Land Use and Built Environment

This paper examines the mode choice behavior of children's travel to school based on surveys conducted at a sample of schools in New Jersey. The main focus is on a variety of network design, land use, and infrastructure variables that have typically been associated with walking activity. Using a mixed logit model, it is found that good connectivity, more intense residential land use, and better sidewalk infrastructure are associated with increased walking to school. The use of a mixed logit model allows the examination of individual heterogeneity. Results indicate substantial heterogeneity...

The objective of this research project is to develop materials for the Highway Capacity Manual (HCM) in order to modify the freeway analysis methods and the urban street methods so that the effects of operations from one facility to the other can be evaluated. This report summarizes the entire research effort and provides the proposed new HCM Chapter (Chapter 38) in Appendix A- Chapter 38 - System Analysis. The new methods produced can be used to evaluate operations along networks that include both freeways and urban streets. The methods can also evaluate the impact of spillback into...

The Highway Capacity Manual (HCM) employs a simple five-point system to assess the quality of bikeway pavement as part of the comprehensive bicycle level of service (LOS) evaluation. Unfortunately, the ambiguous and rudimentary nature of the existing HCM Pavement Quality Index (PQI) fails to offer an objective review of bikeways across different jurisdictions. In the following analysis, first is an assessment of the PQI and bicycle LOS in the HCM. To demonstrate the impact of the pavement quality rating and the importance of a more standardized evaluation method, a sensitivity analysis is...

Count expansion methods are a useful tool for creating long-term pedestrian or cyclist volume estimates from short-term counts for safety analysis or planning purposes. Expansion factors can be developed based on the trends from automated counters set up for long periods of time. Evidence has shown that the activity patterns can vary between sites so that there is potential to create more accurate estimates by grouping similar long-term count trends into factor groups. There are two common approaches to developing factor groups in pedestrian and cyclist count expansion studies. The land...