Spatial Accessibility and the Teenage Social Experience: An Analysis of the Central Willamette Valley

Research on youth loneliness is growing, little work has looked at the connection between geography and infrastructure constrain a teen’s options. Through Oldenburg’s third place framework (Oldenburg, 1999), this study seeks to understand first what are the third places of teenagers today. These are places that allow teenagers to socialize generally without the pressures present at their first places, their homes, and at their second places, their schools (Oldenburg, 1999). Accessibility is measured to these spaces through a route based framework, the Open Source Routing Machine, a high performance routing machine. Teenager data is found through the Decennial Census for those 15-17 years old and re-aggregated through a dasymetric analysis to points. Selected POIS such as coffee shops, parks, movie theaters and gyms are queried through the OverPass API to model a given 3rd place type. Statistics are then used to quantify accessibility between various modalities of travel, including walking, biking and driving. These distances are measured between rural, suburban and urban spaces delineated by the GHS-Degurba toolkit. There exists a stark contrast between urban/suburban and rural teenagers, leading to large discrepancies of travel times. Rural teens face travel times two to three times longer than urban peers, underscoring mobility inequities. Modality affects access as well greatly, with only select third places being accessible by foot even in more densely populated areas such as city centers.