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Improving walkability has the potential to play a major role in improving both accessibility and the public health dimensions of our cities. Walkability research to-date has focused on the influence of the built environment on physical activity associated with health and active transport outcomes. While the probable desirability of walkability to r...
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... suburbs in Sydney have a development pattern with units clustered around a train station, along with a mixed-use area, and houses further away. Figure 15.3 shows a representative suburban area around one of the radial train lines. ...
Context 2
... the distribution of suburb WalkScore for units and houses is quite different, see Fig. 15.4. The most units are in suburbs with a WalkScore of 70-80, and barely any are in suburbs with a WalkScore below 45. In contrast for houses, the suburb WalkScores peak around 60, and all levels from 0 upwards are represented. This may give the house model greater power to differentiate levels of WalkScore, especially if the effects of ...
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Citations
... Xiaoran HUANG, Li ZENG and Hanxiong LIANG wrote the main manuscript text; Li ZENG and Hanxiong LIANG prepared Figs. 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16 and 17; Xiaoran HUANG, Daoyong LI, Xin YANG and Bo ZHANG revised the manuscript, provided supervision and funding for this research. All authors reviewed the manuscript. ...
Assessing street walkability is a critical agenda in urban planning and multidisciplinary research, as it facilitates public health, community cohesion, and urban sustainability. Existing evaluation systems primarily focus on objective measurements, often neglecting subjective assessments and the diverse walking needs influenced by different urban spatial elements. This study addresses these gaps by constructing a comprehensive evaluation framework that integrates both subjective and objective dimensions, combining three neighbourhood indicators: Macro-Scale Index, Micro-Scale Index, and Street Walking Preferences Index. A normalization weighting method synthesizes these indicators into a comprehensive index. We applied this framework to assess the street environment within Beijing’s Fifth Ring Road. The empirical results demonstrate that: (1) The framework reliably reflects the distribution of walkability. (2) The three indicators show both similarities and differences, underscoring the need to consider the distinct roles of community and street-level elements and the interaction between subjective and objective dimensions. (3) In high-density cities with ring-road development patterns, the Macro-Scale Index closely aligns with the Comprehensive Index, demonstrating its accuracy in reflecting walkability. The proposed framework and findings offer new insights for street walkability research and theoretical support for developing more inclusive, sustainable and walkable cities.
... Walkability is a key dimension of healthy, sustainable, resilient and productive cities. Active transport reduces carbon emissions, pollution, noise, and requires less physical space per person than the use of private cars (Baobeid et al., 2021). Walking for transport is related to better health (Martin et al., 2015;Oja et al., 1998), and people may also value walkability economically, as supported by property values among other evidence (Roper et al., 2021). Over the last 20 years, many walkability measures have been described, the majority of which are derived from objective features of the built environment, and usually some positive relationship with walking behaviour is found (reviewed by Dalmat et al., 2021;Talen & Koschinsky, 2013). ...
... This has the strength of using current provision of different types of destinations as a guide to residents' needs but does not allow for comparison of absolute destination numbers between cities. We think that a person who can access, say 100,000 jobs has more access than one who can access 10,000, even if they both represent 10% of the jobs in their respective cities (Levinson & Wu, 2020), and this is borne out by on average higher land prices in larger cities (given that land markets are a way to measure the benefits of access to individuals (Roper et al., 2021)). The proportion approach is also not able to measure walkability improvements that occur simultaneously with growth in destination numbers. ...
... In recent years, much academic work has used commercialized indexes with proprietary algorithms such as Walkscore, which do not provide a transparent methodology with full details of the algorithms, data inputs and their currency, and thus do not enable critique (Kitchin, 2017), or advances in measurement approaches. A recent review of studies comparing residential property prices to walkability metrics found 20 papers of which 12 used Walkscore-nine as the only metric, three as one of several comparators (Roper et al. 2021). ...
