Conducting a
Walkability Audit with ArcPad GIS
Associate Professor: Marc Schlossberg
Graduate Students:
Page Phillips and Darren Wyss
Planning, Public Policy and Management (PPPM)
This site gives an overview of a new walkability audit
instrument designed for ArcPad GIS, presenting a field-based, spatially
referenced approach to pedestrian measurement. Daniel Rodriguez at the
University of North Carolina and Kelly Clifton and Andrea Livi at the
University of Maryland have developed and refined a survey instrument
designed to measure the walkability of an area at the scale of the
streetscape.
We have adapted this pedestrian audit instrument to
be used with ArcPad - a mobile GIS approach that allows the surveyor to
collect data electronically and spatially referenced. The benefits
of this approach are: 1) a reduction in data entry error; 2) data that is
immediately spatially referenced and mappable; and 3) digital images can
be included in the final spatial database. Including digital
photographs have several benefits as well: 1) they provide transparency of
the rating process to other researchers, practitioners, politicians, and
citizens in general; 2) they provide a visual placeholder for unexpected
environments to be later evaluated by a research team; and 3) they provide
a visual reference to various types of pedestrian environments. |
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Below are three sample images of the instrument. |
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Figure 1 |
Figure 2 |
Figure 3 |
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This figure shows ArcPad loaded on a personal digital
assistant (PDA) - essentially a handheld and mobile version of GIS.
Parcels are shown in black and streets are in blue, with one selected
street shown in red. |
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With the street selected, a customized data entry
form can be called up in ArcPad. Here is is Page 1 (of 5) of the
data entry forms. Closed ended questions have values pre-loaded,
while open ended questions allow direct user input. |
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Here is Page 5 (of 5), which includes a field for a
photo. The photo is taken by a digital camera that fits into the
compact flash slot of the PDA. The file name of the photo is
entered into a field in the underlying GIS database, thereby spatially
linking the picture with the street segment. |
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