The Unresolved Relationship between Street Trees and Road Safety [Research Brief]

Abstract

MPC-489Part 1 of this report relies upon advances in remote sensing to map both tree canopy and street-tree locations in GIS for the entirety of the city and county of Denver, Colorado. We then statistically test the association between street trees and seven years of road safety outcomes while controlling for factors known to be associated with crash outcomes. Part 2 investigates the usefulness of 3D volumetric pixels (voxels) and USGS Quality Level 2 (QL2) LiDAR data to measure features in streetscapes. As the USGS embarks on a national LiDAR database with the goal of covering the entire US with QL2 data or better, this paper investigates uses of QL2 LiDAR for the 3D measuring of streetscapes