Two broad categories of barriers to improving pedestrian and bicycle transportation are concerns about traffic safety and personal security. Gathering residents’ perceptions of these barriers can help public agencies develop effective and equitable strategies to create more sustainable transportation systems. We analyzed open-ended responses to the 2020 Milwaukee Safe and Healthy Streets survey to identify common traffic safety barriers (e.g., driver behavior such as speeding and red-light-running) and personal security barriers (e.g., undesirable street behaviors such as gun violence, robbery, and assault) to walking and bicycling. Then, we developed binary logistic models to identify perceptions of neighborhood characteristics, and individual demographic characteristics related to perceiving walking or bicycling as unsafe with respect to traffic or personal security. For walking, respondents’ traffic safety concerns were most strongly associated with perceptions of fast neighborhood traffic speeds, and personal security concerns were associated with perceptions of poor neighborhood cleanliness. For bicycling, both traffic safety concerns and personal security concerns were most strongly associated with poor neighborhood opportunities for exercise. At an individual level, living in a zero-vehicle household and having self-reported poor health were associated with rating traffic safety for both walking and bicycling as unsafe; having disabilities was associated with rating walking as unsafe. In almost every aspect of our analysis, respondents living in lower-income communities reported greater barriers to pedestrian and bicycle safety and security than residents from wealthier neighborhoods. The results emphasized the importance of both the social and physical environment for improving pedestrian and bicycle transportation.

Transportation planners, engineers, and researchers have long lamented the highly emotional public responses generated by changes to parking policies. We know that reducing the supply and increasing the price for parking—while intended to advance sustainability and other important community goals—seems to fuel an angry response, but this knowledge is often vague and anecdotal. This study combines qualitative coding of open-ended survey responses with quantitative analyses of sociodemographic and commute characteristics using descriptive statistics and binary logistic regression models to reveal a strong correlation between parking and anger among University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM) campus users. Higher probabilities of anger are also positively associated with annual household incomes below $50,000, bus pass holders, and residential locations outside of the immediate UWM neighborhood. Qualitative themes from angry comments include frustrations about parking price, supply, and duration; questions about the motivations for university parking policies; and a sense of entitlement among campus users to free and inexpensive parking options. The study interprets these variables and themes together to provide insights into the complicated relationship between parking and anger and the importance of analyzing angry feedback to inform future policies.