A32 How much walking do Sydneysiders do in their daily life? Evidence from the Household Travel Survey

Abstract

Abstract Background The aim is to quantify the amount of walking undertaken by Sydneysiders in the ‘tours’ they make from home. The purpose of quantifying the amount of walking in tours is to provide an evidence base for the key public health message currently advising “more walk trips”. Individuals travel primarily to undertake activities at their destinations. In Sydney, of all tours, only about 20% of home tours are wholly walk trips with the remaining 80% of home tours using car and public transport as the main modes of travel. Given the low density nature of Sydney, converting a car-based or public transport trip to a wholly walk trip may not be possible if the individual is to reach their desired destination. Methods The paper uses three years pooled data from the NSW Household Travel Survey (HTS). The HTS is a large source of personal travel data for the Sydney Greater Metropolitan Area (GMA) and is a survey first conducted in 1997/98 and has been running continuously since then. The HTS includes between 3,000 and 3,500 households in any given year and pooling 3 years of data gives reliable estimates of travel at the geographical level. This paper investigates the drivers of wholly walk tours, including journey purpose and built environment factors as explanatory variables using a double hurdle model. Alongside this, the paper investigates car-based and public transport tours to identify walking as part of these tours. The combination and comparison provides an evidence base as to why and how people walk both in wholly walk tours and as walking as part of a home tour. Results 80% of Sydneysiders walk less than 20 min a day and, if walking is the only physical activity people do, about 87% of the population do not meet the recommended physical activity guidelines. Converting small motorised trip segments to walking trips results in a very small proportional change to the population meeting the guidelines. The double hurdle model’s partial effects allow an understanding of how to target public health message in relation to the determinants of walking. Conclusions Walking to access activities is shown to contribute more to total walking than walking to access motorised modes. Thus, the current public health message “covering short distances on foot” would be better replaced by “doing more activities on foot” to increase the proportion of Sydneysiders meeting the physical activity guidelines through walking.