Estimating Transport Footprint along Highways at Local Levels: A Combination of Network Analysis and Kriging Methods

Transport impacts on the natural environment have been addressed in a large body of literature. Increasingly, transport impacts on the natural environment are quantified by ecological footprint analysis. Existing studies analyze it either at aggregated levels or at local levels only when traffic data are available. When such data are unavailable, existing methods cannot estimate transport footprint at local levels. In this study, we propose an approach to estimate and visualize transport footprint along highways where traffic data are not available by using a combination of network analysis and Kriging methods. We demonstrate the use of the approach for estimating transport footprint along highways in Houghton County of Michigan, USA. Transport footprint along highways generated by the proposed approach provide useful information for environmental and transportation planners to understand traffic impacts on the natural environment at local levels and identify hotspots/corridors of transport footprint.