Grant: Alliance Grants

This 3-year project, in partnership with the Safe Mobility Section at the City of Edmonton, aims to tackle the engineering problems around the design and development of existing active transportation pathways, particularly sidewalks and shared-use paths, in light of safety, equity, and accessibility. We also seek to address these issues as they intersect with sustainability and public health, given the underlying concerns that motivate the push for non-motorized active transportation. The project aims to develop clear and actionable guidance for Edmonton in designing and implementing sidewalks and shared-use paths using faster yet equity-driven methods. The project's broader impacts can be realized by developing a national standard for the equitable design of active transportation infrastructure to instruct transportation engineers and planners across Canada. Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) has been used to support existing infrastructure (re)design and (re)development by digitizing infrastructure networks and exploring ways to automate and improve the analytics required to plan improvements and maintain operations. LiDAR applications include asset data gathering, traffic data collection, and safety evaluation. Moreover, mobile LiDAR has been utilized for measuring roadway geometry, doing roadside inventories and urban intersection design assessment. We aim to use these new technologies to support the City of Edmonton's and the Government of Canada's goals of equitable and accessible transportation for all users, underpinned by the drive to increase active transportation trips across all populations. Our proposed research objectives are to 1) Collect LiDAR data to create digital models of Edmonton's sidewalks and shared-use paths; 2) Collect user's perceptions and experiences of these pathways; 3) Automate the identification of sidewalk and shared-use path features via machine learning methods; 4) Streamline and automate the assessment of existing infrastructure for possible accessibility redesign; 5) Build a prioritization framework to empower decision-makers to select infrastructure improvements that value safety, equity, and accessibility.