Kevin Manaugh

Estimating Potential Effect of Speed Limits, Built Environment, and Other Factors on Severity of Pedestrian and Cyclist Injuries in Crashes:

Road facilities in urban areas are a major source of injury for nonmotorized road users despite the benefits of nonmotorized transportation. In particular, large Canadian cities such as Montreal face serious problems with pedestrian and cyclist safety. To address these problems, funds are continually allocated through different safety improvement programs such as reduction of speed limits, improvement of intersections, and increased traffic enforcement. However, few analytical tools help to identify and quantify the benefits of countermeasures (e.g., roadway design, speed management strategies, or land use policies) in reducing accident frequency and severity. Injury severity models were developed to determine the effects of road design, built environment, speed limits, and other factors (e.g., vehicle characteristics and movement type) on injury severity levels of pedestrians and cyclists involved in collisions with motor vehicles. Sources of data included police reports describing vehicle–pedestrian and vehicle–cyclist collisions, as well as information on land use, transit network, and road design attributes from the city of Montreal. The impacts of road design, land use, built environment, and other strategies on the injury severity levels of vulnerable road users were investigated. Factors such as darkness, vehicle movement, whether an accident occurred at an intersection, vehicle type, and land use mix affected the severity of pedestrian injuries from collisions. For cyclists, however, only vehicle movement and whether the accident occurred at a signalized intersection had significant effects on the severity of the injury.

Cycling Under Influence: Summarizing the Influence of Perceptions, Attitudes, Habits, and Social Environments on Cycling for Transportation

Due to cycling’s many environmental and public health benefits, research on factors that could increase this activity has greatly expanded in recent years. Clear connections have been found between elements of the built environment and cycling for transportation. However, social and psychological factors—such as perceptions, attitudes, habits, and social environments—have recently been shown to play an important role in affecting travel behavior and mode choice. This paper reviews 24 previous studies and sets out to summarize the literature concerning the influence of these social and psychological factors on the choice to cycle for transportation. The findings highlight the importance of these factors on bicycle commuting, especially perceptions of benefits and barriers to cycling, perceptions of safety, attitudes toward cycling and other modes of transportation, habits, and the influence of family, friends, and the workplace. A consensus shows that social factors clearly affect the decision to commute by bicycle. It is therefore important to think beyond the role of physical and built-environment factors when attempting to understand or predict bicycle use. Implications for future research design and policy are presented.

Smog and socioeconomics: an evaluation of equity in traffic-related air pollution generation and exposure

How traffic-related air pollution generation and exposure is distributed among different population groups is an important environmental justice concern. From a social equity perspective, many questions arise at the metropolitan scale. Do socially disadvantaged communities have higher exposure levels to traffic-related air pollution? Do discrepancies exist wherein neighborhoods are not exposed to levels of pollution similar to those they themselves generate? And, is there a relationship between this discrepancy and social disadvantage? These questions are examined for the Montreal Metropolitan Region through the development of an integrated transport and emissions model. Two measures of traffic-related air pollution are estimated at the traffic analysis zone level: (1) generation (average emissions per household), and (2) exposure (average residential zone concentration). A social disadvantage index is also calculated that incorporates elements of social and material deprivation. Three levels of inequity exist regarding emissions, exposure, and socioeconomics. Social disadvantage was found to have a positive relationship with exposure, meaning that the most socially disadvantaged communities tend to experience the highest levels of traffic-related air pollution. Spatial discrepancies in emission generation versus emission exposure are also present for most of the metropolitan region. Furthermore, the communities that face a double burden of greater disadvantage and higher exposure also tend to create the lowest quantities of pollution.

Determinants of Mode Share over Time: How Changing Transport System Affects Transit Use in Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Increasing public transit ridership is a goal for most transit agencies and plays a central role in many recent regional transportation plans. Therefore, a comprehensive understanding of the determinants of mode choice and their effects over time is important. This study sought to understand how accessibility to employment by public transit changes over time, and how this accessibility explains changes in transit use. With the use of linear regression analysis, the authors explored the influence of job accessibility, transport infrastructure, and social disadvantage on transit mode share for three job categories in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, in 2 years, 1996 and 2006. New transit infrastructure did not necessarily attract more transit commuters but was found to affect commuting to different job categories differently. Also, new highway infrastructure hampered transit mode share, regardless of job type. The aggregate all-jobs model was found to dilute some differences between the transit mode choices of people commuting to different job categories. Finally, increases in accessibility by transit were found to augment transit mode share, while people in more socially disadvantaged areas were more likely to commute by transit in any job category. This study reveals findings that may be of interest to land use and transportation planners working toward boosting regional transit ridership, while also attaining social equity goals.

Bicycle equity in Brazil: Access to safe cycling routes across neighborhoods in Rio de Janeiro and Curitiba

ABSTRACT In many Latin American cities, rapid motorization and population growth have resulted in unprecedented urban transportation challenges, with lower income populations disproportionately facing constraints to mobility as well as externalities like air pollution, traffic collisions, and the impacts of climate change. The construction of bicycle lane networks has been identified as an effective tool for increasing citizens mobility and accessibility as well as combating the effects of motorization, but in cities where bicycle lane networks exist, it is not known if they have benefited different income groups equally. This paper assesses the extent to which bicycle lane provisioning has been equitable among neighborhoods in Rio de Janeiro and Curitiba. Both cities were found to have more than twice the supply of bicycle lanes in the wealthiest quintile than the lowest income quintile relative to area and population. A network analysis using a Level of Traffic Stress classification to categorize roads found that wealthier areas have more commercial areas accessible along safer cycling routes. Implications for cycling policy and future research are discussed.

