Pedestrian Environment
To assist with the evaluation of pedestrian-vehicle crashes, a factor was created that incorporates a number of elements identified in the literature as having impacts on the likelihood of these events. The resulting factor provides a ranking of tract suitability for pedestrian travel. Population, income, number of households, amount of commercial and residential land uses as a percentage of Census tracts, weighted trip origins and destinations, and pedestrian environment factor values were sorted in either a descending or ascending order dependent upon whether the literature indicated a positive or negative impact on pedestrian travel. These values (with null values removed from the data set) were then divided into nine ranks. If the increase or decrease in values was fairly steady (as in the case of income), factors were generally divided into equal sections and ranked on an interval scale of one to nine. If, as in the case of population, the numbers were more skewed, natural breaks were determined based upon a visual evaluation of a scatter plot and the data points were given a rank of one to nine. The resulting rankings were aggregated and may be used to help better determine pedestrian exposure risk.
