Assessing Statewide Active Travel Infrastructure in Hawai’i: An Equity and Policy Lens

Sara Jensen Carr (Northeastern University)

Under the Healthy Hawai’i Initiative (HHI), the Hawai’i Department of Health has funded two statewide audits of pedestrian and bike infrastructure in an effort to understand opportunities for active travel. The first, done in 2010, assessed just over 300 street segments; the second, conducted in 2016, looked at 420 additional street segments. In the latter study, we reframed the study in order to link objective measures of the built environment, planning policy, and transit access equity. Working with local community partners and the state’s Department of Transportation, we sampled streets that were potentially due to be upgraded under the state’s new Complete Streets policy and construction of a new rail line on the island of Oahu. Using the Pedestrian Environment Data Scan (PEDS) as a survey tool, which measures over 40 objective and subjective dimensions of street design and use, we built a smartphone app to collect data, which also allowed us to more easily enlist surveyors on distant islands. Our sample confirmed several of the conclusions reached in the 2010 study, namely that roughly 70% of streets surveyed statewide have pedestrian infrastructure, with significant variations between urban and rural areas, while bike infrastructure was very low across the board – less than 4% of streets sampled statewide. This presentation discusses these baseline results, as well as other insights captured by the survey. Moreover, we also discuss the larger value of our follow-up study, which was better aligning the research design to gauge effectiveness of infrastructure policy and transit access equity, as well as changes made to the initial survey to capture the unique built environment contexts of Hawai’i. We found that walkability audits are rarely “one-size-fits-all,” and helpful insights can be gained by framing research through local initiatives, history, and with community partners.