Bike Trail

            As an employee of municipal government, there are numerous issues that may arise of great interest to the community either from the residents, special interest groups, staff or elected officials. There is a particular study that I find very interesting where the residents are suggesting that community leaders conduct a pedestrian and bike audit to determine where problems exist for walkers, bikers and the disabled. In recent years there have been initiatives in metropolitan areas throughout the United States to create more livable communities where walking and bicycling are encouraged and accepted as legitimate forms of transportation. Characteristic of these efforts is the reintroduction of bicycle lanes and sidewalks to the streetscapes, complete with street furniture, landscaping, pedestrian-scaled lighting, and other features making the public right-of-way more inviting for people to travel by bicycle or on foot. The transportation planning and engineering community has recently been attempting to provide analysis and design methods to help create more "livable" streets and roadway environments.
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             A method is needed to objectively quantify pedestrians' perception of safety and comfort in the roadside environment. This quantification, or mathematical relationship, would provide a measure of how well roadways accommodate pedestrian travel. Essentially it would provide a measure of pedestrian level of service within a roadway environment. Such a measure of walking conditions would greatly aid in roadway cross-sectional design and also help evaluate and prioritize the needs of existing roadways for sidewalk retrofit construction. Furthermore, the measure can be used to evaluate traffic calming strategies and streetscape designs for their effectiveness in improving the pedestrian environment. Such a measure would enable pedestrian facility programming to be merged into the mainstream of transportation planning, design and construction.