Street connectivity, defined as how well streets connect to one and other and the density of intersections, is positively associated with active transportation in adults. Our objective was to study the relation between street connectivity and physical activity in youth. Study participants consisted of 8,535 students in grades 6-10 from 180 schools across Canada who completed the 2006 Health Beh...

BACKGROUND Evidence of associations between neighborhood built environments and transport-related physical activity (PA) is accumulating, but few studies have investigated associations with leisure-time PA. OBJECTIVE We investigated associations of five objectively measured characteristics of the neighborhood built environment-destination access, street connectivity, dwelling density, land-us...

The impact of neighborhood walkability (based on street connectivity and traffic exposure) within 2 km of public primary schools on children regularly walking to school was examined. The most (n=13) and least walkable (n=12) schools were selected using a school-specific 'walkability' index and a cross sectional study undertaken of Year 5, 6 and 7 children (n=1480) and consenting parents (n=1332...

The urban street network is one of the most permanent features of cities. Once laid down, the pattern of streets determines urban form and the level of sprawl for decades to come. We present a high-resolution time series of urban sprawl, as measured through street network connectivity, in the United States from 1920 to 2012. Sprawl started well before private car ownership was dominant and grew...

Negative binomial regression models were used to assess the effect of street and street network characteristics on total crashes, severe injury crashes, and fatal crashes. Data from over 230,000 crashes taking place over 11 years in 24 California cities was analyzed at the U.S. Census Block Group level of geography. In our analysis we controlled for variables such as vehicle volumes, income lev...

We study fundamental characteristics for the connectivity of multi-hop D2D networks. Devices are randomly distributed on street systems and are able to communicate with each other whenever their separation is smaller than some connectivity threshold. We model the street systems as PoissonVoronoi or Poisson-Delaunay tessellations with varying street lengths. We interpret the existence of adequat...

BACKGROUND Past studies of associations between measures of the built environment, particularly street connectivity, and active transportation (AT) or leisure walking/bicycling have largely failed to account for spatial autocorrelation of connectivity variables and have seldom examined both the propensity for AT and its duration in a coherent fashion. Such efforts could improve our understandin...

BACKGROUND There is growing recognition that the urban built environment influences physical activity at the population level, although the effects on disadvantaged groups are less well understood. Using the examples of open/green space and street connectivity, this paper explores whether enhancements to the built environment have potential for addressing physical activity-related health inequa...

Research interests in the studies of complex systems have been booming in many disciplines for the last decade. As the nature of geographic environment is a complex system, researches in this field are anticipated. In particular, the urban street networks in the Geographic Information System (GIS) as complex networks are brought forth for the thesis study. Meanwhile, identifying the scale-free ...