Taking Steps Toward Measuring the Pedestrian Environment

Presenters:
Darren Flusche, Montgomery County Planning Department
Eli Glazier, Montgomery County Planning Department
Jessica Horning, Oregon Department of Transportation
Niki Siabanis, City of Toronto

You can probably tell when you are in a place that is built for walking. But what makes us feel this way on some streets but not others? While Level of Traffic Stress has become a best practice for measuring comfort and suitability for bicyclists, there is no single parallel pedestrian measure. This webinar will discuss quantitatively measuring the pedestrian environment with case studies from Fort Worth, Oregon, and Montgomery County, MD. We'll also discuss how pedestrian infrastructure often gets pushed around to accommodate better signal timing and reduce vehicle delay. We'll explore a number of ways the City of Toronto evaluates pedestrian infrastructure and look at the case study of a missing crosswalk link at a major downtown intersection.