Abstract
Cities and regions are increasingly investing in walking and bicycling infrastructure, driven by well-documented health, social, and environmental benefits of active transportation. However, most agencies lack practical tools to accurately assess whether these investments are achieving their intended outcomes. Accurately measuring change in walking and bicycling attributable to investments like new bike lanes or sidewalks is difficult and involves resources and expertise that is generally not feasible or financially sustainable for mode agencies. One promising solution is to develop generalized tools agencies can use to estimate project benefits using theory and prior empirical evidence, which reduces the burden of evaluation. To explore the validity of tool-based evaluation this research evaluated two active travel volume estimation approaches using projects in the cities of Santa Barbara and Santa Cruz as case studies.
