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At least 541 records · Page 30Linked to original sources
PubMed2006

The influence of urban land-use on non-motorised transport casualties.

The relationship between non-motorised road traffic casualties and land-use was investigated in two zones of approximately 8 km2 in Newcastle upon Tyne, England. Road traffic accidents are, more usually, analysed in relation to traffic flow, on the assumption that the latter can be derived from land-use data. Here, a direct relationship between primary functional land-use and non-motorised casualties is estimated. We review past work in this area. A shortcoming of casualty data is that it does not record the origin and destination of the journeys being undertaken when the accident occurred. A method was established to identify zones within which most accidents could reasonably be expected to be related to the land-uses within that zone. Generalised linear models were developed using non-motorised casualties as the response variable, with primary functional land-use, population density and junction density as explanatory variables. Separate models were constructed for each combination of cyclists and pedestrians, adults and children, working and non-working hours in city centre and suburban analysis zones. In general, the study found that pedestrian casualties in the city centre zone are particularly associated with an increase in retail and community land-use during working hours. In the city centre zone, out of working hours, an increase in retail land-use (almost certainly clubs and bars) is also associated with an increase in pedestrian casualties. An increase in cyclist casualties during working hours (in the non-pedestrianised area) is associated with an increase in retail land-use.

Accidents, Traffic↗
PubMed2006

Short-term effects of countermeasures for improved safety and mobility at marked pedestrian crosswalks in Borås, Sweden.

The Swedish code concerning car drivers' responsibility to give way to pedestrians was strengthened in 2000. The primary aim of this study is to evaluate the short-term effects of the change in code. Another goal is to look at the effects of the reconstruction of four sites in Borås, Sweden. One site had changes made prior to the change of code, two test sites had countermeasures implemented during the study, and one comparison site was left unchanged. All the sites were chosen because schools were situated nearby. The focus of the evaluation was on children and elderly as pedestrians and cyclists. The goal of traffic calming of a 90 percentile driving speed below 30 km/h was not fulfilled at any of the test sites. A conclusion is that the height of a speed cushion is important. After the speed cushions were lowered from 70 mm to 55 mm, the 90 percentile speed increased from 34 km/h to 41 km/h. Sites with no speed cushions had much higher speeds. The design of an intersection influences road users' behavior. At the site where one crosswalk was removed, pedestrians that were using the remaining marked crosswalk were given way to less frequently than at the other sites. At intersections where most pedestrians used marked crosswalks, the children benefited the most in mobility. At the intersection where pedestrians used marked crosswalks to a lower extent after reconstruction, children and the elderly had the smallest increase in frequency of being given way to. After reconstruction to a court-yard street, the pedestrians were given way to a lower extent compared with the other sites, though the vehicle speeds were the lowest observed at this study. At the sites were no physical changes were made, the change of code improved driver yield behavior, but no more towards children than other age groups.

Accident Prevention↗
PubMed2007

Traffic signal phasing at intersections to improve safety for alcohol-affected pedestrians.

Alcohol-affected pedestrians are among the highest-risk groups involved in pedestrian casualty crashes. This paper investigates the opportunities to use a modified form of traffic signal operation during high-risk periods and at high-risk locations to reduce alcohol-affected pedestrian crashes and the severity of injuries that might otherwise occur. The 'Dwell-on-Red' treatment involves displaying a red traffic signal to all vehicle directions during periods when no vehicular traffic is detected, so that drivers approach high-risk intersections at a lower speed than if a green signal were displayed. Vehicle speed data were collected before and after treatment activation at both a control and treatment site. Speed data were collected both 30 m prior to and at the intersection stop line. The treatment was associated with a reduction in mean vehicle speeds of 3.9 kph (9%) and 11.0 kph (28%) at 30 m and stop line collection points, respectively, and substantial reductions in the proportion of vehicles travelling at threatening speeds with regard to the severity of pedestrian injury. Other important road safety concerns may also benefit from this form of traffic signal modification, and it is recommended that other areas of application be explored, including the other severe trauma categories typically concentrated around signalised intersections.

