Measuring Perceived Walkability at the City Scale Using Open Data

Yang Ye (), Chaozhi Jia and Stephan Winter
Additional contact information
Yang Ye: School of Architecture and Design, Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin 150001, China
Chaozhi Jia: School of Architecture and Design, Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin 150001, China
Stephan Winter: Department of Infrastructure Engineering, The University of Melbourne, Parkville, VIC 3010, Australia

Land, 2024, vol. 13, issue 2, 1-17

Abstract: The walkability of the built environment has been shown to be critical to the health of residents, and open data have been widely used to assess walkability. However, previous research has focused on the relationship between the built environment and walking behavior rather than perceived walkability, and there is a lack of systematic research on walkability at the urban scale using open data. This paper presents a methodological framework for systematically measuring and assessing perceived walkability at the urban scale, considering general and specific features. The walkability indices are obtained using variables from open data or calculated automatically through machine learning and algorithms to ensure they can be evaluated at a larger urban scale. The proposed method is applied to Harbin, China, to assess the perceived walkability of streets using hundreds of thousands of street view images and points of interest obtained from open data. The results are compared with a subjective evaluation of walkability to validate the proposed method. The results demonstrate that measures of the urban built environment can describe perceived walkability. Thus, the proposed framework shows promise for assessing the walkability of urban spaces, supporting policy proposals, and establishing design guidelines for optimising urban spaces.

Keywords: perceived walkability; perception; built environment; open data (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q15 Q2 Q24 Q28 Q5 R14 R52 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2073-445X/13/2/261/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2073-445X/13/2/261/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jlands:v:13:y:2024:i:2:p:261-:d:1341547

Access Statistics for this article

Land is currently edited by Ms. Carol Ma

More articles in Land from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().