Principal investigator spotlight: Lindsay Braun

Lindsay Braun is an assistant professor in the Department of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Her research focuses on the relationship between the built environment and travel behavior with emphases on active transportation (walking and cycling), public health and social equity.

Braun is currently serving as Principal Investigator for IDOT’s project—R27-200 “Construction of Pedestrian Infrastructure Along Transit Corridors,” which seeks to understand barriers to the implementation of pedestrian infrastructure near suburban transit service (specifically, Pace Bus service in northeastern Illinois). The research will involve developing policy recommendations to overcome those barriers.

“Our research team is conducting interviews and surveys with planning practitioners throughout northeastern Illinois to understand current approaches to pedestrian infrastructure planning and funding,” Braun said. “We are working with Pace and its partners to identify implementation barriers; evaluate the policies of peer transit agencies; and facilitate focus groups with decision makers, advocacy groups, transit users, and other key stakeholders. The outcome of the project will be a set of short-, medium-, and long-term recommendations to help Pace—and suburban transit providers more broadly—to implement plans and policies that more fully support pedestrian access to transit.”

Braun also recently completed an analysis of social equity in the access to bike lanes in U.S. cities using a combination of cross-sectional and longitudinal data.

“I examined the spatial distribution of bike lanes in 22 large cities and found that bike lanes were more likely to be located in places with greater sociodemographic advantage,” Braun said. “I also analyzed associations between bike lane investment and sociodemographic change in three large cities, finding that bike lanes were disproportionately built in places that were either already advantaged or gentrifying over-time. This work highlighted complex concerns about social equity in bicycle planning.”

One of Braun’s next projects is the analysis of social equity in the use of crowd-sourced data to make decisions about bicycle infrastructure. This work recognizes that transportation planners increasingly rely on crowd-sourced data to understand and make decisions about their infrastructure networks, but that the potential equity implications of this practice have not been fully evaluated.

“To address this gap, my colleagues and I will be conducting interviews and surveys with planning practitioners to understand how they use crowd-sourced data to plan for bicycle infrastructure,” Braun said. “We will also be conducting a spatial analysis to understand how representative crowd-sourced data are of underlying community needs.”

Braun was a bikeshare program evaluation consultant for Cincinnati’s bikeshare system. She has also contributed to several peer-reviewed publications, including studies published in the Journal of Transport & Health, Transportation Research Part A (Policy and Practice), and Health & Place. Braun earned her doctoral and master's degrees in city and regional planning from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She also holds a bachelor's from Centre College (Danville, Kentucky).