A method of generating pedestrian walksheds to measure neighborhood walkability

Keywords: Network analysis, Walkability, Walksheds, Sustainable neighborhoods, Accessibility, Food deserts
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Monday
Session Start / End Time: 2/28/2022 02:00 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/28/2022 03:20 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 48

Abstract

Building walkable neighborhoods is crucial to realizing a sustainable future for car-dependent suburbs. Identifying areas that lack walkable access to the services that support daily life should inform the process of improving pedestrian infrastructure. The accessibility of a street network can be determined by using network analysis. The output of such analysis will generate walksheds, a terminology used to define the areas reachable on foot in a given neighborhood. Current research utilizing walksheds often relies upon proprietary business data and software which makes such network analysis unaffordable and inflexible. The proposed methodology in this paper utilizes open-source libraries to implement watershed analysis with publicly available data. Moreover, the extensible nature of the open-source frameworks used in this method enable the simulation of changes to the network's connectivity, the effects on service area sizes depending on time of day, and the addition of new measures of impedance based upon safety of a pedestrian route.

The methods outlined in this paper facilitate highly granular analysis of pedestrian access to essential services at the level of individual households. The implementation applied for Salem, Massachusetts and walksheds at multiple distances were generated for each business within a list of service providers in the area. The resulting map layer displays all areas missing services and creates statistics on the total number of services available for any point within the study area. In the interest of making this research repeatable by any researcher, all code for this project will be made available on GitHub for download.