The Level of Traffic Stress concept was first used by the Mineta Transportation Institute (MTI) in San Jose, California as a way to think about the bike friendliness of a city. Using a few simple metrics, speed limits and number of lanes, the authors mapped the City of San Jose into the following four categories of facilities:
The Miami Valley Regional Planning Commission (MVRPC) simplified and adapted the original LTS analysis to a regional scale as part of the 2015 Update to the MVRPC Bikeways Plan. Using a modified version of the MTI model, MVRPC staff mapped the entire region. One of the primary goals of the project was to identify low-stress islands and potential projects to connect them.
The Miami Valley has the nation’s largest paved trail network, which provides a very low-stress riding environment where cyclists are completely separated from traffic except for where the trails cross roads. However, these trails do not lead directly to many work, shopping, residential and recreational destinations. To reach those, riders need to be comfortable on the street grid. Increasing connections between the regional trail system and low-stress streets will make the regional network safer and more useful to many riders who are “interested, but concerned.” The MVRPC believes this is the key to increasing the share of trips taken by bicycle in the Miami Valley.
This project takes the data collected by the MVRPC and makes it available as an interactive map using Leaflet and OpenStreetMap.
LTS data is stored as TopoJSON, converted to GeoJSON on the client using the TopoJSON API, sliced into vector tiles using geojson-vt, and rendered as a canvas element.
It was originally hosted as a Node.js app on Azure using Express, but is now hosted on my personal site using GitHub pages.
Check out LTS Dayton!
MIT