Active living

Scooters, Ubers, and Automobiles: Sustainable Transportation with Prof. Harvey Miller

I’m on the latest episode of Prognosis Ohio, a podcast about health and healthcare in Ohio. We talk infrastructure bill, scooters, Ubers, public transit, walking and health care access.

Scooters, Ubers, and Automobiles: Sustainable Transportation with Prof. Harvey Miller

Geospatial Data for Healthy Places: Building Environments for Active Living Through Opportunistic GIScience

On September 19 2019, I gave a lecture in the Methods: Mind the Gap Webinar Series of the National Institutes of Health Office of Disease Prevention (ODP): Geospatial data for healthy places: Building environments for active living through opportunistic GIScience.  A video of the lecture and slides is posted here

In this lecture, I discuss the role of geospatial technologies and data in facilitating quasi and natural experiments about built environment factors that encourage active living.   I also extend this idea to the concept of geographic information observatories: systems for ongoing data collection and analysis that facilitate opportunistic science that can leverage real-world events via ongoing observation, experimentation, and decision-support.

New paper – Street use and design: Daily rhythms on four streets that differ in rated walkability

Werner, C.M., Brown, B.B., Stump, T., Tribby, C.P., Jensen, W., Miller, H.J., Strebel, A. and Messina, A. (2018) “Street use and design: Daily rhythms on four streets that differ in rated walkability,” Journal of Urban Design, DOI: 10.1080/13574809.2018.1448706

Abstract.  Few studies have correlated counts of street users to walkability features or tested for temporal variations in use across the day. Trained observers counted street users for four streets that differed in walkability according to the Irvine-Minnesota audit. From 7 am to 7 pm weekdays, across four 2-hour observation periods, all four streets had significant quadratic trends of increasing then decreasing use. Furthermore, the two most walkable streets also showed significant linear increases in users across the day. Part of a street’s identity is its temporal activity rhythm, and both walkability and rhythms can inform urban design and renewal.