Abstract
Abstract After the emergence of the term “walkability” in the 1990’s, many metrics have been developed with the aim of evaluating the quality of the built environment for pedestrians. More recently, researchers have also sought an association of these metrics with pedestrian behavior: do better sidewalk conditions and their surroundings correspond with higher pedestrian activity? To study the association of the built environment with the share of pedestrian movements, two different indexes, one at the city level (macro) and one at the neighborhood level (micro), were proposed using georeferenced data from São Paulo (Brazil). Once the available built environment and transport-related data were incorporated in a linear regression model, the neighborhood-level index (micro) and the share of pedestrian movements presented a strong positive correlation (adjusted R2 = 0.797). In addition to the contributions to the relationship of walkability scores with data from developing countries, the discussions presented in this paper intend to provide insights into the territorial disparities in pedestrian mobility, mainly those related to socio-spatial segregation.
Highlights
An integrated consideration of both natural and built environments in transportation planning brings attention to the importance of data and its outcomes in identifying, discussing, and anticipating problems among scholars and municipalities and for non-governmental organizations (NGO) and other civil organizations
In regions with lower Comparison Index (CI) values where the built environment presents a rather consolidated level, the low performance in the share of pedestrian movements can be addressed through activities that seek to promote walking as a mode of transportation, e.g., advocacy and campaigns on pedestrian mobility
High CI values suggest prioritizing the upgrading of existing pedestrian movements performed under inadequate conditions, and low CI values indicate a better match of strategies for promoting walking in regions with a low pedestrian share and a rather consolidated infrastructure
Summary
An integrated consideration of both natural and built environments in transportation planning brings attention to the importance of data and its outcomes in identifying, discussing, and anticipating problems among scholars and municipalities and for non-governmental organizations (NGO) and other civil organizations. Due mainly to the absence of accessible datasets, the diagnosis and implementation of the most fundamental parts of the planning process lack methods regarding the analysis of pedestrians and other active modes Large cities amplify this shortage since the scale of pedestrians requires a degree of detail that hampers the analysis by public managers. For more aggregated data regarding largescale patterns of pedestrian movements, some studies tend to comprise sets of indicators that are more related to physical conditions, such as the road network and land use The latter, which is the focus in this paper, is referred to as the walkability (of a neighborhood, district, or city), term that emerged in the 1990s (BRADSHAW, 1993) and has been used by different metrics with the aim of evaluating the quality of the built environment for pedestrians. The sets of indicators present a diversity of factors, different levels of analysis, and several contexts and approaches towards performing studies on active mobility
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