Impact of regional population density on walking behavior

Masayoshi Tanishita and Bert van Wee

Transportation Planning and Technology, 2017, vol. 40, issue 6, 661-678

Abstract: Land use can influence walking (measured by the number of steps) and so the health of people. This paper presents the result of empirical research on the impact of regional population densities (inhabitants per inhabitable area) on the number of steps (all steps, both outdoors and indoors). With data collected from almost 11,000 respondents in 148 Japanese regions, we estimate polynomial regression models, the total number of steps being the dependent variable and densities being the main independent variable. Regional population density significantly affects the number of steps after controlling for individual and household attributes. The estimated population density that maximizes the number of steps is around 11,000 persons/km2. Increasing densities, up to levels of around 11,000 inhabitants/km2, could increase walking and consequently the health of inhabitants. The population density elasticity of the number of steps is 0.046–0.049 in a simple log linear regression model without a peak.

Date: 2017
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/03081060.2017.1325137 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:taf:transp:v:40:y:2017:i:6:p:661-678

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/GTPT20

DOI: 10.1080/03081060.2017.1325137

Access Statistics for this article

Transportation Planning and Technology is currently edited by Dr. David Gillingwater

More articles in Transportation Planning and Technology from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().