Accidents, Traffic↗
PubMed2007

New methods to identify and rank high pedestrian crash zones: an illustration.

Identifying and ranking high pedestrian crash zones plays a key role in developing efficient and effective strategies to enhance pedestrian safety. This paper presents (1) a Geographical Information Systems (GIS) methodology to study the spatial patterns of pedestrian crashes in order to identify high pedestrian crash zones, and (2) an evaluation of methods to rank these high pedestrian crash zones. The GIS based methodology to identify high pedestrian crash zones includes geocoding crash data, creating crash concentration maps, and then identifying high pedestrian crash zones. Two methods generally used to create crash concentration maps based on density values are the Simple Method and the Kernel Method. Ranking methods such as crash frequency, crash density, and crash rate, as well as composite methods such as the sum-of-the-ranks and the crash score methods are used to rank the selected high pedestrian crash zones. The use of this methodology and ranking methods for high pedestrian crash zones are illustrated using the Las Vegas metropolitan area as the study area. Crash data collected for a 5-year period (1998-2002) were address matched using the street name/reference street name intersection location reference system. A crash concentration map was then created using the Kernel Method as it facilitates the creation of a smooth density surface when compared to the Simple Method. Twenty-two linear high crash zones and seven circular high crash zones were then identified. The GIS based methodology reduced the subjectivity in the analysis process. Results obtained from the evaluation of methods to rank high pedestrian crash zones show a significant variation in ranking when individual methods were considered. However, rankings of high pedestrian crash zones were relatively consistent with little to no variation when the sum-of-the-ranks method and the crash score method were used. Thus, these composite methods are recommended for use in ranking high pedestrian crash zones instead of individual methods.

Accidents, Traffic↗
PubMed2005

The public health roots of zoning: in search of active living's legal genealogy.

BACKGROUND: Improvements in the built environment and changes in land-use policy are promising approaches to increasing physical activity among a largely sedentary population. Opportunities for walking and cycling as part of daily life are important to increasing physical activity and improving health. Yet, local zoning codes and related land-use regulations have made it difficult to create vibrant, mixed-use neighborhoods with well-connected streets and more compact development-the infrastructure necessary to support healthier rates of walking and cycling for transportation. METHODS: To better understand the dynamic nature of land-use law and policy, and how policymakers might accomplish zoning reform to encourage more physically active environments, this paper traces the public health roots of zoning through a family tree of land-use legal doctrines. RESULTS: Zoning and public health laws evolved from the same legal ancestors-the common law of public nuisance and the expansion of state police powers, both premised on protection of the public's health. When the U.S. Supreme Court approved zoning in the 1926 case of Ambler Realty v. Village of Euclid, it nominally recognized the health basis of zoning. But it went on to craft a new legal rationale focused more on protection of property rights and residential neighborhoods. Since Euclid, court decisions have given little consideration to the public health roots of zoning. Given an emerging body of research demonstrating the importance of walking-friendly environments and the deference shown by the courts to the passage of zoning laws, the courts are likely to support policymakers as they move to change zoning systems conceived long ago. CONCLUSIONS: Legal, historical, and policy rationales support the modernization of zoning and land use policies that allow sensible mixes of land uses. Mixed land uses make walking an attractive alternative to driving and support a more physically active and healthy citizenry.

City Planning↗
PubMed2006

The Irvine-Minnesota inventory to measure built environments: development.

