Quantifying the pedestrian access potential of suburban street network retrofits

Abstract

The United States largely depends on the automobile for personal transportation. This dominance has significant consequences for society over a range of issues, including the environment, public safety, public health, and equity. The issues associated with the dominance of the automobile are most pressing in the suburbs due to their size and curvilinear street network patterns. Thus, any effort to address the negative consequences of automobile dependency in the US needs to consider retrofitting the suburbs and their street networks. We attempt to better understand the potential for street network retrofits to increase suburban pedestrian access. We consider a class of planar graph augmentation problems that attempt to increase pedestrian access to points of interest (POIs) within the study area by adding new pedestrian paths to the street network that follow existing property lines. Our methodology builds on past work on graph dilation and route directness, from the planar graph and street network communities, respectively, to score the pedestrian access disruption of individual blocks. We apply this methodology to a case study of suburban Seattle. We find that, both in the limit of all possible interventions and with a limited number of untargeted interventions, retrofits can meaningfully increase pedestrian access to POIs. Given this promise, the methods we outline present a useful starting point for discussing the potential of street network retrofits to serve non-automobile mobility in suburban communities across the US.