BARRIERS AND FACILITATORS OF WALKABILITY: ANALYSIS OF STREET NETWORKS

AND URBAN DESIGN CHARACTERISTICS AROUND AN INSTITUTIONAL ZONE

LITERATURE STUDY:

This chapter focuses on the important aspects within the focus of school siting and walkability.
Further implications promoting walkable school communities include topics such as health, land
development trends, pedestrian patterns and complexities, and urban design characteristics. The
literature begins to dissect the main benefits and growing health trends of walkability, including how
a healthy community can be developed and how children health tendencies are dependent upon
their environment.

Defining Walkability

In data from 17 countries published by The National Geographic Society in 2009, only five percent of
Americans surveyed used public transportation daily, and only seven percent reported taking public
transportation at least once a week. Sixty-one percent of Americans reported that they never use
public transportation. Internationally, 25 percent of respondents reported using public
transportation daily, and 41 percent reported using it at least once a week. Also there is evidence
that when the 1960 Census collected and published information regarding Journey to Work the
original numbers began with 13 percent taking transit, 10 percent walked and 7 percent worked at
home. Since then, mainly with the growing trend of the private vehicle within the last 50 years, the
public transit and walk modes have declined.

Measuring Walkability

Physical proximity is one of the main factors of walkability. There are two groups of measures of
pedestrian travel in the context of the physical environment: general walkability and origin-
destination walkability. Literature shows that on average, an acceptable distance for pedestrian and
transit-friendly travel can be distinguished by a 5- to (maximum) 10-minute walk, which is
approximately one-quarter to one-half of a mile. The further a child lived away from the school, the
least likely he/she was able or even allowed to walk or bike to school. General aspects of walkability
include specific numbers of intersections and block length and size. For example, smaller block sizes
or shorter block lengths indicate better connectivity or greater potential for movement through
space.

Health in the Built Environment

The positive health benefits of walking or any sort of physical activity have been well established for
a long period of time. The Center for Disease Control has stated that though physical inactivity has
been shown to be a leading cause in mortality, less than 50 percent of the adult population engages
in the recommended levels of physical activity. As of recently, 33.6 percent of children and
adolescents are considered obese or at risk for becoming obese, which is three times the rate of
obesity in children and adolescents for decades ago.
Childhood Obesity and Physical Inactivity:

Childhood obesity is a growing issue not only in the United States, but also internationally. Adding to
the constant population growth and rising public school enrollment numbers, this is a topic that
could be changed by healthy community involvement and planning. The multiple factors that can
influence physical activity behaviors among children and adolescents include sex differences,
parental overweight status, previous physical activity and perceived activity competence, and mostly
parental perceptions concerning safety for the child’s environment. Children and adolescents are
spending a lot more time inside their homes than before, mostly including more time in front of
televisions and video games. Along with that, there is the constant concern for safety within
communities for children especially concerning elementary-aged students.

Land Use Development in Hyderabad

What are the major concerns today with planning and development? First there is urban sprawl,
next there is the issue of water conservation, and then later air pollution in relation to car use and
lack of alternative methods of transportation. In the state of Florida alone, the population is set to
double by the year 2060 to over 35 million people. The automobile-dependency trend throughout
the United States has caused for many different areas of low density and sprawl to occur outside
major nodes and cities, including multiple small and large school neighbourhood developments.

Transportation development has taken a huge leap in importance in the last few decades with the
recent complications and stipulations towards natural resources and pollution. The main discussion
would be toward providing alternative methods of transportation. If the trend for the personal
automobile cannot be decelerated, then the focused on making sure traffic density is dissipated and
not continually overwhelming (less traffic lights possibly). A few best practices would be “Design the
street network with multiple connections and relatively direct routes”, “Provide networks for
pedestrians and bicyclists as good as the network for motorists” and “Incorporate transit-oriented
design features.”

Urban Design Characteristics

Defining what qualities make a city a successful pedestrian-influenced urban core, focusing on urban
design characteristics, help outline this research topic. The specific list of important variables
includes aspects of not only walkability, but also urban design and land use. Urban design elements
include architecture, land use categorization, usage of public space, traffic solutions, quality of
sidewalks, and street level activities as some of the variables that determine the type of livable
community people live in. Land use mainly divides the separation between commercial, residential,
and mixed use (or multi-family), amongst a few others.

Two main characteristics focused upon in urban form are explored in this study:
Street Connectivity and Residential Density. Street Connectivity is analyzed using three indicators: (1)
Street Density, (2) Intersection Density, and (3) Pedestrian Route Directness (PRD).

Street Connectivity
Because streets accommodate most forms of travel, their importance serves as a central focus in
understanding patterns of walkability (Bejleri, et al., 2010). Historically cities have developed using
different patterns and trends. At the beginning, based on early European city development plans,
the older United States cities were laid in a gridiron pattern, but over time with the development of
automobile and other technologies started to bring about irregular forms of roadways some made
up of cul -de-sacs and dead ends. The circuitous nature of lopping roadways of automobile
thoroughfares, focused on making residential streets safer for the pedestrian. Conventional street
designs have had adverse effects resulting in reduced connectivity, an increase in vehicle miles
traveled, increased traffic conditions, and a host of other public nuisances and health-related issues

Residential Density

Density is often defined using population, employment, or floor-area ratio. In this case, residential
density statistics, using housing unit counts, indicate the maximum number of students who
potentially live within pedestrian sheds around the selected elementary schools. This data provides a
generality for how many potential students live within the SAZ attending the school and where the
majority of the neighborhoods lie directionally towards the school location. However, it must also be
taken into account that not every household has a child and some might have multiple, but the
general idea is to identify the direction and path a student potentially takes from within a
neighborhood cluster to the school.

Siting of Institutional Facilities

Combat growth is a growing problem related to school siting trends in recent years. The idea of
trying to reduce sprawl has actually promoted families to move to the suburbs so their children can
attend newer and generally develop tense socio-economic segregations between the newer
traditional neighbourhood developments within these newer suburbs and the older established
urban schools. Comparing the concept of economics, specifically distinguishing how much income
the child’s guardian annually accumulates, as well as the likelihood as to whether or not a child
ultimately walks or bikes to school provides its own challenges. The suburbanization trend could be
partly promoted by some of the newer Institutional siting trends there has been within Hyderabad.

Growth Management

The multiple regulations in place today help with controlling unplanned growth as well as reallocate
the initial blame, whether it’s bad regulations, population increase or developers. The timeframe of
when the school was built plays the main role in assessing its initial development. Segmenting the
different growth management legislation eras are defined as follows: schools sited before 1950
schools sited between 1950 and 1985, schools sited between 1986 and 1995.

Using these time periods to compare the indicators of the pedestrian environment offers insight into
the evolution of urban form around elementary schools and the implications of urban form for the
potential of children to walk to school.