Understanding the Role of Community-Generated Data in Planning for Equitable Youth and Family Access to Active Transportation Options

Young people and families have special transportation needs and demands, and they typically make more trips every day than adults without children at home.[1] In its recent Transportation Master Plan, Boulder County recognizes this fact and calls for analysis of what is missing from current efforts to accommodate the accessibility and mobility needs of families with school-aged children.[2]

Understanding the particular and often complex transportation needs of young people and families is important for promoting human-centered mobility and access strategies, removing barriers, and increasing the capacity of the transportation system to accommodate youth traveling to and from school and other destinations. The current methods for discerning the transportation options and actions of young people and families, however, provide limited data and may lead to limited solutions that may not align with the county’s transportation goals or the needs and values of diverse youth and families. This research project proposes to extend the capacity of the Boulder County Youth Transportation Program to collect community-generated data that may provide more information for active and multi-modal transportation interventions that meet the needs of youth and families. This research will honor the county’s commitment to reaching out to under-served community members and ensuring their voices are heard while testing the feasibility of a new type of community-engaged data collection for ongoing use by county staff and other transportation professionals.

Three inter-related questions guide this research, focusing on school transport data collection methods and resulting solutions: 1) How does the data collected to inform planning for active and multi-modal transportation to school influence the interventions developed? 2) Could planners learn additional information about the needs and capabilities of stakeholders by directly collecting rich spatial and experiential data from underrepresented students and their adult caregivers in different geographic areas around Boulder County? 3) Would this new, intergenerational data collection approach influence innovative active and multi-modal transportation interventions and be a feasible data collection, design, and planning strategy for the ongoing co-creation of safe routes programming and infrastructure changes?

The goal of this research is to learn whether transportation planners, Safe Routes to School program coordinators, and families can benefit from integrating community-generated data into decision-making processes, and, in turn, whether doing so might increase the capacity of youth and adults, whose voices are typically not heard, to become more actively involved in processes that affect their lives. Ultimately, these findings could result in more active travel to school and other destinations by more and more diverse students, resulting in benefits for the students (health and autonomy), their families (time and money), and their communities (congestion and air quality).

References:

[1] Litman, T. (2020). Evaluating accessibility for transport planning: Measuring people’s ability to reach desired goods and activities. Victoria Transport Policy Institute. Retrieved from https://www.vtpi.org/access.pdf

[2] Boulder County Transportation. (2020). Boulder County Transportation Master Plan. Longmont, CO: Boulder County.

This study has been approved by the University of Colorado Denver Institutional Review Board - COMIRB Protocol #21-3907