The role of the built environment in explaining relationships between perceived and actual pedestrian and bicyclist safety

Influence of built environment on pedestrian crashes: A network-based GIS analysis

“…We then computed the number of surrounding stores/restaurants, bars/pubs, and public transit stops within a 0.5-mile (about 805 m) buffer of a segment. This distance was chosen because the literature suggested it as a reasonable walking distance for leisure or commuting (Boone, Buckley, Grove, & Sister, 2009;Cho et al, 2009). Finally, the last seven variables (Table 2) based on census statistics at a census tract were assigned to a road segment if the segment fell into the census tract, similarly to previous studies (DiMaggio & Li, 2011;Kuhlmann et al, 2009).…”

“…So restaurants were merged with stores to describe the commercial establishments around a road. A builtenvironment audit is useful for an in-depth understanding of the hotspots at the street level (Cho, Rodriguez, & Khattak, 2009;Clifton et al, 2009;Schuurman et al, 2009). Such a qualitative approach, however, was based on field observations within hotspots.…”

“Put the blame on…others!”: The battle of cyclists against pedestrians and car drivers at the urban environment. A cyclists’ perception study

“…Cho, Rodríguez, and Khattak (2009) explored the perceived and actual crash risk for pedestrian and cyclists and how this is related with the greater built environment. They concluded that residents who live in low density-single residential neighborhoods are more likely to perceive their neighborhood as dangerous relative to residents of compact, mixed-use neighborhoods even though the latter exhibited higher actual crash rates.…”

Walkability for Different Urban Granularities

“…GIS have been used variously in walkability studies, e.g. to investigate the correlation between objective measures of the built environment and perceived walkability as assessed from population surveys (Cho, Rodriguez and Khattak, 2009;Weiss, Maantay and Fahs, 2010), to assess and compare walkability of different cities or urban areas (Giles-Corti et al, 2014) and to explore the influence of built environment features on physical activity in older adults (King et al, 2010). In purely GIS-based approaches, walkability indices are generally calculated based on existing and easily accessible data (Weiss, Maantay, and Fahs, 2010).…”