Sidewalk Completeness Score
– The percentage of pedestrian accessible streets that have a
sidewalk on at least one side.
In GIS, the buffer tool was used to create 35 foot buffers on either side of sidewalks. The streets
shapefile was then clipped by the resulting buffer layer. The resulting clipped layer contained
only streets surrounded by sidewalks on at least one side. The clipped road layer was then
clipped by the NSA boundaries to prevent roads from overlapping multiple NSAs. Using the
Summary Statistics tool, the distance of clipped road lengths (equal to the total length of
sidewalks) was totaled by NSA.
The Summary Statistics tool was then used to calculate the total length of street miles per NSA.
The number of street miles with sidewalks was divided by the total number of street miles to
obtain the percentage of pedestrian accessible streets that have sidewalks on at least one side.
The values were categorized using the following:
High – 50%+
Medium – 25% - 50%
Low – 0% - 25%
Source: Information Technology, Chesapeake, 2013.
Access to Public Transportation
– The percentage of residential parcels within walking
distance of public transportation, defined using the Chesapeake Area Transit System bus stops.
By utilizing the tax parcel database, each tax record was assigned to an NSA using GIS. Each tax
record was analyzed for residential use and this number was used as a proxy for the total number
of residential units.
The bus stops were buffered by ¼ mile using GIS. The residential tax parcels that fell within the
buffer boundaries were used as a proxy for the number of residential units with access to public
transportation. The number of residential parcels with access to public transportation was divided
by the total number of residential parcels to get the percentage of residents accessible to public
transportation for each NSA. A reverse Z score was used to prioritize NSAs with lower access to
public transportation.
Source: Information Technology, Chesapeake, 2013.
Real Estate Assessor, Chesapeake, 2012.
Percent of Persons Using a Means Other than an Automobile to Get to Work
– The
percentage of daily commuters who walk, use public transit and bike to work.
Commuter data was collected by census tract. NSAs were assigned the values of the census tracts
by which they were contained. A reverse Z score was used to prioritize NSAs with lower non-
auto commuting rates.
November 2014
A-9
