Daily Bicycle and Pedestrian Activity as an Indicator of Disaster Recovery: A Hurricane Harvey Case Study

Annie Doubleday, Youngjun Choe, Scott Miles and Nicole A. Errett
Additional contact information
Annie Doubleday: Department of Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences, School of Public Health, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195, USA
Youngjun Choe: Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195, USA
Scott Miles: Department of Human Centered Design and Engineering, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195, USA
Nicole A. Errett: Department of Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences, School of Public Health, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195, USA

IJERPH, 2019, vol. 16, issue 16, 1-10

Abstract: Changes in levels and patterns of physical activity might be a mechanism to assess and inform disaster recovery through the lens of wellbeing. However, few studies have examined disaster impacts on physical activity or the potential for physical activity to serve as an indicator of disaster recovery. In this exploratory study, we examined daily bicycle and pedestrian counts from four public bicycle/pedestrian trails in Houston, before and after Hurricane Harvey landfall, to assess if physical activity returned to pre-Harvey levels. An interrupted time series analysis was conducted to examine the immediate impact of Harvey landfall on physical activity; t -tests were performed to assess if trail usage returned to pre-Harvey levels. Hurricane Harvey was found to have a significant negative impact on daily pedestrian and bicycle counts for three of the four trails. Daily pedestrian and bicycle counts were found to return to pre-Harvey or higher levels at 6 weeks post-landfall at all locations studied. We discuss the potential for further research to examine the trends, feasibility, validity, and limitations of using bicycle and pedestrian use levels as a proxy for disaster recovery and wellbeing among affected populations.

Keywords: wellbeing; physical activity; disaster recovery (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/16/16/2836/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/16/16/2836/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jijerp:v:16:y:2019:i:16:p:2836-:d:255942

Access Statistics for this article

IJERPH is currently edited by Ms. Jenna Liu

More articles in IJERPH from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().