(calm music) (logo whooshing)
- [Narrator] Accommodating people traveling
by bike or on foot was a key component of updates
in the Texas Department of Transportation's
roadway design manual.
The manual favorite shared use paths, or SUPs,
over other designs, but did not have detailed information
on how to estimate the number of people
who will use the new path before building it,
an outcome that is influenced by the path's design.
Using current sources of information, TxDOT,
along with the Texas A&M Transportation Institute,
developed a sketch planning tool
to improve estimation accuracy.
- It is very hard to estimate how many people
will actually use a new trail once it's built
if nobody is biking and walking in the area today
because there's no place for them to be.
- Shared use paths have become more popular in the world,
also in our region, because they provide a safer access
to active transportation for biking, walking, rolling.
Unfortunately, though, we don't have the data
to support the investments.
We still lack a lot of active transportation data
and tools to understand the demand,
so this project really fills in that gap
by providing resources and tools
to estimate the demand for bicycling and walking
on shared use paths.
- [Bonnie] This project is intended
to analyze various available datasets
to identify ones that are closely associated
with bicycle and pedestrian usage
and to help us estimate the latent demand
for anticipated future use.
- [Ipek] We conducted many stakeholder interviews,
which provided fantastic insights for us
to better shape the next steps, then we used data.
We compiled various different data sources,
whether these are publicly available data sources
or data sources that are available to us through TxDOT,
to make sure that end result
is always available and accessible,
and we took all the output to use as an input
into easy-to-use tools for our end users,
so we developed two different tools
to make the process easier for them
to understand the demand.
- One tool is a spreadsheet
that you input demographic or land use data into the tool,
and it estimates a range of potential activity
that can be expected or the latent demand
that can be expected on that trail.
The other part of the tool is a map-based tool
that you can kind of explore the data associated
with bicycle and pedestrian activity,
so it has things like the locations of schools
and the locations of transit stops
and various activities or demographic data
that are commonly associated
with bicycle and pedestrian activity.
- A planner or a professional transportation professional,
for instance, can go into the tool,
try to understand all these different data sources
and how they interact with the behavior
to understand where they could put the shared use path
or how the shared use path usage will be influenced
by different characteristics.
- [Narrator] For more information
and to find the publication for this project,
please visit the TxDOT research library
at the link shown below.