Yesterday Reid Ewing, a Research Professor at the
National Center for Smart Growth, visited SHORE and gave a talk that touched on various aspects of the relationship between the Built Environment and Public Health.
He talked about the sprawl index they developed, which is comprised of: low density, highly segregated land use, lack of centering, and poor street connectivity. Low accessibility is also a characteristic of sprawl.
Sprawl has been linked to outcomes like: increased VMT (Vehicle Miles Traveled), worse air quality, climate change, and traffic safety.
Climate change and traffic safety were new ideas things for me.
Reid also mentioned the 6 "D" variables that influence travel at the meso and micro scale: Density, Diversity, Design, Demographics, Distance to transit, and Destination accessibility.
Some of those D's are relatively straightforward. Design is more complicated to measure but the key point is that "human scale" design is good.
A very interesting comment that Reid made was that Destination accessibility is the most important variable in terms of VMT. This relates to the CO2 project ie my model which measures change in accessibility under different transport scenarios.
