National Center for Sustainable Transportation

In urban areas, many socio-economic concerns have been raised regarding fatal collisions, traffic congestion, and deteriorated air quality due to increased travel and logistic demands as well as the existing on-road transportation systems. As one of the promising remedies, active transportation has been advocated, which may not only mitigate congestion on local streets, but also promote physical fitness, foster community livability, and boost local economy. To promote the active transportation mode, extensive work has been focused on planning and developing a number of pedestrian and bicyclist related programs which require the infrastructure, e.g., sidewalks, as a premise. A significant amount of these efforts have to go for the setup, maintenance and evaluation of the sidewalk inventory on a relatively large geographic scale (e.g., citywide, statewide), which lays a solid foundation for a variety of active-mobility-focused applications and related research.

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