Walkability indices are currently used for a wide range of research and commercial applications. Few studies have examined the relationship between walkability indices and measured pedestrian volume or walking rates, nor explored moderators of pedestrian volume such as weather. With 14 years of traffic study data from the City of Ottawa, a spatial auto-regressive (SAR) multi-level model (MLM) was used to understand the proportion of variance in walking explained by the commercial Walk Score® index and selected weather variables. Modeling revealed that a significant proportion of pedestrian volume at a given location in Ottawa, including its spatial lag, was explained by the corresponding Walk Score® value and its spatial lag (51.45%). Furthermore, weather expressed as a combination of ‘felt’ temperature, presence or absence of precipitation, and percent cloud cover, accounted for 2.79% of the variance in walking. These findings indicate that walkability indices may provide value as cost-effective engineering and urban planning tools.

Sidewalks provide many community services, yet not much geospatial research exists regarding sidewalks, especially in Mississippi. The purpose of this thesis was to use geographic information systems to inventory and map sidewalks for Starkville, MS and to compare sidewalk availability and quality to 2010 US census block demographics. In Starkville, sidewalks served 28% of the census block population, which classifies the city as “Car-Dependent” according to a Walk Score criteria. Majority minority census blocks and majority white census blocks had similar proportions of sidewalks. However, 97% of “Excellent” quality and 64 more sections of ADA compliant sidewalks were within majority white census blocks or commercial census blocks. Residential census blocks, especially majority minority blocks, have 26% less connectivity and an overall less dense sidewalk network. Starkville sidewalks have greatly improved since initial construction, but it seems that the current sidewalk infrastructure still reflects historical settlement and zoning patterns.