more standard suburban developments. We compare survey results from residents of matched pairs of neighborhoods in seventeen U.S. cities and towns, with each pair comprised of one NTD and one typical suburban neighborhood of similar size, age, and socio-demographic composition. The study addresses salient themes in the transportation, planning and health literatures: a national study, surveying populations of diverse incomes, collecting resident information on preferences for and attitudes towards neighborhood qualities, and addressing transportation and health outcomes for diverse community designs

Crest Drive Community Mapping Project - Community Atlas 1.0

This Atlas contains a series of maps resulting froma community-based mapping project between the University of Oregon and the Crest Drive Citizens Association in Eugene, OR. In the Fall, 2006 academic term, students taking the class “PPPM 4/536: Applied Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and Social Planning” worked with residents of the Crest Drive Neighborhood to collect data in the neighborhood of interest to residents. The planning for this project began about four months prior to the term when the Chair of the neighborhood association, Kathy Saranpa, and I, the instructor of the course, met to brainstorm potential project ideas. Over the course of those four months, we eventually decided to conduct a walkability analysis of some central streets between Crest Drive Elementary School and Wayne Morse Ranch. Data was collected using ArcPad GIS with teams of residents and students doing the data collection. In addition to maps showing this data, this final Atlas also includes maps of the neighborhood using other city and census data.The Tom and Carol Williams Fund for Undergraduate Educatio

Active Community Environments and Health: The Relationship of Walkable and Safe Communities to Individual Health

13 pagesThe literature suggests that individuals will be healthier if they live in Active Community Environments that promote exercise and activity. Two key elements of such environments are walkability and safety. Examining data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey III, 1988–1994 and using a multilevel analysis, we found that individuals who live in counties that are more walkable and have lower crime rates tended to walk more and to have lower body mass indices (BMIs) than people in less walkable and more crime-prone areas, even after controlling for a variety of individual variables related to health. Among lifelong residents of an area, lesser walkability and more crime were also associated with respondents reporting weightrelated chronic illness and lower ratings of their own health. The effect of high crime rates was substantially stronger for women than for men, and taking this interaction into account eliminated gender differences in walking, BMI, weight-related chronic conditions, and self-reported poor health. The results suggest that to promote activity and health, planners should consider community walkability, crime prevention, and safety