BACKGROUND: Researchers and policymakers increasingly identify active living-including walking and bicycling for travel and recreation-as a potential strategy to increase rates of physical activity in the United States. Understanding the impact of the built environment on physical activity levels requires reliable methods to measure potentially relevant built environment features. This paper presents an audit tool-the Irvine Minnesota Inventory-that was designed to measure a wide range of built environment features that are potentially linked to active living, especially walking. METHODS: The inventory was created through a literature review, focus group interviews, a panel of experts, and field testing in 27 settings. The inventory was developed in 2003-2004. RESULTS: The Irvine Minnesota Inventory includes 162 items, organized into four domains: accessibility (62 items), pleasurability (56 items), perceived safety from traffic (31 items), and perceived safety from crime (15 items). (Some items are in multiple domains.) The inventory includes both a paper version and a version in Microsoft Access, to allow data to be input directly into the computer. CONCLUSIONS: Limitations of methods used to develop the inventory are discussed. Strategies are offered for using the Irvine Minnesota Inventory to systematically and reliably measure characteristics of the built environment that are potentially linked to active living.

Bicycling↗
PubMed2006

The Irvine-Minnesota inventory to measure built environments: reliability tests.

BACKGROUND: Inter-rater reliability is an important element of environmental audit tools. This paper presents results of reliability tests of the Irvine-Minnesota Inventory, an extensive audit tool aimed at measuring a broad range of built environment features that may be linked to active living. METHODS: Inter-rater reliability was measured by percentage agreement between observers. Reliability was tested on a broad range of sites in both California and Minnesota. RESULTS: For the variables that remained in the inventory, in tests conducted at the University of California-Irvine, 76.8% of the variables had >80% agreement among the three raters. In tests conducted at the University of Minnesota, 99.2% of the variables had >80% agreement among the two raters. CONCLUSIONS: Reliability was high for most items. The inventory was modified to eliminate items with low reliability. Differences in the use of the inventory and the goals of the research led to generally higher reliability in Minnesota. Those differences, limitations, and directions for future research are discussed.

California↗
PubMed2004

The city as a context for scientific activity: creating the Mediziner-Viertel in fin-de-siècle Vienna.

At the turn of the 19th century, a surprisingly dense network of academic institutes and medical facilities developed on the margins of Ringstrasse, the impressive boulevard that surrounded the old city of Vienna. Enmeshed, socially and culturally in the life of the city, that area known as the Mediziner-Viertel grew out of the needs of natural scientists and physicians as much as it was shaped by the liberal ideology, feminists' petitions for women's acceptance to university studies, Vienna's intellectuals and Kaffeehaus culture. Recovering the city behind the structure of modern academic institutes tells us a good deal about the context in which intellectual work was developed and its impact on the production of scientific knowledge.

Academies and Institutes↗
PubMed2007

The need for the "new health geography" in epidemiologic studies of environment and health.

Growth during the past decade in what can be broadly referred to as social and environmental epidemiologic research has been an important contributor to an emerging understanding of environment and health relationships. While the incorporation of geographic information systems as well as concepts such as "neighborhoods" might be viewed as evidence of social epidemiology moving closer to health geography, I argue that the two fields are not well aligned. Health geography has much more to contribute to studies of environment and health, and attention by social epidemiologists to those potential contributions could help rectify this misalignment. This paper suggests a number of geographic perspectives on health and environment that could create useful connections between geography and public health, via social epidemiology. To illustrate this potential, I use an ongoing study of a Texas community exposed to a large petrochemical complex-an inquiry constructed in the mode of social epidemiology - as a case in point. I apply several perspectives and concepts from geography to the case study. Cultural ecology, discourse materialized, political ecology, and territoriality are used to assess the Texas City situation and suggest important types of understandings that can enhance the social epidemiology approach to environment and health. I conclude with a discussion of the prospects for a social epidemiology infused with this type of geographic thought and analysis.

Chemical Industry↗
PubMed2005

Obesity and the built environment.

