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Neighborways are created by painting streets and implementing other interventions with the hope of calming traffic and getting more people to use the street for walking, playing, and biking.
Willoughby Street: Somerville's first Neighborway (Source: Somerville Streets)
Side-streets that run parallel to major thoroughfares are good candidates for becoming a neighborway. In Somerville, the hope is to turn series of side-streets into neighborways, creating a network of safe streets for non-vehicular traffic.
We met with Mark Chase, one of the leaders of the Somerville Neighborway Streets project, to discuss our system and the ways in which it could help measure the change in community transportation patterns as a result of these planned interventions.
According to Mark Chase, there is not a reliable sensor that can track pedestrians and bicyclists. Counting cars is a solved problem, as almost every municipality has the ability to place down pneumatic tubes to count cars.
More complicated forms of data, like turning counts and non-vehicle counts, are collected by human staff or volunteers stationed with a clipboard at the corner of an intersection.
Neighborways needs our system to show via metrics that transforming streets into neighborways results in an increased flow of bicyclists and more kids walking to school. They can collect this data over a longer time period during the day and over multiple days without the linear increase in cost of stationing human staff.
We are piloting collecting video at the intersection of Elm Street and Hancock Street in the Porter Square Station / Somerville area. A volunteer from the Somerville Streets organization will be collecting several hours of video from their second-story porch.
This pilot is in progress. Updates will be posted here with future opportunities.