... Future research will also test the comparative performance of WalkTHERE in property value modeling, to see if performance improves over that previously found with Walkscore and whether exploration of model parameters can provide clues to understanding apparent inconsistencies or idiosyncrasies produced by the Walkscore property pricing correlation (Roper et al., 2021). ...
In this paper, we argue for an explicit decoupling of “walkability” and “walking behavior” and for the advantages of a definition of walkability based on access. This provides impetus for a new approach to constructing and using walkability indices, combining accessibility theory with a goal of comprehensiveness and communicability. Diminishing returns-to-opportunities can be used to map the infinite origin-destination gravity potential space to a finite scale thus creating an easily communicable metric, or metrics. In addition, this method can be applied to any mode and applied to multiple destination types singly or combined. Application of this theoretical approach is demonstrated through the creation of a novel comprehensive open-source transport walking potential index, WalkTHERE. A 0-100 scale is used to represent the percentage of people’s total needs potentially accessible by walking. The index is applied to eight Australian and two European cities, and the specific data considerations and parameters chosen are described. Significant disparity is shown in walking access between different destinations within cities, and in walking access between cities. Walking access to recreational opportunities is highest, followed by education and shopping, with very little employment access for most residents. Avenues for expansion and further validation are discussed.
... This has the strength of using current provision of different types of destinations as a guide to residents' needs, but does not allow for meaningful comparisons between cities, only within them, or measuring walkability improvements that occur simultaneously with growth in destination numbers. Wu and Levinson (2020, p. 143) argue "land markets primarily consider absolute rather than relative access when embedding value", and land markets are a way to measure the benefits of access to individuals (Roper et al. 2021). ...
... If studying the walkability of a city centre for tourism, the framing question would be what percentage of a tourist's needs they can fulfil by walking, the frequency with which tourists visit different kinds of destinations could be used for weighting, and their walking distances to derive a different distance decay factor/s. A goal of future research is to test the comparative performance of WalkTHERE in property value modelling, to see if performance improves over that previously found with Walkscore and whether exploration of model parameters can provide clues to understanding apparent inconsistencies or idiosyncrasies produced by the Walkscore property pricing correlation (Roper et al. 2021). ...
In this paper, we argue for an explicit decoupling of ‘walkability’ and ‘walking behaviour’ and for the advantages of a definition of walkability based on access. This provides impetus for a new approach to constructing and using walkability indices, combining accessibility theory with a goal of comprehensiveness and communicability. Diminishing returns-to-opportunities can be used to map the infinite origin-destination gravity potential space to a finite scale thus creating an easily communicable metric, or metrics – and this method can be applied to any mode, and applied to multiple destination types singly or combined. Application of this theoretical approach is demonstrated through the creation of a novel comprehensive open-source transport walking potential index, WalkTHERE. A 0-100 scale is used to represent the percentage of people’s total needs potentially accessible by walking. The index is applied to eight Australian and two European cities, and specific data considerations and parameters chosen are described. Significant disparity is shown in walking access between different destinations within cities, and in walking access between cities. Walking access to recreational opportunities is highest, followed by education and shopping, with very little employment access for most residents. Avenues for expansion and further validation are discussed.
Colouring Australia is a digital platform for collecting and visualising building level information across several Australian cities. It provides a valuable resource for bringing together data on building age, material, sustainability ratings, walkability and other key metrics as we plan for net zero cities. Colouring Australia comprises part of the international Colouring Cities Research Programme, which supports the development of open-source platforms that provide open data on national building stocks. In this paper we outline the technical architecture of the platform, and the development and visualisation of a building level walkability metric based on pedestrian access to destinations. This platform provides a useful digital tool for planners to understand which parts of the city are walkable and in turn this can support future active transport programs and policies. Future research will be to validate this novel walkability index through a series of stakeholder and public workshops using the Colouring Australia platform in an interactive tabletop environment where usability testing can be undertaken.