Diagnosing Transportation: Developing Key Performance Indicators to Assess Urban Transportation Systems

Rapid urbanization is putting pressure on transportation agencies to respond to an increasing demand for transportation networks with greater effectiveness and efficiency. In response, policy makers, faced with limited budgets and time constraints, are looking for tools and processes to identify priority problems in a timely and cost-effective manner. Rapid assessments can be performed with diagnostic tools that identify cities’ transportation problems within the global context. Using a series of performance indicators that are based on a review of research and practice from around the world, this paper assesses cities’ transportation networks. The performance indicators rank cities according to an overall score as well as categories of transportation performance. Such an approach allows planners to identify priority problems in the transportation network to design targeted solutions. The final results benchmark the performance of transportation systems according to the performance of the systems in peer cities with relatively similar sizes. Such a process assists with the benchmarking of performance and accounts for context so that appropriate best practices can be shared between cities around the world.

Using Embodied Videos of Walking Interviews in Walkability Assessment

The relationship between the built environment and pedestrian travel behavior has inspired many geospatial-based and audit-based indexes for assessing the extent to which an environment is walkable. However, recent research suggests that their accuracy in predicting travel behavior varies depending on the characteristics of the populations being studied—a limitation especially pertinent for those who walk because they lack viable transportation alternatives. Examining the broader scope of walking determinants and mediators from the pedestrian perspective can take into account the mismatch between travel behavior and embodied experience. Social geography provides theoretical avenues for co-analyzing environmental and personal characteristics, while methodological and technological innovations provide ways of placing these theories into practice. A walking interview procedure supported by embodied video recording technology and sedentary interviews was designed to assess the walking environment according to residents’ unique perspectives of their neighborhoods. The walking interview allows for real-time engagement with pedestrians as they experience the environment, while video recording of these engagements offers sensory data that the researcher may use to interpret pedestrian statements and to draw retrospective conclusions. Aided by preceding sedentary interviews, the walking interview also illuminates how a pedestrian’s personal characteristics influence his or her perception of the built and social environment. It was concluded that, as designed, the procedure is well suited to support conventional walkability assessment tools by revealing how pedestrians’ characteristics and recollections shape their engagement with the built environment.

Spatially Clustered Autonomous Vehicle Malware: Producing New Urban Geographies of Inequity

Malicious software (malware) is both a hurdle to autonomous vehicle (AV) adoption and a serious threat to AV occupant safety. Yet, to date, the topic of how subnational transportation decision makers should handle this cybersecurity threat has been underexplored. This paper describes how malware can spread through vehicle-to-X networks and infect AVs to a non-technical planning audience. It then explains how AV malware can cluster spatially in linguistic, socioeconomic, and political enclaves of American cities. Since AVs can identify new indicators of safety imperceptible to humans, malware clusters can produce new geographies of accessibility, mobility, economic, and environmental inequity across a city. In provisioning the inherently localized technical malware prevention tools available to them, subnational transportation planners have the capacity to reproduce or overcome historical and current transportation system inequities.

Illuminating Spaces in the Classroom with Qualitative GIS.

Abstract As social and postmodern ontologies continue to shape our definition of space, undergraduate instructors have struggled to incorporate these paradigms in the geography classroom. Recent research suggests that practical applications using field work, qualitative research, and geographic information science can augment students’ understanding of these spatial ontologies. Qualitative GIS holds promise as a means to integrate these methods in geographic education, yet there are no signs to date that the methodology has transitioned from research to teaching. This paper details our attempt to incorporate qualitative GIS into an undergraduate urban field studies course in lieu of a strictly lab-based GIS assignment. We outline our approach before discussing students’ engagement with the assignment in greater depth. Drawing from field experiences and deliverables across four terms, we argue that teaching from a qualitative GIS framework can effectively communicate the fundamentals of modern spatial theory and geographic research methods to students as they investigate problems in the field. We also note recurring challenges to mixed-methods teaching for students unfamiliar with the new methods presented. We close by discussing avenues for instructors in different circumstances, e.g. personal skills sets and class characteristics, to consider qualitative GIS in their classrooms.

Eyes on the alley: children’s appropriation of alley space in Riverdale, Toronto

ABSTRACT Recent research suggests that numerous positive physical, cognitive, and social benefits can be derived from independent mobility and play agency amongst children, necessitating an understanding of how physical and social environments facilitate this development. This study involved parents, and children aged 9–13 from twelve households in the neighbourhood of Riverdale in Toronto. Using a mapping exercise to instigate discussion, participants were asked to describe where, how, and with whom play occurs in their neighbourhood. A reoccurring theme emerged amongst households that border a back alley where parents perceived this space as safer allowing them to grant greater independent mobility to their children and use this space as an intermediary tool to prepare their children for greater independence. For children, this space serves as one of creative appropriation, granting them access to more space and friends to play with. Situated within the context of age-friendly cities, this research identifies several socio-spatial qualities found in alleys that have the potential to contribute to the discussion of more inclusive city-building practice.