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California was the first state to legislate a Safe Routes to School (SR2S) program under Assembly Bill 1475 (1999). SR2S funds construction projects that make it safer for children to walk or bicycle to school and encourages a greater number of children to choose these modes of travel for the school commute. The main goal of this project was to assess the long-term impact of program-funded engineering modifications on walking and bicycling levels and safety. Improvements were evaluated with a targeted method to determine the countermeasures that resulted in safety and mode shift. The major results indicated that the safety of pedestrians increased within 250 ft of an infrastructure improvement, such as a sidewalk. There was also evidence of mode shift near improvements. Positive results for safety and mobility, as well as improved data collection for funded programs, should make SR2S programs competitive among other transportation needs.

Growing interest in sustainable transportation systems and livable communities has created a need for more complete measures of pedestrian travel. Yet many performance measures do not account for short pedestrian movements, such as walking between stores in a shopping district, from a street parking space to a building entrance, or from a bus stop to home. This study used a 2009 intercept survey and the 2009 National Household Travel Survey (NHTS) to quantify pedestrian travel to, from, and within 20 shopping districts in the San Francisco Bay Area of California. Overall, walking was the primary travel mode for 21% of intercept survey and 10% of NHTS tours with stops in these shopping districts. However, detailed analysis of pedestrian movements showed that walking was common on respondent tours (52% of intercept survey tours included some walking) and that walking was used on the majority of trips within these shopping districts (65% of intercept survey trips and 71% of NHTS trips within the shopping districts were made by walking). In general, urban core and suburban main street shopping districts had higher levels of pedestrian activity than suburban thoroughfare and suburban shopping center shopping districts. The detailed analysis in this paper provides a more complete picture of pedestrian activity than is commonly shown by national and regional household survey summaries.

Growing interest in sustainable transportation systems and livable communities has created a need for more complete measures of pedestrian travel. Yet many performance measures do not account for short pedestrian movements, such as walking between stores in a shopping district, from a street parking space to a building entrance, or from a bus stop to home. This study used a 2009 intercept survey and the 2009 National Household Travel Survey (NHTS) to quantify pedestrian travel to, from, and within 20 shopping districts in the San Francisco Bay Area of California. Overall, walking was the primary travel mode for 21% of intercept survey and 10% of NHTS tours with stops in these shopping districts. However, detailed analysis of pedestrian movements showed that walking was common on respondent tours (52% of intercept survey tours included some walking) and that walking was used on the majority of trips within these shopping districts (65% of intercept survey trips and 71% of NHTS trips within the shopping districts were made by walking). In general, urban core and suburban main street shopping districts had higher levels of pedestrian activity than suburban thoroughfare and suburban shopping center shopping districts. The detailed analysis in this paper provides a more complete picture of pedestrian activity than is commonly shown by national and regional household survey summaries.

The variability within calculated protein residue pKa values calculated using Poisson−Boltzmann continuum theory with respect to small conformational fluctuations is investigated. As a general rule, sites buried in the protein core have the largest pKa fluctuations but the least amount of conformational variability; conversely, sites on the protein surface generally have large conformational fluctuations but very small pKa fluctuations. These results occur because of the heterogeneous or uniform nature of the electrostatic microenvironments at the protein core or surface, respectively. Atypical surface sites with large pKa fluctuations occur at the interfaces between significant anionic and cationic potentials.