Your Community - Community Assessments

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There are a lot of good reasons to take stock of where things are in your community with regard to walking, bicycling, and physical activity. This type of data gathering is often referred to as a "community assessment" or "audit."

A community assessment can help you identify trends. For instance, it might be helpful to know whether more or fewer children are walking to school on a regular basis. But, unless such data was collected sometime in the past, even with good, current numbers you'd have nothing to compare to. So, you may well want to collect some information on current conditions (sometimes called "baseline data") to make it possible to track changes over time.

An assessment of your community or neighborhood can also help you define objectives, and even serve as a way to measure progress. Conducting an assessment provides an objective way to describe the difference between where you are and where you want to be.

Ready to get going with your community assessment? Here are some walking and bicycling assessment “tools” that you may find useful.

National Center for Bicycling & Walking (NCBW)

The NCBW has been developing a set of indicators to help define and
monitor progress towards making communities more bicycle-friendly and
walkable. Download it here. (PDF Format | 146KB)

One of the keys to bringing about change is to know where you are relative
to where you want to be. This Community Assessment Tool is designed
to help you defi ne or identify where your community is and to suggest
where it needs to go. With this information, you can use various guides as
“road maps” to plot a course to make your community bicycle-friendly and
walkable, and to support active living.

Through its Active Living Resource Center program, the NCBW is also working with the University of Oregon on the development of an exciting new approach to data collection by community members. Called the Community Assessment Tool (or CAT), this tool is software that runs on personal digital assistants (PDAs). For more information, click here. The two maps in the header of this page were produced in community workshops using this tool.

Pedestrian and Bicycle Information Center (PBIC)

Walkability Checklist
This checklist helps to identify specific walking problems and offers suggestions on what can be done to fix them. The checklist was developed by PBIC through funding from National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) for use by the Partnership for a Walkable America. Several versions of the checklist are available including one from the National Safety Council and another from NHTSA (in English and Spanish).

Bikeability Checklist
This checklist helps to identify specific bicycling problems and offers suggestions on what can be done to fix them. The checklist was developed by PBIC through funding from NHTSA.

League of American Bicyclists

Bicycle Friendly Communities Assessment
The Bicycle Friendly Communities Campaign is an awards program of the League of American Bicyclists that recognizes municipalities that actively support bicycling. Two application forms are designed to generate a community profile by assessing levels of activity and investment in improving conditions for bicycling.

University of Kansas
The University of Kansas Community Tool Box contains a wide range of interesting and useful information, including a section on “Assessing Community Needs and Resources”. This section provides a process for involving people in the process of evaluating what needs to be done to create change in a community.

Local Government Commission

The Community Image Survey
Based on the Visual Preference Survey developed by architect Anton Nelessen, the Community Image Survey is a very effective tool for educating and involving community members in land use planning. The Community Image Survey consists of 40 slides from a community or region that present contrasting images of our living environment - its streets, houses, stores, office buildings, parks, open space and key civic features to help people better understand crucial planning elements and make more informed, pro-active decisions about creating places where they want to live, work, shop and play.

National Park Service

Community Tool Box:
From the Rivers, Trails, and Conservation Assistance (RTCA) program of the National Park Service. This site outlines a process for a broad community inventory, with links to related resources and tools.

Note: You'll need Adobe Acrobat Reader in order to read the items listed above. If you don't have Acrobat Reader already installed on your computer, you can get it here.