Built Environment Influences on Active Travel in the Twin Cities Region: Evidence from a Smartphone-Based Household Travel Survey

Abstract

Compelling evidence links the built environment to active transportation behaviors. However, prevailing studies often rely on relatively coarse characterizations of the built environment to explore relationships between the built environment and active transportation, such as using respondent home locations alone to calculate built environment measures. This study leveraged detailed location information that was collected using a smartphone-based travel survey in the Twin Cities metropolitan region to better understand the associations between built environment factors and active transportation behaviors. We found that using built environment variables calculated across all locations visited by survey respondents over a 7-day survey window strengthened associations between active transportation and built environment measures. Including built environment measures calculated at all locations visited by a respondent (i.e., not just the home location) further strengthened these relationships. Further, we found that including built environment variables measured along trips (i.e., trace data collected while respondents were moving) revealed additional associations with variables describing the transportation system, such as the density of bicycle facilities. More broadly, this work demonstrates how routinely collected transportation data can be valuable to a diverse range of stakeholders including public health researchers and practitioners.