Biological, psychological, behavioral, and social factors are unable to fully explain or curtail the obesity epidemic. In this article we review research on the influence of the built environment on obesity. Studies were evaluated with regard to their methods of assessing the environment and obesity, as well as to their effects. Methods used to investigate the relationships between the built environment and obesity were found to be dissimilar across studies and varied from indirect to direct. Levels of assessment between and within studies varied from entire counties down to the individual level. Despite this, obesity was linked with area of residence, resources, television, walkability, land use, sprawl, and level of deprivation, showing promise for research utilizing more consistent assessment methods. Recommendations were made to use more direct methods of assessing the environment, which would include specific targeting of institutions thought to vary widely in relation to area characteristics and have a more influential effect on obesity-related behaviors. Interventions should be developed from the individual to the neighborhood level, specifically focusing on the effects of eliminating barriers and making neighborhood level improvements that would facilitate the elimination of obesogenic environments.

City Planning↗
PubMed2006

A quantitative method for zoning of protected areas and its spatial ecological implications.

Zoning is a key prescriptive tool for administration and management of protected areas. However, the lack of zoning is common for most protected areas in developing countries and, as a consequence, many protected areas are not effective in achieving the goals for which they were created. In this work, we introduce a quantitative method to expeditiously zone protected areas and we evaluate its ecological implications on hypothetical zoning cases. A real-world application is reported for the Talampaya National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage Site located in Argentina. Our method is a modification of the zoning forest model developed by Bos [Bos, J., 1993. Zoning in forest management: a quadratic assignment problem solved by simulated annealing. Journal of Environmental Management 37, 127-145.]. Main innovations involve a quadratic function of distance between land units, non-reciprocal weights for adjacent land uses (mathematically represented by a non-symmetric matrix), and the possibility of imposing a connectivity constraint. Due to its intrinsic spatial dimension, the zoning problem belongs to the NP-hard class, i.e. a solution can only be obtained in non-polynomial time [Nemhausser, G., Wolsey, L., 1988. Integer and Combinatorial Optimization. John Wiley, New York.]. For that purpose, we applied a simulated annealing heuristic implemented as a FORTRAN language routine. Our innovations were effective in achieving zoning designs more compatible with biological diversity protection. The quadratic distance term facilitated the delineation of core zones for elements of significance; the connectivity constraint minimized fragmentation; non-reciprocal land use weightings contributed to better representing management decisions, and influenced mainly the edge and shape of zones. This quantitative method can assist the zoning process within protected areas by offering many zonation scheme alternatives with minimum cost, time and effort. This ability provides a new tool to improve zoning within protected areas in developing countries.

Argentina↗
PubMed2004

Local services and amenities, neighborhood social capital, and health.

Recent work on health and place has examined the impact of the environment on health. At the local level, research has followed several strands, such as contextual effects of neighborhoods, the impact of differential access to services and amenities, effects of a neighborhood's collective efficacy, and the relationship between social capital and health. Of these four approaches, social capital has generated the most debate; some scholars discuss social capital as a key epidemiological variable, while others discount or dismiss its utility. We undertook this research to assess whether the concept of social capital could increase our understanding of the impact of neighborhoods on residents' health. We utilized key informant interviews and focus groups to understand ways in which residents of diverse neighborhoods in one large California city perceived that their local communities were affecting health. We argue in this paper that using the term "social capital" to discuss social resources and their mobilization in a particular neighborhood highlights the ways in which social resources can vary in relation to economic resources, and that residents of neighborhoods with differing levels of services and amenities face different issues when mobilizing to improve their neighborhoods. Additionally, the projects that people invest in vary by neighborhood socioeconomic status. We draw on the paired concepts of "bridging" and "bonding" social capital, and discuss that while stores of bonding social capital may be more uniform across neighborhoods of varying SES, bridging social capital tends to be found in greater amounts in neighborhoods of higher SES which allows them greater success when mobilizing to improve their neighborhoods.

Adult↗
PubMed2004

Awareness and use of community walking trails.

