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.

Below are three sample images of the instrument. 

 
Figure 1 Figure 2 Figure 3

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.
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.
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.

  Main Community-Based GIS with ArcPad Page  
       
Neighborhood GIS Walkability GIS Housing Condition GIS Teaching GIS

 

 

 For more information:
 Marc Schlossberg
 541-346-2046
 schlossb@uoregon.edu
 http://www.uoregon.edu/~schlossb/PPPM/

   

Last edited on: March 10, 2005