Walkable Destinations Research Articles

Walking Behaviors Reported in the American Time Use Survey 2003–2005

We report walking for shopping, exercise, transportation, and walking the dog, among other sources captured in the 2003 to 2005 American Time Use Survey (ATUS). We extracted and analyzed 8 walking behaviors (by sex, age, education level, and race/ethnicity) from 24 hours of activities recalled by telephone interview for 15,175 males and 19,518 females age<15 years. On any given day in 2003 to 2005, 45.8% of Americans participated in a median of 45 minutes of any walking activities; 31.6% walked for shopping purposes, 12.5% walked for transportation, 4.8% walked for exercise, and 2.5% walked the dog. College-educated respondents more commonly reported walking while shopping, walking for exercise, and dog walking. Those with less than a high school education more commonly reported walking for transportation. Despite limitations identified in imputing explicit and implicit performance of walking behaviors in the ATUS, Americans engage in a wide variety of walking behaviors that are not well represented by surveys focused only on leisure-time behaviors. Public health implications include increased availability of multiple and varied opportunities for walking, especially through environmental shifts toward more walkable places and destinations and policy shifts that support walking behaviors over competing transportation modes.

Active commuting to school: an overlooked source of childrens' physical activity?

The assessment and promotion of childrens' healthful physical activity is important: (i) to combat the international obesity epidemic that extends to childhood; and (ii) to establish an early habit of lifestyle physical activity that can be sustained into adolescence and adulthood. The primary focus of both assessment and promotion efforts has been on in-school physical education classes and, to a lesser extent, out-of-school structured exercise, sport and play. A potential source of continuous moderate activity, active commuting to school by means of walking or by bicycle, has been largely ignored in surveys of physical activity. Suggestive evidence of steep declines in the amount of childrens' destination walking can be gleaned from national transportation surveys. At the same time, there has been a dramatic increase in the reported use of motorised vehicles, including the use for chauffeuring children. There is very little evidence to support or refute active commuting to school as an important source of childrens' physical activity; however, this is largely because it has been overlooked in the stampede to assess time in more vigorous activities. The promotion of active commuting to school must be considered in the context of parents' real and perceived concerns for their children's personal and pedestrian safety. We certainly do not have a full understanding at this time of all the factors related to decisions about transportation mode, whether by child, parent, community, or school. Such information is necessary if successful and sustainable interventions can be implemented, important transport policy decisions can be made, and community and school designs can be modified. Practice rarely waits for research, however, and there are numerous examples of innovative programming, policies and environmental designs occurring internationally that can serve as natural experiments for enterprising researchers willing to push the envelope of our understanding of active commuting and childrens' physical activity. Since we know so little, there is much to learn.

Driver choice of parking in the city

Of relevance to urban transportation planning in a scenario studied here are the choices of 5000 motorists among 55 parking lots and garages when travelling to one of 13 destinations in a city. These people behave as if they were minimizing a linear combination of driving distance, walking distance and parking fee. Walking is six times more costly than driving. Multi-level garages directly connected to a destination point have a special attraction equivalent to four normal parking facilities. Also influencing driver choice is a random element with a standard deviation of 400 m of walking. None of these factors is significantly affected by parking duration. Estimators that maximize the logarithm of the likelihood function have been determined by non-linear optimization techniques. Calculation of standard errors has been modified to accommodate a lack of statistical independence between the results for different payment periods or walking destinations. Computing charges were reduced 97%, with negligible effect on accuracy by temporarily replacing the probit by the logit model during a preliminary analysis of the data.