BACKGROUND: Community trail development is an emerging strategy to increase physical activity (PA) among community residents. The purpose of this study was to assess awareness and use of trails and compare perceptions to objective data. METHODS: A telephone survey was administered to a stratified sample of adults (N = 1,112) in a southeastern county in the United States. Respondents' home addresses and the locations of trails were entered into a GIS database. A kappa statistic was used to measure agreement between awareness and presence of trails. Differences in reported trail use patterns by sex, race, education, and PA levels were evaluated. RESULTS: There was no agreement between the awareness and presence of trails (kappa = 0.07). Fifty-six percent of the respondents reported having trails; however, only 33% reported using the trails. Of the trail users, 42% reported being regularly active in moderate-to-vigorous PA (30+ min/day for 5+ days/week), and 51% reported being less active (P < 0.003). Among walkers (> or =30 min/day for > or =5 days/week), 49% of regular walkers and 35% of irregular walkers (< walkers) reported using the trails (P < 0.04). CONCLUSIONS: Awareness of existing trails in this community and levels of use were low. Marketing programs should promote awareness and use of trails among older adults and irregularly active adults.

Adolescent↗
PubMed2001

Area-wide urban traffic calming schemes: a meta-analysis of safety effects.

This paper presents a meta-analysis of 33 studies that have evaluated the effects on road safety of area-wide urban traffic calming schemes. Area-wide urban traffic calming schemes are typically implemented in residential areas in towns in order to reduce the environmental and safety problems caused by road traffic. A hierarchical road system is established and through traffic is removed from residential streets by means of, for example, street closures or one-way systems. Speed reducing devices are often installed in residential streets. Main roads are improved in order to carry a larger traffic volume without additional delays or more accidents. The meta-analysis shows that area-wide urban traffic calming schemes on the average reduce the number of injury accidents by about 15%. The largest reduction in the number of accidents is found for residential streets (about 25%), a somewhat smaller reduction is found for main roads (about 10%). Similar reductions are found in the number of property damage only accidents. The results of evaluation studies are robust with respect to study design. There is no evidence of publication bias in evaluation studies. Study findings are found to have high external validity.

Accidents, Traffic↗
PubMed2001

A simple method for identifying and correcting crash problems on urban arterial streets.

Urban arterials by their nature carry heavy traffic volumes and generate large numbers of motor vehicle crashes. The present study involved review of police crash reports to identify precrash events and driver actions for a sample of crashes on urban arterials and describes a method for reducing such crashes based on analyses of collision patterns and identification of locations with excessive numbers of crashes of a particular type. Police-reported crash data were obtained for three urban arterials in the Washington, DC metropolitan area. A total of 2,013 crash reports were analyzed. Seven crash types accounted for nearly 90% of these reports. On each arterial studied, several locations with excessive numbers of crashes of a particular type were identified, and corresponding engineering countermeasures were recommended. Differences between the approach employed in this study and traditional blackspot analyses are discussed.

Accidents, Traffic↗
PubMed2003

Accident prediction models for urban roads.

This paper describes some of the main findings from two separate studies on accident prediction models for urban junctions and urban road links described in [Uheldsmodel for bygader-Del1: Modeller for 3-og 4-benede kryds. Notat 22, The Danish Road Directorate, 1995; Uheldsmodel for bygader- Del2: Modeller for straekninger. Notat 59, The Danish Road Directorate, 1998] (Greibe and Hemdorff, 1995, 1988). The main objective for the studies was to establish simple, practicable accident models that can predict the expected number of accidents at urban junctions and road links as accurately as possible. The models can be used to identify factors affecting road safety and in relation to 'black spot' identification and network safety analysis undertaken by local road authorities. The accident prediction models are based on data from 1036 junctions and 142 km road links in urban areas. Generalised linear modelling techniques were used to relate accident frequencies to explanatory variables. The estimated accident prediction models for road links were capable of describing more than 60% of the systematic variation ('percentage-explained' value) while the models for junctions had lower values. This indicates that modelling accidents for road links is less complicated than for junctions, probably due to a more uniform accident pattern and a simpler traffic flow exposure or due to lack of adequate explanatory variables for junctions. Explanatory variables describing road design and road geometry proved to be significant for road link models but less important in junction models. The most powerful variable for all models was motor vehicle traffic flow.

Accidents, Traffic↗