IAAPE - Pedestrian accessibility and attractiveness assessment tool when planning for walkability

Every trip begins and ends with walking. Many factors affect our decisions on whether, when and where we walk: personal traits, built environment, trip purpose, urban context and other environmental and cultural variables. Although many models refer the importance of such issues, integrated and structured analysis that bring together these concerns is still lacking. Pedestrian accessibility has now been fairly extensively addressed by the literature. However, it is not only the existence of an accessible environment that makes pedestrians use it. Making it attractive plays a fundamental role. Hence, measuring the quality of urban walkable spaces adds on an attractiveness dimension to pedestrian accessibility analysis, which enriches the modeling and evaluation of more walkable environments. This paper focuses one part of the IAAPE project that aims to assemble a GIS-based pedestrian accessibility and attractiveness assessment tool to support urban planning for walkability. One cornerstone of the project is selecting built environment factors and weighting them for further analyses. We call it the structuring and scoring phases. In fact, we do not aim to provide another “right” set of factors that influence walking. Instead, is seeks to provide an operational process to structure a flexible walkability assessment tool that accounts for different pedestrian groups (adults, elderly, impaired and children), for different trip purposes (utilitarian, recreational) and that is adaptable to different urban contexts. Our results prove that, according to the stakeholder panel we interviewed, selecting and weighting factors differs significantly among pedestrian groups, such it does for different walking purposes.