Using Health Behavior Theory and Relative Risk Information to Increase and Inform Use of Alternative Transportation (05-008)

Project Description: All interventions aimed at promoting walking and cycling as an alternative transportation must educate the public on the associated risk and account for it in order to allocate resources efficiently. There are two components to estimating injury risk – injury counts (the numerator )and a measure of exposure (the denominator). Injury count (fatalities and non-fatal injuries) or the numerator can be sourced from the state crash database (CRIS), however, that excludes events that do not involve a motor-vehicle. Additionally, crash data provides limited information on injury diagnosis beyond discrete identification of injury severity (e.g., fatality, suspected serious injury, possible injury). The most popular and commonly used measure of exposure is population, for it is an easily available metric. However, population while a measure of the burden of injury, overestimates the risk among younger population and males (Keall, 1995). Furthermore, Buehler and Pucher (2021) argue that while per-capita rates are useful for controlling for changes in population across different countries when making country-level comparisons, they do not control for changes in walking, cycling, and driving rates over time within each country. The project estimated three different measures of exposure – annual trip count, annual distance travelled and annual trip duration – for pedestrians and bicyclists. Data Scope: The Areawide Non-Motorized Exposure Tool makes it easier for practitioners to obtain and summarize nationwide travel survey data to estimate pedestrian and bicyclist exposure to risk at statewide and MPO area scales. The first part of the tool titled Statewide Exposure Estimates allows user to estimate non-motorized exposure at the state-level. The second part of the tool titled MPO Area Exposure Estimates also estimates non-motorize exposure but for individual MPOs throughout the nation. Data Specification: The tool uses NHTS (National Household Travel Survey) and (American Community Survey) data to produce annual non-motorized exposure estimates by mode for years 2013 to 2017 in terms of trips, miles of travel, and hours of travel for their respective areawide geography.