An Assessment of GIS-Enabled Walkability Audits
An Assessment of GIS-Enabled Walkability Audits
(Version 3/14/07)
Anonymous
Abstract: Research on walking and the built environment is a fairly recent area of inquiry, accelerated over the last ten years by an increased interest in the relationship between urban form and public health. As the research has progressed, so has the interest in developing ways to collect data at a very fine scale – in essence, to be able to collect data at the streetscape level and link this data to transportation behavior. This paper discusses the development and implementation of a GIS-based pedestrian audit tool that allows users to collect data in electronic form using a hand-held computer (i.e., a Pocket PC or Personal Digital Assistant). While the authors, in general, believe that such tools may be useful for better understanding the relationship between the built environment and pedestrian behavior, the tools may be unnecessarily complex and unfocused. Specifically, such walkability audit tools could be improved by: 1) applying unique sets of walkability measures to different types of walking environments; 2) perhaps focusing auditing activities on major streets and intersections only (e.g. do not audit neighborhood streets where possible); 3) include subjective as well as objective measures of the streetscape; 4) verify the accuracy of digital base maps before widespread implementation; and 5) continuously evaluate whether the simpler technology of pen and paper would be preferable alternatives. That said, the authors conclude that appropriately applying GIS-enabled pedestrian audit tools can be an efficient way to collect and quickly analyze pedestrian infrastructure characteristics so that planners, practitioners, policy makers, and community members can make more effective decisions on behalf of walkability.
