Search

Introduction: Urban form characteristics intended to support pedestrian activity, collectively referred to as neighborhood walkability, are thought to increase total physical activity. However, little is known about how neighborhood walkability influences utilization of neighborhood space by residents and their overall physical activity., Methods: Sociodemographic information and data on mobility and physical activity over 1-week periods measured by GPS loggers and accelerometers were collected from 803 residents of New York City between November 2010 and November 2011. Potentially accessible neighborhood areas were defined as land area within a 1-kilometer distance of the subject's home (radial buffer) and within a 1-kilometer journey on the street network from the home (network buffer). To define actual areas utilized by subjects, a minimum convex polygon was plotted around GPS waypoints falling within 1 kilometer of the home. A neighborhood walkability scale was calculated for each neighborhood area. Data were analyzed in 2014., Results: Total residential neighborhood space utilized by subjects was significantly associated with street intersection density and was significantly negatively associated with residential density and subway stop density within 1 kilometer of the home. Walkability scale scores were significantly higher within utilized as compared with non-utilized neighborhood areas. Neighborhood walkability in the utilized neighborhood area was positively associated with total weekly physical activity (32% [95% CI=17%, 49%] more minutes of moderate-equivalent physical activity across the interquartile range of walkability)., Conclusion: Neighborhood walkability is associated with neighborhood spaces utilized by residents and total weekly physical activity., (Copyright © 2016 American Journal of Preventive Medicine. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

Public health research has shown that neighborhood conditions are associated with health behaviors and outcomes. Systematic neighborhood audits have helped researchers measure neighborhood conditions that they deem theoretically relevant but not available in existing administrative data. Systematic audits, however, are expensive to conduct and rarely comparable across geographic regions. We describe the development of an online application, the Computer Assisted Neighborhood Visual Assessment System (CANVAS), that uses Google Street View to conduct virtual audits of neighborhood environments. We use this system to assess the inter-rater reliability of 187 items related to walkability and physical disorder on a national sample of 150 street segments in the United States. We find that many items are reliably measured across auditors using CANVAS and that agreement between auditors appears to be uncorrelated with neighborhood demographic characteristics. Based on our results we conclude that Google Street View and CANVAS offer opportunities to develop greater comparability across neighborhood audit studies., (Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

Background: Research indicates that neighborhood environment characteristics such as physical disorder influence health and health behavior. In-person audit of neighborhood environments is costly and time-consuming. Google Street View may allow auditing of neighborhood environments more easily and at lower cost, but little is known about the feasibility of such data collection., Purpose: To assess the feasibility of using Google Street View to audit neighborhood environments., Methods: This study compared neighborhood measurements coded in 2008 using Street View with neighborhood audit data collected in 2007. The sample included 37 block faces in high-walkability neighborhoods in New York City. Field audit and Street View data were collected for 143 items associated with seven neighborhood environment constructions: aesthetics, physical disorder, pedestrian safety, motorized traffic and parking, infrastructure for active travel, sidewalk amenities, and social and commercial activity. To measure concordance between field audit and Street View data, percentage agreement was used for categoric measures and Spearman rank-order correlations were used for continuous measures., Results: The analyses, conducted in 2009, found high levels of concordance (≥80% agreement or ≥0.60 Spearman rank-order correlation) for 54.3% of the items. Measures of pedestrian safety, motorized traffic and parking, and infrastructure for active travel had relatively high levels of concordance, whereas measures of physical disorder had low levels. Features that are small or that typically exhibit temporal variability had lower levels of concordance., Conclusions: This exploratory study indicates that Google Street View can be used to audit neighborhood environments., (Copyright © 2011 American Journal of Preventive Medicine. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

Although many low-income urban areas are highly walkable by conventional measures such as population density or land use mix, chronic diseases related to lack of physical activity are more common among residents of these areas. Disparities in neighborhood conditions may make poor areas less attractive environments for walking, offsetting the advantages of density and land use mix. This study compared poor and nonpoor neighborhoods in New York City, using geographic information systems measures constructed from public data for US census tracts within New York City (N=2,172) as well as field observation of a matched-pair sample of 76 block faces on commercial streets in poor and nonpoor neighborhoods. Poor census tracts had significantly fewer street trees, landmarked buildings, clean streets, and sidewalk cafes, and higher rates of felony complaints, narcotics arrests, and vehicular crashes. The field observation showed similar results. Improving aesthetic and safety conditions in poor neighborhoods may help reduce disparities in physical activity among urban residents.

Ordinary kriging, a spatial interpolation technique, is commonly used in social sciences to estimate neighborhood attributes such as physical disorder. Universal kriging, developed and used in physical sciences, extends ordinary kriging by supplementing the spatial model with additional covariates. We measured physical disorder on 1,826 sampled block faces across four U.S. cities (New York, Philadelphia, Detroit, and San Jose) using Google Street View imagery. We then compared leave-one-out cross-validation accuracy between universal and ordinary kriging and used random subsamples of our observed data to explore whether universal kriging could provide equal measurement accuracy with less spatially dense samples. Universal kriging did not always improve accuracy. However, a measure of housing vacancy did improve estimation accuracy in Philadelphia and Detroit (7.9 percent and 6.8 percent lower root mean square error, respectively) and allowed for equivalent estimation accuracy with half the sampled points in Philadelphia. Universal kriging may improve neighborhood measurement.

Objectives. To demonstrate an information technology-based approach to assess characteristics of streets and intersections associated with injuries that is less costly and time-consuming than location-based studies of pedestrian injury. Methods. We used imagery captured by Google Street View from 2007 to 2011 to assess 9 characteristics of 532 intersections within New York City. We controlled for estimated pedestrian count and estimated the relation between intersections' characteristics and frequency of injurious collisions. Results. The count of pedestrian injuries at intersections was associated with the presence of marked crosswalks (80% increase; 95% confidence interval [CI] = 2%, 218%), pedestrian signals (156% increase; 95% CI = 69%, 259%), nearby billboards (42% increase; 95% CI = 7%, 90%), and bus stops (120% increase; 95% CI = 51 %, 220%). Injury incidence per pedestrian was lower at intersections with higher estimated pedestrian volumes. Conclusions. Consistent with in-person study observations, the information-technology approach found traffic islands, visual advertising, bus stops, and crosswalk infrastructures to be associated with elevated counts of pedestrian injury in New York City. Virtual site visits for pedestrian injury control studies are a viable and informative methodology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Studies relating urban design to health have been impeded by the unfeasibility of conducting field observations across large areas and the lack of validated objective measures of urban design. This study describes measures for five dimensions of urban design – imageability, enclosure, human scale, transparency, and complexity – created using public geographic information systems (GIS) data from the US Census and city and state government. GIS measures were validated for a sample of 588 New York City block faces using a well-documented field observation protocol. Correlations between GIS and observed measures ranged from 0.28 to 0.89. Results show valid urban design measures can be constructed from digital sources. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]