Lanterna Rally

Author: Maria F. Ramirez Bernal

Publisher:

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 100

ISBN-13:

Global warming is a result of most of increasing contaminant components in our atmosphere, many of them generated by motor vehicles. It causes harm to human health, not only to individuals but to communities and towns as a whole. Increasing heat, extreme cold, rising sea levels and flood plains damage each habitat's equilibrium. It has been proven that public transit leads to more walking and biking. Surveys report that 63% and 68% of pedestrians and bikers walk at least once a day, respectively. Public transit commuters walk more than car commuters. Walking to those neighborhood destinations accounts for higher frequencies than public transit does. Integration between land use areas, enhancing mixed-use parcels are a complement and support to a public transportation network that includes pedestrians and bikers. Biking infrastructure comparisons have been made among cities and countries; unfortunately, there aren't many studies that compare and analyze characteristics in metropolitan areas. This lack of analysis explains the gap of infrastructure improvements in cities where using bicycles as active modes of transportation is barely at its beginnings. Bicycle infrastructure innovation is often related to Master Plans as those quantify the needs of pedestrians and bikers at different levels (city, region, state). As a result of some studies, there are prioritized lists of pedestrian and bicycle corridors according to need and importance to generate an enhanced and improved master plan. Household travel surveys (HTS) supply multi-level information regarding travel patterns per day. They provide information regarding the purpose of the trips, mode choice, trip length, location of activities and, most importantly for this research, routes taken. A large-scale HTS was been developed for the Cincinnati Metropolitan Area between the months of August 2009 and August 2010. GPS units were given to each participant household member 12 years or older to carry all day for 3 days. Each household member was requested to provide demographic and location information. Once the survey was concluded, the information was located on the map d and compiled as Google Earth maps. This research will study collected demographic and route data from the household transportation survey and add it to infrastructure attributes from the street network and its corresponding land use zones. After an adequate statistical analysis, this research will develop a methodology for estimating the coefficients for a linear equation, called the Bicycle Compatibility Evaluator (BCE); that correlates "human and street" characteristics to determine usage of existing infrastructure and evaluate how compatible they are with one another. This process helps establish factors that affect ridership in a particular metropolitan area of study. This methodology will present a list of potential variables to be included in an evaluation equation and how will they be included in or rejected from the equation. Each one will be either rejected or accepted and to finally estimate their coefficients. Lastly, it will estimate a cut-off match and mismatch compatibility value between streets and individuals.