Background: Adding additional bicycle and pedestrian paths (BPPs) to an area should lead to improved health outcomes of residents over time. However, quantitatively determining which areas stand to benefit more from BPPs, how many miles of BPPs are needed, and the health outcomes that may be most improved remain open questions.
Objective: Our work provides and evaluates a methodology that offers actionable insight for city-level planners, public health officials, and decision makers tasked with the question: “To what extent will adding specified BPP milage to a census tract improve residents’ health outcomes over time?”
Methods: We conduct factor analysis on data from the American Community Survey (ACS), CDC 500 Cities Project, Strava and BPP location and usage data from two different cities (Norfolk, VA and San Francisco, CA). We construct two city-specific factor models and use an algorithm to predict the expected mean improvement that a specified amount of BPP miles contributes to identified health outcomes.
Results: We show that given an amount of additional BPP miles in each year from 2012 to 2015 and a specific census tract, our models forecasts health outcome improvements more accurately after five years than two alternative approaches for both Norfolk, VA and San Francisco, CA. Furthermore, for each city we show that the additional accuracy is a statistically significant improvement (P