National Capital Region Trail Monitoring and Analysis Program

Overview

Person riding a bike on a paved greenway.
Image source: Sarah Bayldon

Agencies and organizations that manage trails benefit from meaningful data to meet the needs of their visitors, including pedestrians and bicyclists. In the National Capital, Washington, D.C., area, national parks span multiple jurisdictions with different data collection methods. The National Parks Service (NPS) funds this research project to improve and standardize pedestrian and bicycle count data in the region.

This project aims to centralize, validate, standardize, and analyze trail count data, making it more accessible and useful. It provides a centralized database and dashboard to manage existing and future data from various jurisdictions. The project also fosters collaboration between agencies through quarterly meetings between NPS and local and regional agencies. Additionally, it produces regular reports on travel patterns, monitoring system expansion, data validation, and involves university partners in research activities including network volume estimation using emerging datasets.

Project collaborators include researchers from the UNC-Chapel Hill Highway Safety Research Center, Virginia Tech, and Portland State University Transportation Research and Education Center. This project has the potential to serve as a model for how universities can help institutionalize equipment maintenance and validation, data checking, and data sharing. By improving data availability and usability, it also offers opportunities for safety analysis in trail management.

Project Team Details

  • UNC-Chapel Hill Highway Safety Research Center: Krista Nordback, Sarah O’Brien, Sarah Bayldon, and Mike Vann
  • Virginia Tech: Ralph Buehler, Steve Hankey, Md. Shazalal Tushar, Vahid Bakhshi
  • Portland State University Transportation Research and Education Center: Tammy Lee, Basem Elazzabi

 

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