Neighborhood Pedestrian Accessibility
How easy is it to walk in your neighborhood?
The neighborhoods in which our older citizens live should be safe and walkable. Our older citizens should be able to get exercise, meet their neighbors, access public transit and complete simple errands. Unfortunately so many of our communities are developed to suburban standards that have long walking distances between activities and few paved sidewalks. Often the street or parking lots are shared pedestrian ways. The analysis of a major urban corridor in Charlottesville/Albemarle explores pedestrian "Hot Spots". It examines how easy, or how difficult, it is for a person to access typical activities within the neighborhood. Numerous Hot Spots are identified. The most critical of these is the barrier Seminal Trail (Route 29N) poses with its 10 traffic lanes and few if any crosswalks.
Barriers to walkability
Walking along a well maintained sidewalk is generally safe, convenient and pleasant. Stairs, crossing a road in a crosswalk or having to take a shortcut through a parking area represents hindrances to the pedestrian. While these are places one where pedestrians are expected, they take additional effort or additional attentiveness to traverse. Walking in a street or having to cross a major arterial is much more of a barrier. These are not places designed for pedestrians are places of competition with automobiles and perhaps trucks and buses. Having to walk across broken terrain, up a slope, through landscaping is not what one would consider urban walking. That is hiking.
This map analysis explored the walkability of urban terrain by simply scoring each portion of the neighborhood on its ease of walking for a older citizen. Each unit of sidewalk was the base measure and received a score of one. Crosswalks were scored as requiring three times as much effort, parking lots scored as a four, walking in the street a six, crossing a major arterial eighteen and cutting across unpaved terrain a very high sixty.
Data was collected from planimetric drawings of roads, sidewalks, parking areas and non-pedestrian areas. Air Photographs were used to identify features that might not be clear in the planimetrics. Field checking was conducted where buildings, sidewalks and parking lots had been constructed in the intervening time since the photographs and planimetrics were produced.
All data was digitally interpreted. Bus routes and stops had been digitized as part of the larger project. Objects in planimetrics and air photographs were digitized quickly to a four foot accuracy. All digitized objects were converted to a 4 foot grid for the entire neighborhood. Each grid feature was given the scoring for walkability. Off paved terrain was limited to 50 feet.
- Sidewalk score: 1
- Crosswalk score: 3
- Parking lot score: 4
- Roadway score: 6
- Major arterial score: 18
- Open terrain score: 60
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The walking distance to or from major facilities or activities in the neighborhood to all other points was calculated with these scores. The walking distance as was also calculated with all surfaces having a score of 1. Hot spots were identified by taking the ratio of these two "distances".
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Relative Walkability of a Target Neighborhood
The target neighborhood is a strip of residential and commercial development along Seminole Trail (U.S. Route 29N) in Charlottesville City and Albemarle County. The study area was bounded on the south by the KMart lot near Hydraulic Road and on the North by Albemarle Square Shopping Plaza. The study area extends only a few hundred feet to the west of Route 29, but includes a wide portion of commercial and residential development to the east including several senior housing complexes. At the heart of this target area is the headquarters and service center for Jefferson Area Board of Aging and the Senior Center. The target area also includes Whole Foods grocery store, one of Charlottesville's organic and healthy food stores, and Woods Edge, independent living apartment homes for persons age 55 or better.
The Neighborhood is also served by several routes and numerous bus stops of Charlottesville Transit Service.
Five maps show the relative walkability of the neighborhood from different locational perspectives: The closed bus stop (above), the Jefferson Area Board of Aging Headquarters, the Woods Edge apartment homes, Whole Foods Grocery and South Border of Study Area (KMART).. Locations on the blue end of the spectrum indicate ease of pedestrian walkability relative to simple distance. Red and orange locations indicate local "hot spots" where the lack of sidewalks or significant barriers make walkability relatively difficulty. The further one moves away from the facility of origin or destination, the more apt the relative walkability is to fall in the blue end of the spectrum simply because of the greater distance to that remote location.
Clearly the lack of sidewalks in some places is a barrier to easy walkability. This is the case near Woods Edge and the JABA headquarters. Physical barriers such as the 10 lanes of 29N make destinations on the opposite side much less accessible. Fashion Square shopping center is one place one finds particularly difficulty to access by walking.
Limitations in this analysis
The patterns of relative accessibility demonstrated in these maps provide an indication of where more site-specific analyses should be undertaken. Since most data was gathered from four year -old planimetrics and air photographs, the interpretations are subject to the usual photo interpretation limits. Where major land use changes in the neighborhood occurred like Woods Edge, Laurals Assisted Living and Rosewood Village, the level of accuracy of digitizing from field sketch plans rather than planimetrics may affect local results. Further, not all sidewalks in in some of the apartment complexes could be identified from air photographs due to tree cover or plantings. Similarly, stairs and informal paths that would only be identified by on-site exploration would need to be included in more exhaustive analysis maps.
