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

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.

• Publication year

  2019

• Venue

  International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health

• Publication date

  2019-08-01

• Fields of study

  Geography, Medicine, Environmental Science

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.3390/ijerph16162836PMID 31398907PMCID 6721727
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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