L Street View - Characterizing Neighborhoods With Google Street View

L Street View allows users to navigate through the world's streets by moving their device and looking around. This movement is tracked by the device's rotation sensor and a user-enabled control appears on the screen. The control allows users to hide or show the motion tracking feature.

The ability to navigate the world using Google Street View has given artists a remarkable tool for creating new works of art. Over the past decade, artists have seized upon this unprecedented visual access to public spaces as a way of commenting on issues from surveillance to sex work.

There is increasing interest in using Google Street View for measuring neighborhood characteristics to inform policy decisions. This exploratory study shows that Street View is an efficient tool for examining some characteristics important to neighborhood health, such as sidewalk width and availability, infrastructure for active transportation, motorized traffic safety and parking, urban forestry, and physical disorder.

However, a few methodological concerns should be considered to adapt Street View for systematic scientific analysis. These include the need to develop protocols to improve reliability and validity measures through the systematic use of Street View's pan, rotate, and magnification functions during multiple passes along a target block; the need to collect additional quality metrics to complement those captured with the Street View camera; and the impact of image degradation with zooming. A future direction for research is to test and validate new methods of characterizing neighborhoods using Google Street View, including the development of Street View-specific protocols optimized for obtaining data on those characteristics most critical to policy.