Developing an Active Transportation Assessment Scorecard for Rural and Suburban Communities

Abstract

In recent years, many communities have begun to focus on creating spaces for walking and bicycling throughout their localities to reduce congestion, improve public health, and promote economic growth. However, rural and suburban communities often find it difficult to select and fund active transportation, especially since many resources designed to support this effort cater to urban areas and are complex. In order to mitigate the gap in resources, this thesis creates an Active Transportation Assessment Scorecard designed specifically for rural and suburban communities. This scorecard allows communities to quantify how well local residents will feel about active transportation on that roadway segment, based on data collected from video-based user perception surveys. Twenty-five segments in Alabama were video-recorded and evaluated for analysis, each with a variety of active transportation amenities and infrastructure conditions. Additional built environment data were collected for each location as well. An ordinal probit regression was used to for analysis and resulted in the creation of five models that predict segment user perceptions. This tool will be used to support many communities in Alabama.