Drive-Thru USA - the Spatial Analysis of Car-Centric Sprawl - Livestream

Drive-thru businesses, in which customers place and retrieve orders without ever leaving their cars, discourage social interaction and physical exercise, and degrade a street’s walkability and air quality. Despite these negative attributes, their proliferation across the United States has never been quantified or spatially analyzed. This study pursues this topic by mapping drive-thrus throughout every county nationwide, combining data programmatically extracted from OpenStreetMap, satellite imagery, as well as company records. Though drive-thrus are historically associated with highway interchanges and rural areas, we find a large percentage of drive-thrus are located in suburban and urban areas. Further, a street-network analysis indicates that many drive-thrus intersect with local streets, highlighting the dangers these businesses pose to pedestrian safety. This national database - the first of its kind - can guide the co-locating of traffic-calming and pedestrian-safety infrastructure, and inform local governments as they consider restricting or banning drive-thrus from their jurisdictions.

Marcel Moran joins us from San Jose State University to talk about leveraging secondary datasets and automatic processes to measure and analyse novel indicators of car-centrism in the built environment.

Speaker: Marcel Moran, San Jose State University

Register at weblink