Can street-focused emergency response measures trigger a transition to new transport systems? Exploring evidence and lessons from 55 US cities.

Transport planning and policy is increasingly being called to action in ways that differ from practices of yesteryear. Varied segments of society are increasingly looking to city streets-the workhorse of a city's transport system-as places to enact change. Namely, to change their character away from the type of streets pervasive in auto-oriented urban environments. Acutely experienced during the disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic, emergency response measures from many cities across the world abruptly altered the nature and purpose of street space. These "street experiments" fueled an opportunity, in part, to explore a transition to practices prioritizing forms of sustainable mobility such as walking and bicycling. This research inventories street-focused emergency response measures from the 55 largest cities in the US. We devise a rubric to systematically assess and locate characteristics of these measures that enable a transition. Results show that five "innovator" and several "early adopter" cities are using COVID conditions to test new forms of streets and in some cases, street networks. These cities excelled in conveying a vision for alternative future, articulating implementation pathways, leveraging political capacity, and circulating information. After six months, half of the cities continue their efforts, including only six which have expanded. The few showing continued strength demonstrate endeavors to evaluate the experiments, validate their feasibility, and embed the experiments into existing sustainability policy. These components, when leveraged together, could seed innovative break-throughs in how city streets are used, designed, and standardized. The paper establishes baseline evidence on which future research efforts can build and provides empirical evidence on early stages of the experimentation and transition processes of urban mobility systems.

Reliability testing of the Pedestrian and Bicycling Survey (PABS) method.

BACKGROUND: The Pedestrian and Bicycling Survey (PABS) is a questionnaire designed to be economical and straightforward to administer so that it can be used by local governments interested in measuring the amount and purposes of walking and cycling in their communities. In addition, it captures key sociodemographic characteristics of those participating in these activities. METHODS: In 2009 and 2010 results from the 4-page mail-out/mail-back PABS were tested for reliability across 2 administrations (test-retest reliability). Two versions--early and refined--were tested separately with 2 independent groups of university students from 4 universities (N = 100 in group 1; N = 87 in group 2). Administrations were 7 to 9 days apart. RESULTS: Almost all survey questions achieved adequate to excellent reliability. CONCLUSIONS: Transportation surveys have not typically been tested for reliability making the PABS questionnaire an important new option for improving information collection about travel behavior, particularly walking and cycling.

A schematic for focusing on youth in investigations of community design and physical activity.

This paper provides a first step in addressing special considerations for youth in a relatively new area of physical activity research. After reviewing the urgent need for novel approaches to increasing physical activity, the growing interest in the effects of community design are discussed. Although most discussion on this topic has focused on adults, there are important differences between youth and adults that warrant a special focus on youth and need to be accounted for This article presents a schematic that accounts for how and where youth spend their time, decomposing the day into time spent in travel and time spent at destinations, and identifying portions of those times that are spent engaged in physical activity. By focusing on both spatial and behavioral dimensions of youth time, the schematic may help organize and advance scientific inquiry into the relationships between community design and physical activity specifically for youth.