Early in the 1969 film 'Midnight Cowboy,' Dustin Hoffman, playing the character of Ratso Rizzo, crosses a Manhattan street and angrily bangs on the hood of an encroaching taxi. Hoffman's line ' 'I'm walking here!' ' has since been repeated by thousands of New Yorkers. Where cars and people mix, tensions rise. And yet, governments and planners across the U.S. haven't thoroughly tracked where it is that cars and people mix. Officials have long measured vehicle traffic closely while largely ignoring pedestrian traffic. Now, an MIT research group has assembled a routable dataset of sidewalks, crosswalks, and footpaths for all of New York City ' a massive mapping project and the first complete model of pedestrian activity in any U.S. city. The model could help planners decide where to make pedestrian infrastructure and public space investments, and illuminate how development decisions could affect non-motorized travel in the city. The study also helps pinpoint locations throughout the...
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