Gabriel LEFEBVRE-ROPARS
Biographical note
Gabriel Lefebvre-Ropars holds a bachelor s degree in Urban Planning and is currently a M.A.Sc. candidate in Transportation Engineering at Polytechnique Montréal. His research interests focus on the link between active transportation behavior and the built environment.
Presentation: Assessing the potential of walkability indices to explain access and egress to suburban rail stations
Suburban rail stations are prominent features of the urban landscape and play an important role as intermodal nodes between mass transit and numerous access and egress modes, including walking, cycling and driving. In the Greater Montréal Area (GMA), parking areas adjacent to rail stations face a strong demand, with numerous commuters using their private car to access their boarding station. With the rise of transit-oriented development (TOD) and corresponding policy goals, there is a need to better understand how the urban form influences access and egress mode choice in order to promote strategies in favor of active transportation.
This paper explores the results of a case study on the explanatory power of composite walkability indices on the choice of active transportation to get to and from suburban rail stations in the GMA. The chosen measures combine several variables related to the urban form, such as population density, land use diversity, intersection density, infrastructure comfort, network design and directness and green space supply. These measures include the Walkability Index (Frank et al., 2010), the Walk Score® (Koschinsky, Talen, Alfonzo, & Lee, 2016), the Walk Opportunities Index (Freeman et al., 2012), the Pedshed (Porta & Renne, 2005), the Extended Walkability Index and the Moveability Index (Buck et al., 2014), the Neighborhood Accessibility Index (Witten, Pearce, & Day, 2011) and the Pedestrian Index of the Environment (Singleton, Schneider, Muhs, & Clifton, 2014).
New measures created to improve the representation of the determinants of walking to transit are also presented. These measures leverage techniques like principal component analysis (PCA) to include more elements of the urban form and improve their explanatory potential. Potential uses for each walkability index, according to the individual and trip characteristics, are presented. Levers for action and policy recommendations regarding the urban form around rail stations are also highlighted.
