![]() I hadn’t noticed it yet, but now I’ll certainly want to take a look. I really appreciate this interesting summary of the paper. Post navigation ← Previous post: Dense and Beautiful Stormwater Management Next post: Location, Transportation, and Urban Design in LEED 2012 →Ģ6 responses to “ The Power of Intersection Density” And it reports surprising, preliminary results about the very large effects of intersection density and connectivity on increased walking, increased transit use, and reduced amount of driving. The study provides a core database, a “seed,” that can be strengthened as more and better research is produced. Nevertheless, this meta-analysis does a huge service by providing ballpark estimates of the effects of built environment on travel. They are favored by academic researchers for those reasons. There are better measurements available, but the intersection density and number of 4-way intersections measurements are relatively easy to compute and can use free databases that have broad geographic coverage. These measurements do not account for intersections that lead to dead ends, bottlenecks in the street layout, or inaccessible gated areas. ![]() In addition, intersection density and number of 4-way intersections are not necessarily the most accurate or rigorous measures of walkability and street connectivity. But it’s important to academics to pin down these kinds of things. , if they bother to think about it at all. , or do people who like to walk chose to live in walkable places? Most nonacademics assume that both are happening The elasticity of 4-way intersections for transit use was 0.29 And in fact, the study did find that 4-way intersections were much more significant for transit use than for walking. In that case, it may be easier to bike or take a short drive to the transit stop. But a street layout may provide 4-way intersections along with extremely large, unwalkable blocks. The number of 4-way intersections in an area can represent the level of street connectivity. It was the biggest elasticity found for walking, and also the biggest elasticity found in the entire meta-analysis.Īlso surprising was the effect of 4-way intersections on transit use. If intersection density is doubled (100 percent increase), walking will increase 39 percent. That means if intersection density is increased 10 percent The ratio between the two is the elasticity.įor example, in “Travel and the Built Environment,” the elasticity of intersection density was found to be 0.39 for walking. Elasticity can be defined this way: when a built environment measurement changes by a certain percentage, that will cause walking, transit use, or driving measurements to change by a certain percentage. The authors report their built environment measures in terms of elasticity. In other words, intersection density is the most important factor for walking and one of the most important factors for increasing transit use and reducing miles driven, but gets relatively little attention in research and in public policy. , and the relatively limited attention paid to design.
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