Supporting Active Transportation Planning in Mt. Shasta with Alta

As an international consulting firm dedicated to creating active communities, Alta Planning + Design (Alta) has worked with clients around the world to provide innovative transportation design, planning, and engineering solutions. Beginning in 2021, Alta partnered with the City of Mt. Shasta in Northern California to collaborate on a mobility analysis study. This initiative aimed to address the city’s evolving transportation needs, enhancing safety, accessibility, and comfort across multimodal transportation networks in the region.

Increasing project efficiency with AI-based mapping

For transportation planning projects having comprehensive, accurate, and up-to-date geospatial data is essential. This data provides insights into the intricate details of transportation networks and infrastructure. However, in many cities, the existing inventories of sidewalks, crosswalks, and other types of multimodal infrastructure are often outdated, fragmented, or nonexistent. It is resource-intensive and time-consuming for civil engineering firms and municipalities to produce these diverse features through on-site evaluations or manually digitize features from aerial imagery. Recognizing these challenges, Alta enlisted Ecopia AI (Ecopia) to acquire the detailed geospatial data needed for performing technical analyses in the Mt. Shasta region. 

Ecopia’s mapping systems leverage artificial intelligence (AI) to extract vector data from high-resolution aerial imagery with the accuracy of a GIS professional, efficiently providing high-quality, scalable data. In just 3 days, Ecopia’s AI-based mapping systems digitized transportation features in Mt. Shasta, producing detailed sidewalk and crosswalk inventory in a region that had no active mode inventory before. “Ecopia was able to quickly create that baseline data at a price point that was unmatched,” says David Wasserman, Alta’s Civic Analytics Leader. “The labor cost would be three times as much as it was if we hadn't partnered with Ecopia, and would have resulted in significantly greater expenses for our client,” he says. 

Ecopia's sidewalk inventory, complete with width attribution, helped Alta evaluate sidewalk presence and quality throughout the region and inform areas needing improvement, such as missing or disjointed sidewalks and obstructions. Using Ecopia and existing Mapillary data, Alta was able to identify 133 obstructions that hindered sidewalk access. Crosswalk data was also used to evaluate access and connectivity for pedestrians, further enhancing understanding of the transportation landscape.

Powering connectivity analyses to better understand user comfort

To better understand connectivity in Mt. Shasta’s transportation networks, Alta computed walkshed and bikeshed areas. These areas were created by determining how far one could walk or bike in a straight path assuming there are no obstructions, compared to the actual area that one could reach within the same timeframe accounting for obstacles present in the real-world transportation network. The walkshed and bikeshed areas were then compared to a perfect circle to develop connectivity ratios for both pedestrian and bicycle routes.

To further enhance analyses, Alta developed level of traffic stress (LTS) metrics incorporating Ecopia data on sidewalk presence with additional information such as speed limits to account for traffic dynamics. This LTS analysis provided insights into the comfort of the transportation network for pedestrians and cyclists. This helped Alta understand how connectivity changes when traffic stress is accounted for. Overall, Alta found that elevated levels of vehicle traffic, the presence of interstate ramps, and insufficient pedestrian amenities collectively contribute to an uncomfortable walking environment in many areas outside of Mt. Shasta’s downtown core.

Incorporating digital inventories into their network analysis methodologies allowed Alta to provide Mt. Shasta with deep insights into how pedestrian and bicycle comfort affects multimodal connectivity. This formed the basis for detailed recommendations to improve the safety, accessibility, and comfortability of Mt. Shasta’s multimodal transportation networks. “Ecopia’s data played an important role in creating connectivity ratios, a key metric for evaluating connectivity more holistically in the region,” Wasserman says. “This helped inform our recommendations for areas that require improvement, not only in terms of establishing new connections but also in directing investments toward mitigating stress factors for users”.

The data-driven recommendations that Alta created build on existing infrastructure and identify areas that provide vital connections in the community while considering cost, priority, and feasibility, as well as short and long-term goals. They address pedestrian gaps with sidewalk and high-visibility crossing suggestions and include detailed bikeway recommendations to improve connections for biking or walking. To learn more about Alta’s innovative recommendations for Mt. Shasta's transportation system, check out Mt. Shasta's Mobility Plan. 

Continuing to support active and healthy communities

The work in Mt. Shasta is just one example of Ecopia's collaboration with Alta. Ecopia has provided high-precision geospatial data to support several of Alta’s other innovative transportation infrastructure, planning, and design projects. Ecopia is proud to support Alta with up-to-date data for project areas as they continue to empower communities with solutions to support their goals.

“Ecopia is thrilled to partner with Alta as they continue to create safer, more sustainable, active transportation options for communities everywhere,” said Bill Singleton, VP of Sales at Ecopia. “It is great to see the meaningful impact that our data is having on communities like Mt. Shasta and we are committed to providing high-precision geospatial data to improve the efficiency and scalability of projects”.

To learn more about Ecopia’s civil engineering solutions, get in touch.

References: Mt. Shasta Mobility Plan. (2022). [https://altago.com/wp-content/uploads/Mt-Shasta-Mobility-Plan_Final-WEB.pdf]