The Effects of Street Repurposing on Pedestrian, Vehicle and Visitor Patterns

COVID is a crisis that is unanticipated both in its occurrence and also its length of impact. In the early days, many office employers implemented work-from-home policies while retail businesses shuttered, leading to deserted downtowns across the country. Yet crisis is also an opportunity, and municipalities and businesses innovated in response to the fears of infection. In particular, many cities changed transportation infrastructure, including permitting sidewalk cafes that accommodated outdoor dining, reallocating street space from travel or parking to outdoor dining, and redesigning streets to accommodate a wide variety of users etc. What are the effects of these urban infrastructure innovations? How well do they draw visitors and support businesses nearby? What are their effects on the region’s traffic patterns? Are there spillover effects spatially? As cities emerge from COVID and re-imagine the future of our urban cores, answers to these questions are critical. Though the existing literature has a wealth of knowledge on the built environment effect on travel behavior, they are nearly exclusively at much larger scale (e.g., census tracts) and static (comparing different behavioral patterns between places with different built environment characteristics. There is little to no insight on how block-level urban infrastructure innovations lead to changes in visit patterns as well as nearby businesses. And yet, changes at this scale (block-level) are where local policy changes take place. This proposal is to answer these questions.

• Record URL:
  • https://tbd.ctr.utexas.edu/research-product/the-effect-of-urban-infrastructure-change-on-movement/

Language

• English

Project

• Status: Completed
• Funding: $150,000.00
• Contract Numbers:

  69A3552344815

  69A3552348320

• Sponsor Organizations:

  Office of the Assistant Secretary for Research and Technology

  University Transportation Centers Program
  Department of Transportation
  Washington, DC  United States  20590
• Managing Organizations:

  Center for Understanding Future of Travel Behavior and Demand

  University of Texas
  Austin, TX  United States 
• Performing Organizations:

  University of Washington, Seattle

  Civil and Environmental Engineering Department
  201 More Hall, Box 352700
  Seattle, WA  United States  98195-2700
• Principal Investigators:

  Chen, Cynthia

• Start Date: 20230901
• Expected Completion Date: 20250531
• Actual Completion Date: 0
• USDOT Program: University Transportation Centers

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Central business districts; COVID-19; Infrastructure; Innovation; Pedestrian flow; Social impacts; Streets; Traffic flow
• Geographic Terms: Seattle (Washington)
• Subject Areas: Highways; Pedestrians and Bicyclists; Planning and Forecasting; Society;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01989182
• Record Type: Research project
• Source Agency: Center for Understanding Future of Travel Behavior and Demand
• Contract Numbers: 69A3552344815, 69A3552348320
• Files: UTC, RIP
• Created Date: May 14 2026 3:19PM