Abstract
Walking has become an indispensable and sustainable way of travel for college students in their daily lives and improving the walkability of the college campus will increase the convenience of student life. This paper develops a new campus walkability assessment tool, which optimizes the Walk Score method based on the frequency, variety, and distance of students’ walking to and from public facilities. The campus Walk Score is the product of four components. A preliminary score is calculated through 13 types of facility weight and 3 types of cure of time-decay, and the final score also factors in intersection density and block length. We examine the old and new campuses of Tianjin University to test the tool’s application and evaluate the rationality of facility layout and walkability, and to give suggestions for improvement. The results show that the old campus’ multi-center layout has a high degree of walkability, while the centralized layout of the new campus results in lower walkability. In addition, the diversified distribution of facilities surrounding the old campus promotes the walkability of peripheral places. This assessment tool can help urban planners and campus designers make decisions about how to adjust the facility layout of existing campuses in different regions or to evaluate the campus schemes based on the results of their walkability assessment.
Highlights
Walking, as a sustainable way of travel, plays a significant role in promoting the economy, the environment, and human health, which has important social benefits [1,2,3]
We found a close association between Walk Score and facility layout, with walkability considerably improved if an area has a variety and density of facility types, a decentralized facility layout, and a highly permeable boundary [47,48,49,50]
The following three conclusions and suggestions can be drawn from this study: 1. This optimized Walk Score tool can evaluate the walkability of campus and the rationality of facility layout
Summary
As a sustainable way of travel, plays a significant role in promoting the economy, the environment, and human health, which has important social benefits [1,2,3]. As an important factor affecting the built environment, walkability has been widely used in the domains of health and physical activity, planning, transport, and urban design. One direction accepts the multi-dimensional definition of the term “walkability” by combining the environmental and social factors that induce walking, as well as the pedestrian’s own attributes. Many scholars have focused on neighborhood walkability, defined as the capacity to support physical activity, including the access to different destinations, city block size, street connectivity, residential density, aesthetics, sidewalk access, and other community features [5,6,7]. Some scholars have given more comprehensive definitions combining pedestrian’s walking preference, safety, comfort, and friendliness for walking with built environment characteristics and the means, outcomes, and influences related to a walkable environment [8,9]
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