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Resilience down the streets

Matthew Toro, ASU Library

Background

Maricopa County suffers from a mobility crisis, especially for non-motorized forms of mobility. Our community's built environment is inherently hostile to pedestrians, cyclists, and other non-motorized commuters. Mobility, the ability of people to move through the community to live, work, and play, is deeply linked to all forms of community resilience - from public safety, to employment, to economic development, to social justice, to mental health, to ecological impacts, etc. 

Research questions

  • Using geographic data, and performing analytics of Maricopa County’s regional-scale built environment, can we identify areas that are most dangerous for pedestrians and cyclists?

  • If so, can we use these analytics to target policy and design interventions aimed at building our community’s mobility resilience?

Partners

  • ASU Researchers and Analysts

  • KER Academic and Community Fellows

  • KER Crosscutting Scholars

  • Arizona Department of Transportation

Findings

  • Applied data analytics are on-going, but there is a poorly recognized under-acknowledged public safety crisis for pedestrians and cyclists in our community.

  • The built environment of specific neighborhoods is more hostile to non-motorized mobility than others.

  • There are concrete design and policy interventions that can help alleviate the crisis while building mobility resilience in our community.

  • From this work, many “tactical urbanism” design interventions can be testing for short terms solutions to the longer-term design problems inherent to our built environment.

Deliverables

Explore Toro's story map of the mobility challenges and opportunities in Metro Phoenix below: 

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