Development of a Toolkit to Measure and Value Community Severance Due to Traffic

Heavily motorised large roads can interfere with individuals’ ability to access the goods, services, and people they need for a healthy life (‘community severance’). It also reduces the amenity value of streets as active social spaces. Interference with active living affects particularly children, denied freedom to explore and play, and older people, whose slower walking speeds limit their ability to cross roads. Despite this, there is a lack of tools to identify, measure, and study community severance caused by busy roads. This project aimed to develop a suite of tools to measure community severance, and validate the tools through triangulation of findings from different data sources.