Transportation Planning Through Mobile Mapping Technology

Communities across the nation are adopting Complete Street policies that seek to improve the pedestrian, bicycle, and transit components of our street network while supporting other active transportation efforts such as Safe Routes to School. This work is motivated by a desire to reduce congestion, increase non-polluting modes of transportation and reduce greenhouse gasses, address the national obesity epidemic, and to enhance general quality of life by providing transportation choice to citizens. Yet few communities have any clear idea what defines a complete street, how it is assessed, and how to think about a connected network of complete streets in…

Communities across the nation are adopting Complete Street policies that seek to improve the pedestrian, bicycle, and transit components of our street network while supporting other active transportation efforts such as Safe Routes to School. This work is motivated by a desire to reduce congestion, increase non-polluting modes of transportation and reduce greenhouse gasses, address the national obesity epidemic, and to enhance general quality of life by providing transportation choice to citizens. Yet few communities have any clear idea what defines a complete street, how it is assessed, and how to think about a connected network of complete streets in their community. In previously supported OTREC work, we have developed a suite of GIS assessment tools focused on assessing these environments in a fine scaled, field-based, geo-referenced format so that local communities can better identify gaps in their networks and work to make appropriate improvements. This work explicitly focused on the role and capacity of a general citizenry to conduct built environment audits and engage in facilitated discussions about the data and maps resulting from their community data collection.

While our experience validates the potential of such public participation GIS methods to promote active communities, the increasingly cumbersome, costly and technical nature of currently available GIS systems challenge the development of truly accessible GIS tools. Meanwhile, simultaneous to our development of these mobile GIS tools over the past 5 years, public exposure to and familiarity with geographic data has grown unexpectedly and exponentially through the emergence of popular online mapping software such as Google Maps. As this trend continues, online-mapping will increasingly influence how transportation decisions are made, including those related to walking and biking. Yet while applications like Google Maps are widely used to assist in transportation decisions, its routing is limited due to the lack of finer-scale, street-level detail around which pedestrian or biker transportation decisions are made.

This project will address this deficiency by exploring the integration of proven community-based data collection methods - developed with OTREC support over the last few years - with the popularity and ease-of-use of online web-mapping and Internet-enabled mobile devices. This transition is one from a centrally located GIS with a facilitated participatory GIS data gathering process to one that uses more accessible web-mapping platforms where data is collected by a wider public, but in a less facilitated manner. Insofar as each person views their environment differently, online and mobile phone web-mapping provides the potential to aggregate evaluations from multiple citizens in a format that is accessible for a general public, policy makers, and city staff responsible for a functional multi-modal infrastructure. Such a mobile mapping tool explores the potential of how emerging mobile technology can be harnessed within a planning context to articulate a localized vision of complete streets.

After exploring different methods to translate the GIS-based built environment assessment tools into a web-based and/or mobile phone based environment, we will make the tool(s) available to the 30,000 students and staff of the University of Oregon to evaluate the transportation infrastructure to and throughout campus with a particular focus on the walking and biking environment. Tool download and evaluation uploads will be monitored, and key university stakeholders will be brought together to evaluate the efficacy of this decentralized “non-professional” transportation data-gathering and synthesis. The eventual goal is to distribute these tools nationally to develop a comprehensive, fine scaled, map based, publicly collected tool for articulating, evaluating and navigating the country’s pedestrian and biking infrastructure.