The development and deployment of walkability assessment models for built environments
Loading...
URL
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Insinööritieteiden korkeakoulu |
Master's thesis
Unless otherwise stated, all rights belong to the author. You may download, display and print this publication for Your own personal use. Commercial use is prohibited.
Authors
Date
2017-10-30
Department
Major/Subject
Geoinformation Technology
Mcode
IA3002
Degree programme
Geomatiikan koulutusohjelma
Language
en
Pages
67 + 14
Series
Abstract
To encourage walking behavior, revising a built environment to be walkable is recognized as a necessity for influencing a broader audience while also having a long-term effect. Walkability, which indicates the friendliness of walking in a built environment, helps concerning parties to understand a urban context and make informative decisions when building walkable neighborhoods. Walkability is a fusion of different environment characteristics (e.g. sidewalk quality) influential to walking. Multiple instruments have been developed to measure perceived walkability by conducting surveys. However, this process is expensive and time-consuming. Matured GIS technologies together with extensive accessible data enable analysts to measure walkability objectively. While it is considerably inexpensive and time efficient, measuring walkability objectively has several challenging areas to tackle: the environmental characteristics to be considered, the methods to evaluate these characteristics, and the data availability to conduct the evaluation. To date, no existing model addresses those aspects appropriately. This thesis has developed models to objectively evaluate walkability for neighborhoods and walking routes. Through examining empirical studies that explored the relationship between walking and environment characteristics, this thesis has identified a few characteristics that are influential to walking and incorporated them into the area based walkability evaluation model: population density, destination accessibility, land use mix, walking infrastructure quality, aesthetics, traffic safety and transit accessibility. The importance of these characteristics changes when targeting different walking purposes (recreational or transportation), population groups, geographic locations and cultural contexts. By weighing each characteristic accordingly, the model adapts to different study contexts. The weights should be adjusted based on expert knowledge or by benchmarking empirical studies conducted in similar contexts (e.g. similar urban setting). For evaluating walkability for walking routes, Dijkstra's algorithm is adopted to identify the walkable routes by minimizing the cost associated with the routes. This cost is defined by route distance, street type (e.g. highway, sidewalk), infrastructure quality and facilities along the routes. As a case study, walkability is evaluated for the city of Helsinki. The implementation of the models has two purposes: 1) to provide a benchmark for analysts who intend to apply the model to other contexts, 2) to provide the environment quality information of Helsinki to concerning parties. Data processing, characteristics assessment, and walkability evaluation are described in detail to fulfill the first purpose. Secondly, a web application was developed to provide an accessible service for users to view the environment quality information including walkability. While walkability varies for individuals due to their personal preferences and needs, this service also allows customization by providing functionality to adjust weights of characteristics that are used to define walkability.Description
Supervisor
Virrantaus, KirsiThesis advisor
Virrantaus, KirsiKeywords
GIS, walkability, built environment, walking, active transport, environment characteristics