NEW PAPER PUBLISHED BY SAFETREC RESEARCHER JULIA GRISWOLD
SafeTREC researcher Julia B. Griswold has co-authored a newly published paper, "Comparison of Pedestrian Count Expansion Methods: Land Use Groups versus Empirical Clusters" with researchers Aditya Medury, Robert J. Schneider and Offer Grembek in the Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board.
This paper compares two approaches to developing factor groups for hour-to-week pedestrian count expansion factors. The land use (LU) classification approach assumes that surrounding LUs affect the pedestrian activity at a location, and is easy to apply to short-term count locations based on identifiable attributes of the site. The empirical clustering (EC) approach uses statistical methods to match locations based on the actual counts, which may produce more accurate volume estimates, but presents a challenge for determining which factor group to apply to a location. The researchers found that both the LU and EC approaches provided better weekly pedestrian volume estimates than the single factor approach of taking the average of all locations.