Development and Validation of a Google Street View Pedestrian Safety Audit Tool

Abstract

Background: Assessing aspects of intersections that may affect the risk of pedestrian injury is critical to developing child pedestrian injury prevention strategies, but visiting intersections to inspect them is costly and time-consuming. Several research teams have validated the use of Google Street View to conduct virtual neighborhood audits that remove the need for field teams to conduct in-person audits. Methods:We developed a 38-item virtual audit instrument to assess intersections for pedestrian injury risk and tested it on intersections within 700 meters of 26 schools in New York City using the Computer Assisted Neighborhood Visual Assessment System (CANVAS) with Google Street View imagery.Results: Six trained auditors tested this instrument for inter-rater reliability on 111 randomly selected intersections and for test-retest reliability on 264 other intersections. Inter-rater kappa scores ranged from −0.01 to 0.92, with nearly half falling above 0.41, the conventional threshold for moderate agreement. Test-retest kappa scores were slightly higher than but highly correlated with inter-rater scores (spearman rho=0.83). Items that were highly reliable included presence of a

Development, scoring, and reliability for the Microscale Audit of Pedestrian Streetscapes for Safe Routes to School (MAPS-SRTS) instrument

“…Future research should assess the MAPS-SRTS tools’ psychometric properties across a greater range of school districts, including suburban and rural geographic regions. Additionally, one promising avenue for future research could be to consider more time-efficient audit-based methods, such as virtually through Google Street View, which have been validated multiple times [ 53 – 55 ]. This could also allow for improving the external validity of the existing tool by allowing researchers to capture more diverse geographic contexts than one metropolitan area.…”

Validation of the Urban Walkability Perception Questionnaire (UWPQ) in the Balearic Islands

“…Moreover, we must consider that, before the assessment, the routes were studied in detail with the geographic viewer Street View to evaluate certain characteristics and ease the in situ validation process [ 41 , 42 ]. As in Mooney [ 49 ], the participants chose sections without slopes or steps to avoid physical overexertion or to prevent injuries.…”

“…To make the validation process more efficient, we performed a parallel audit with the Street View viewer [ 48 , 49 ] to locate those sections that a priori could accomplish high levels of walkability (large pavements, low traffic density, signalized crossings, lack of obstacles, etc.).…”

A Review of Research Progress on the Impact of Urban Street Environments on Physical Activity: A Comparison between China and Developed Countries

“…MAPS is primarily employed to evaluate whether street environments support physical activity and to identify streetscape elements correlated with physical activity [102,103]. With the application of street view images, virtual audit tools like virtual assessment tools (Virtual-STEPS) [104] and Computer-Assisted Neighborhood Visual Assessment Systems (CANVAS) [105] are also being validated. Within this research theme, scholars focus significantly on adolescents, particularly assessing whether environmental elements along school-commuting routes attract adolescents to engage in physical activity voluntarily [106,107].…”