Evaluating Impacts of Street Repurposing Interventions in U.S. Cities (Phase II)

Term Start:

June 1, 2026

Term End:

May 31, 2027

Budget:

$125,758

Keywords:

Location-based services, Pedestrian safety, Street repurposing

Thrust Area(s):

Data Collection Mechanisms, Data Modeling and Analytic Tools

University Lead:

University of Washington

Researcher(s):

Cynthia Chen

Cities are increasingly repurposing street space to support pedestrian activity and economic vitality through interventions such as sidewalk cafés, parklets, streateries, and pedestrian plazas. While these interventions are widely implemented, their impacts are often evaluated using limited case studies or coarse spatial data. There is a need for scalable, data-driven approaches to evaluate their effects on mobility, economic activity, and safety at the street segment level across diverse urban contexts.

This project is Phase II of the prior study “The Effects of Street Repurposing on Pedestrian, Vehicle and Visitor Patterns,” which focused on selected sites in Seattle and developed methods to quantify pedestrian and vehicle movement patterns using Location-Based Services (LBS) data. Unlike Phase I, which focused on a small number of Seattle sites and mobility-related outcomes, the proposed research expands the analysis to multiple cities, introduces computer vision–based intervention detection, and incorporates safety-related outcomes. Building on established workflows, the project will develop scalable data capture and analysis pipelines that can be applied across diverse urban settings.

The project will leverage anonymized LBS trajectory data and street-level imagery. Computer vision object detection methods will be applied to identify and characterize street repurposing interventions, including their type and spatial configuration. The study will examine street segments across cities including Seattle, Chicago, San Francisco, and New York City. A quasi-experimental design will be used, comparing conditions before and after intervention implementation at treated sites and matched control locations to isolate the effects of interventions from broader temporal and spatial trends.

The analysis will evaluate impacts on mobility, economic activity, and safety-related outcomes, including counts and rates of observed behaviors such as vehicle speeding, mid-block pedestrian crossings, and pedestrian–vehicle conflicts. The study will also document contextual characteristics such as land use, neighborhood activity levels, and intervention type to support interpretation of results and assess the transferability of findings across urban environments.

This project will produce a scalable framework for evaluating street repurposing interventions and provide practical evidence to support transportation planning and policy decisions.

Project scope

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