National Health Outreach and Engagement Conference 2024

LaMondia, J and Carter, M.
Supporting active transportation, like walking and cycling, has many benefits for communities
of all sizes, including improved health, quality of life, environmental impacts, and economic
development. This is especially critical in smaller communities, where they are experiencing
record levels of obesity and adverse health outcomes related to reduced physical activity,
according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

As such, many small U.S. cities and rural towns are now seeking to introduce safer and more
accessible walking and cycling infrastructure to their existing vehicle-oriented built
environments to encourage a shift in active travel behavior. However, these communities lack
the resources, experience, and capabilities to determine where to promote built environment
improvements, and what type of improvements to make. In our outreach activities with many
local leaders and planners, we have found they need easy-to-implement data-driven tools to
help them (a) identify potential routes that support active transportation access to everyday
destinations and (b) communicate these routes with residents and others to develop coordinated
improvement plans.

This presentation describes the development, implementation, and case study of an easy-to-
implement GIS-based Active Route Visualization (ARV) Tool to support active transportation
planning and decision making in small cities and rural towns in the United States. The ARV
Tool can be used by small towns in urban and rural areas to generate a planning-level map
highlighting the routes most likely to support walking and bicycling between residential zones
and everyday destinations. This tool is intended to support local planners and coalitions as they
complete the transportation planning public outreach process and identify routes that could be
improved, promoted, and connected to support active transportation. Additionally, the
planning-level maps generated from the tool can be used to focus efforts to cost-effectively
improve the local built environment where residents are most likely to actually walk and bike.

The tool provides a map of where residents are most likely to walk and bike by using a
modified three-step model planning process developed to forecast potential active travel trips
and assign them to the most likely routes. This process (which is done automatically within the
tool once data is entered) includes small-community-focused active travel trip generation, trip
distribution, and route assignment. The tool uses open-source data from the US census and
Google maps. The tool requires a basic understanding of ArcGIS software to run. This
quantitative approach is best because it is familiar to many of the rural planning organizations
interested in active travel planning and creates an impartial and equitable data-driven map.
In this presentation, we will show how to easily collect the data needed to run the tool, how to
use the tool in the GIS platform, and what the resulting map will look like. We will also share
our experiences using the tool in thirteen different Alabama communities, including how
community coalitions used the tool and maps to develop their own local active transportation
action plans.