Evaluating Pedestrian Connectivity for Suburban Sustainability

A crucial ingredient for achieving urban sustainability is reducing society's dependence on the automobile. Residents of suburban developments are often dependent on their cars for trips to destinations within the neighborhood because of circuitous street layouts, lack of sidewalks, and long travel distances. The term pedestrian connectivity is introduced as a measure of both the directness of route and the route distance for the pedestrian for each home-destination trip. The developed methodology for retrofitting pedestrian enhancements to an existing suburban neighborhood is coded as an ArcView GIS extension. Improvements include the addition of sidewalks and access pathways to isolated cul-de-sacs to make for shorter and more direct routes. Reduced energy consumption, and therefore greater sustainability, may be achieved by having suburban neighborhoods retrofitted in such a way as to allow people to walk for some of their needs and to be well connected to a regional transit system. Modeled results from a neighborhood in Hamilton, Ont., Canada, show how the retrofitted improvements could lead to measurably improved conditions for pedestrians.