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Objectives. We examined the public health consequences of unsafe and inconvenient walking and bicycling conditions in American cities to suggest improvements based on successful policies in The Netherlands and Germany. Methods. Secondary data from national travel and crash surveys were used to compute fatality trends from 1975 to 2001 and fatality and injury rates for pedestrians and cyclists in The Netherlands, Germany, and the United States in 2000. Results. American pedestrians and cyclists were much more likely to be killed or injured than were Dutch and German pedestrians and cyclists, both on a per-trip and on a per-kilometer basis. Conclusions. A wide range of measures are available to improve the safety of walking and cycling in American cities, both to reduce fatalities and injuries and to encourage walking and cycling.

One argument for containing urban densities is that cities need a critical population density to sustain sufficiently available public transportation. However, the question of whether denser cities foster shorter public transport networks empirically is problematic because real-world transport nets are a product of many additional factors presumably not related to urban form. This paper adopts a network expansion simulation approach to generate and analyze counterfactual data on network lengths for 36 world cities, in which all networks are generated with similar expansion restrictions and objectives. Denser cities are found to have shorter simulated public transport networks, regardless of the tested model parameters. This provides additional proof that densities are needed to facilitate the provision of proximate public transport infrastructure, with potentially self-reinforcing effects.

The European Copernicus Land Monitoring Service (CLMS) has been producing datasets on imperviousness every 3 years since 2006. However, for 2018, the input for the production of the imperviousness dataset was switched from mixed inputs to the Sentinel constellation. While this led to an improvement in the spatial detail from 20 m to 10 m, this also resulted in a break in the time series as the 2018 update was not comparable to the previous reference years. In addition, the European CLMS has been producing a new dataset from 2018 onward entitled CLC+ Backbone, which also includes a sealed area thematic class. When comparing both datasets with sampled reference data, it appears that the imperviousness dataset substantially underestimates sealed areas at the European level. However, the CLC+ dataset is only available from 2018 and currently does not include any change layer. To address these issues, a harmonized continental soil sealing combined dataset for Europe was produced for the entire observation period. This new dataset has been validated to be the best current dataset for monitoring soil sealing as a direct input for European policies with an estimated total sealed area of 175,664 km2 over Europe and an increase in sealed areas of 1297 km2 or 0.7% between 2015 and 2018, which is comparable to previous time periods. Finally, recommendations for future updates and the validation of imperviousness degree geospatial products are given.

Access to parks by urban residents has been associated with higher mental and physical health, social capital, community cohesion, and quality of life. Policymakers require data-driven metrics to quantify access to parks to benchmark their performance and support decisions for resource allocation. This work leverages high-resolution and globally consistent data on population from WorldPop with parks data and navigation estimates from Google Maps to quantify accessibility to parks across nearly 500 metropolitan areas in six countries, measuring: (1) the share of the population with access to parks within a 10-min walk; and (2) the median walking time to the closest park. We find large differences in access to parks both between and within countries. To demonstrate how this framework can support cross-country comparisons, we assessed access to parks by income group in French and American metropolitan areas, finding shorter walking times in low-income neighbourhoods.

Growth before and especially after the crisis differed from large-city-led growth pattern. The crisis has led to big contractions especially in urban regions and in remote rural regions, while intermediate and rural regions close to a city displayed more resilience. In some countries, the capital metro region had much higher economic growth prior to the crisis, but this pattern was inverted by the crisis. Capital cities are now central to the problems faced by national economies in Europe, and appear to have exacerbated the adverse effects of the crisis. This implies that a development strategy primarily focused on the capital city can lead to more volatile and potentially lower growth, than a more a balanced development strategy. The article uses data from the OECD regional database to investigate the performance of rural, intermediate and urban regions and Eurostat data to investigate metro regions.

