UWEC Construction: Pedestrian Foot Travel

GEOG 337 - GIS II

The goal of this lab was to find the shortest path for people to walk from the beginning of the walking bridge to the entry to Phillips Hall on the UW-Eau Claire campus. Specifically, the impact of the Garfield Avenue construction on pedestrian foot travel is analyzed.

The first step of this lab was to create a network out of the given data. Shapefiles of the path, construction barrier, and start and finish points were provided in a geodatabase, but the network dataset is based off only the path file. The barrier and points were added later. In the New Network Dataset window, I set the travel mode to pedestrian and assigned the corresponding attributes. This way, the length of the path will take into account factors that impact walking distance.

Next, I added the start and finish points and the construction barrier to the network dataset in order to find the two paths. I loaded the points into the Stops field while the construction point were loaded into the Point Barriers field. Then, the network was complete and functional. The Network Analyst toolbar has six options for solving the path, but since the goal of this lab was to find the shortest path, I used the New Route tool. After that path was found, I deleted the Point Barriers field and ran the New Route tool again to find the length of the path without any construction.

Oftentimes, the time it takes to get from point A to point B is more relevant than the actual distance of the path. For example, students crossing the walking bridge to Phillips Hall need to know approximately how long it takes to get to class on time. The average pedestrian walking speed is 5,000 meters per hour. To find the travel time of each path, I multiplied the total length field by 5,000, and then multiplied that number by 60 to find the amount of minutes.

After calculations, the path with the Garfield Avenue Redesign construction ended up costing people walking from the bridge to Phillips 6.21 total minutes. However, after construction is completed, the travel time of the path will decrease to only 5.16 minutes, which is 1.05 minutes less than before.