d improve safety along routes to school.
- Built environment improvements to increase active transport to school benefited the surrounding community as nearly 40% of communities are within ½ mile of a public school. Five crosswalks were restriped and raised walking intersections and new traffic lights were installed.
- Parental surveys confirmed increased rates of walking to school (18% to 42% in two years) and parental perceptions of health benefits and enjoyment of walking increased. Rates of walking home did not change.
Susan Henderson, Robin Tanner, Normal Klanderman, Abby Mattera, Lindey Martin Webb, John Steward. (2013). Safe Routes to School: A Public Health Practice Success Story—Atlanta, 2008-2010. Journal of Physical Activity and Health, 2013, 10, 141-142.
- This novel interdisciplinary collaboration between public health and computer science provides automatic analysis of existing public data feeds to quantify the impact of built environment intervention on increasing bike travel mode share.
- The Archive of Many Outdoor Scenes (AMOS) has archived over 225 million images of outdoor environments from more than 12,000 public webcams since 2006. Using the publicly available webcams and a custom web crawler (similar to the web search engine or Google), webcam images are captured at the rate of one image per camera per hour and given a time stamp. Many of the locations have had built environment improvements such as complete streets, bike share startups or walking school bus programs. AMOS is able to document and allow quantification of population behavior changes following the built environment modification.
- The intersection of Pennsylvania Ave NW and 9th ST NW in Washington, DC where bike lanes were installed was chosen as a location to monitor transportation mode share comparing the first workweek or June 2009 and the first week of June 2010 (pre-bicycle lane and post-bicycle lane).
- Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) website was used to crowd-source the image annotation. MTurks are simple tasks not yet c