Abstract
(1) Background: school travel is an important part of a child’s daily activities. A comfortable walking environment can encourage children to walk to school. The existing methods of evaluating walking environments are not specific to children’s walks to school. (2) Methods: this study proposes a method of evaluating walking comfort in children traveling to school at street scale. Related indexes were selected that reflect children’s school travel behavior and their needs in street environments based on walking environment audit tools. Factor analysis was then used to calculate the relative weight of each index. (3) Results: the new evaluation method was tested in the neighborhoods around the First Central Primary School in Hedong District, Tianjin, China. The walking comfort for children’s school travel was evaluated in eight indexes: effective street width; street flatness; street cleanliness; interface diversity; buffer; shade coverage; green looking ratio; and sound decibels. Different classes and types of streets were found to have various vulnerabilities. (4) Conclusions: this evaluation method can accurately locate the weak spots in streets to improve the local policymakers’ perception of street environments, which can greatly facilitate the implementation of precise measures to promote children walking to school.
Highlights
Perception of street environments, which can greatly facilitate the implementation of precise measures to promote children walking to school
Research has proven that micro-design factors of built environments strongly influence the walking comfort in children’s school travel
Effective assessment of the street environment is a prerequisite for optimizing school travel roads
Summary
Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Several studies have proved that walkability indexes, including the length and width of sidewalks [12], street interface [13], shading condition of street trees [14], landscape characteristics [15], public facilities [16], and noise [17] impact the walking experience of pedestrians Environmental audit tools, such as MAPS [18], PEDS [19], and SPACES [20] are standard measures to quantify microenvironment data and are widely applied in international studies. A key limitation of these studies is that only a few have assessed the impact of environmental factors on children’s school travel at micro scale to guide the design of streets in detail Another major limitation is that the related literature rarely pays attention to children’s walking comfort requirements on a psychological level during school travel, which requires quantifying children’s subjective feelings. 18, 10292 and problems of the different levels and types of streets to provide scientific of 21 guidance for the planning, design, implementation, and management of streets
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