Do aspects of quality of government, broadly defined, such as corruption, impartiality, and quality of public services, vary below the country level? The concept of quality of government (QoG) and various measures to assess it have become more ubiquitous in several social science disciplines. QoG is related with economic and social development, better environmental conditions, and better quality of life. Yet while governance indicators have proliferated in recent years, their focus remains almost universally on analysis at the country level. Moreover, the majority of indices rely on expert assessments, as opposed to the assessments of citizens, who are the on-the-ground consumers of public services. Building on a preliminary round of data collected in 2010, this study, for which data were collected in 2013, presents a novel and comprehensive index that captures the quality of governance for 206 regions in 24 European countries. The ‘European Quality of Government Index’, which will be published free for scholarly use, is built on the largest survey to date focusing on governance at the regional level; over 85,000 citizens were surveyed. The instrument proposed here builds on both perceptions and experiences of citizens in public service areas such as health care, education, and law enforcement. The paper presents final results of the survey, as well as a sensitivity analysis and checks for external and internal validity.

To mitigate the impact of greenhouse gas (GHG) and air pollutant emissions, it is of utmost importance to understand where emissions occur. In the real world, atmospheric pollutants are produced by various human activities from point sources (e.g. power plants and industrial facilities) but also from diffuse sources (e.g. residential activities and agriculture). However, as tracking all these single sources of emissions is practically impossible, emission inventories are typically compiled using national-level statistics by sector, which are then downscaled at the grid-cell level using spatial information. In this work, we develop high-spatial-resolution proxies for use in downscaling the national emission totals for all world countries provided by the Emissions Database for Global Atmospheric Research (EDGAR). In particular, in this paper, we present the latest EDGAR v8.0 GHG, which provides readily available emission data at different levels of spatial granularity, obtained from a consistently developed GHG emission database. This has been achieved through the improvement and development of high-resolution spatial proxies that allow for a more precise allocation of emissions over the globe. A key novelty of this work is the potential to analyse subnational GHG emissions over the European territory and also over the United States, China, India, and other high-emitting countries. These data not only meet the needs of atmospheric modellers but can also inform policymakers working in the field of climate change mitigation. For example, the EDGAR GHG emissions at the NUTS 2 level (Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics level 2) over Europe contribute to the development of EU cohesion policies, identifying the progress of each region towards achieving the carbon neutrality target and providing insights into the highest-emitting sectors. The data can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.2905/b54d8149-2864-4fb9-96b9-5fd3a020c224 specifically for EDGAR v8.0 (Crippa et al., 2023a) and https://doi.org/10.2905/D67EEDA8-C03E-4421-95D0-0ADC460B9658 for the subnational dataset (Crippa et al., 2023b).

This study proposes a sequence of methods to obtain geolocated estimates of primary school provision, costs, and access. This sequence entails: (1) location-allocation, an approach that mimics school location patterns in case of decentralised governance, such as exists in the EU and UK; (2) balanced floating catchment areas, an approach to assign pupils to schools assuming free school choice; and (3) school costs estimates, which are induced from pupil counts and the distributional properties of observed school costs. The method is fine-tuned using observed school locations and school-level costs data. It is developed to assess how much local population densities and demography affects school access and schooling costs across Europe. Its results can be aggregated by degree of urbanisation to quantify the differences across human settlements ranging from mostly uninhabited areas to densely populated cities.

Urban accessibility and congestion indicators allow us to benchmark cities. If these indicators are also available at a fine resolution, we can compare different neighbourhoods within a city. We present a dataset of different accessibility indicators for all urban areas with more than 250 thousand people in the EU27, the UK, Switzerland and Norway. Each city is analysed by means of a population grid of 500 m by 500 m and represented by a wider area covering both the densely populated urban centre and the commuting zone. To capture congestion, we measure accessibility for each grid cell at different times of the day that correspond to different traffic conditions using the detailed network and congestion information provided by TomTom. Measurement(s) urban accessibility • congestion impact Technology Type(s) computational modeling technique Factor Type(s) longitude and latitude • urban area • transport performance • absolute accessibility • potential accessibility • location indicator Sample Characteristic - Environment city Sample Characteristic - Location Germany • Italy • French Republic • Poland • Sweden • Croatia • Kingdom of Spain • Kingdom of the Netherlands • Romania • Greece • Bulgaria • Kingdom of Denmark • Republic of Ireland • Belgium • Portuguese Republic • Austria • Hungary • Finland • Czech Republic • Island of Cyprus • Luxembourg • Slovenia • Malta • Lithuania • Slovak Republic • Estonia • Latvia • United Kingdom • Switzerland • Kingdom of Norway Machine-accessible metadata file describing the reported data: https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.12687836