How Far, by Which Route, and Why?
A Spatial Analysis of Pedestrian Preference
Asha Weinstein
(corresponding author)
Assistant Professor, Department of Urban and Regional Planning
San José State University
One Washington Square, San Jose, CA 95192-0185
email: asha.weinstein@sjsu.edu
408-924-5853; 408-924-5872 (fax)
Vanessa Bekkouche
Research Assistant, Public Policy and Management
University of Oregon
Katja Irvin
Research Assistant, Department of Urban and Regional Planning
San José State University
Marc Schlossberg
Assistant Professor, Planning, Public Policy and Management
University of Oregon
November 15, 2006
Word count: 4907 + 10 tables = 7,407 words
Submitted for presentation at the 2007 Annual Meeting of the Transportation Research Board
This work was supported by the Mineta Transportation Institute at San José State University.
Weinstein and Schlossberg are both Research Associates of the Institute.
TRB 2007 Annual Meeting CD-ROM Paper revised from original submittal.
Weinstein, Bekkouche, Irvin, and Schlossberg
ABSTRACT
There is an increasing interest in community walkability, as reflected in the growing number of
state and federal initiatives on Safe Routes to School, the new concern over a national obesity
epidemic (especially in children), and a wide range of policy initiatives designed to convince
travelers to switch from auto trips to more environmentally sustainable bicycle and walking trips.
In each of these cases, policy makers recognize walking as a key mode of travel and believe that
increasing the number of walk trips is a key goal.
Despite the seeming simplicity of the goal, we know very little about how far people
actually walk or about how street design affects people’s willingness or capacity to access their
desired destinations by walking. This paper reports on a survey designed to answer two primary
research questions related to the topic of pedestrian behavior: (1) How far do pedestrians walk to
light rail stations? (2) What environmental factors do they say influence their route choice?
The paper concludes with five major findings about our study population at five rail transit
stations in the San Francisco Bay Area in California and in Portland, Oregon::
1. Pedestrians walk considerably farther to access light rail stations than commonly
assumed.
2. Pedestrians believe that their primary consideration in choosing a route is minimizing
time and distance.
3. Secondary factors influencing route choice are safety and, to a lesser extent,
attractiveness of the route, sidewalk quality, and the absence of long waits at traffic
lights.
4. Pedestrians vary considerably in how accurately they estimate the distance of a regular
walk trip.
5. Asking survey respondents to trace their walking route on a local map is an effective
research technique.
TRB 2007 Annual Meeting CD-ROM Paper revised from original submittal.
Weinstein, Bekkouche, Irvin, and Schlossberg 2
INTRODUCTION
There is an increasing interest in community walkability, as reflected in the growing number of
state and federal initiatives on Safe Routes to School, the new concern over a national obesity
epidemic (especially in children), and a wide range of policy initiatives designed to convince
travelers to switch from auto trips to more environmentally sustainable bicycle and walking trips.
In each of these cases, policy makers recognize walking as a key mode of travel and believe that
increasing the number of walk trips is a key goal.
Despite the seeming simplicity of the goal, we know very little about how far people actually
walk or about how street design affects people’s willingness or capacity to access their desired
destinations by walking. Developing new tools to identify walk trip distances is a key research
challenge, as is learning to characterize the local environment from a pedestrian point of view.
This paper reports on a survey designed to answer two primary research questions related to the
topic of pedestrian behavior:
1. How far do pedestrians walk to light rail stations?
2. What environmental factors do they say influence their route choice?
The next section of the paper sets the context for the research by examining related literature.
A description of the survey methodology comes next, followed by an analysis of the survey
findings, and then the paper’s conclusions.
LITERATURE REVIEW
As explained in the introduction, the study addressed two primary questions:
1. How far do pedestrians walk to light rail stations?
2. What environmental factors influence their route choice?
For neither the question of how far pedestrians walk nor the factors that influence their route
choice is there a well-established literature providing firm answers to the questions. While there
are many rules of thumb and educated guesses, relatively little research exists on walking
behavior in general, and these topics in particular. Until the mid-1990s, pedestrian behavior was
virtually ignored in the transportation and planning literatures. In the last decade, and especially
the last five years, the topic has suddenly become popular and many papers related to pedestrians
have been published or underway. Much of the new literature has come from the public health
community, complementing work done by planning and transportation researchers.
The earliest and largest body of research, which comes from the transportation planning
community, assesses the factors that influence people to choose one mode of travel instead of
another. In general, the authors of these studies want to understand how to shift Americans away
from solo driving trips and towards transit, biking, or walking. Because the research was usually
designed solely to discover why people choose to walk instead of drive, most studies did not
examine the distances or routes walkers traveled. The majority of these studies claim to look at
what is often called the “three Ds”: density, diversity, and design, though in reality, the studies
tend to focus on the first of the two Ds, density and diversity of land-uses. Many researchers
have concluded that residents are more likely to walk in dense neighborhoods that include a
diverse mix of nonresidential uses within a short distance (1, 2, 3), though a subset of the
TRB 2007 Annual Meeting CD-ROM Paper revised from original submittal.
Weinstein, Bekkouche, Irvin, and Schlossberg 3
research community remains unconvinced that the association is very strong, except for
comparisons between extremely high and extremely low densities (4, 5).
Despite the rhetoric about the 3 Ds, micro-scale urban design and environmental factors
were often ignored, likely because no pre-existing datasets captured design factors such as the
presence of greenery, attractive buildings, smooth and wide sidewalks, traffic control devices
that aid pedestrians crossing the street, or the presence of heavy traffic. In North America and
Europe there were scattered studies on the topic from the 1970s through the mid-1990s, many
focusing on how heavy traffic volumes discourage walkers (6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16).
Since 2000, there has been a burst of enthusiasm for taking on the design question more
rigorously, with a number of studies on the topic appearing in the last decade (17, 18, 19, 20).
However, researchers have quickly discovered that pedestrian behavior is highly complex and
difficult to study, and the existing body of research points to few consistent findings. A recent
review of the evidence linking physical activity with the built environment concluded that there
is limited evidence showing a connection between neighborhood design and walking, but that
further research is needed to determine if there is truly no link or if existing research has not been
designed properly to reveal real relationships (21).
There is even less literature looking specifically at how far pedestrians walk than there is
about what factors influence people to walk. The main sources of information are the U.S.
Census, National Household Travel Survey, and regional household travel surveys. These
surveys often report the number of walk trips made, but do not necessarily include trip distances,
and even when they do, the data is often suspect (22). In the 2001 NHTS, for example,
surveyors recoded many walk trip distances to the nearest mile. Given that most walk trips are
quite short, this recording method makes the data almost useless for understanding walk trip
distances with any precision.
In terms of how far pedestrians walk to access light rail specifically, most of the existing
data is collected by transit agencies conducted internal surveys of their passengers. Researchers
usually do not have easy access to the data, as there are not centralized databanks that collect the
surveys. In addition, such surveys usually ask respondents to estimate the distance they walked,
and thus the data may not be highly accurate. One study from the mid-1990s, however, gathered
a few such surveys from the United States and Canada and conducted a survey of light-rail riders
in Calgary, Canada. The authors found that the median walking distance in Calgary was about a
fifth of a mile, though at suburban stations it was twice that distance (23).
METHODOLOGY
In the survey conducted for this research, respondents were asked a series of questions about
how far and how long they walked to the station, what factors influenced their choice of route,
their attitudes towards walking, and some basic demographic questions.
Surveys were distributed at five transit stations. Two were in the San Francisco Bay
Area, in California: one in San Jose (Japantown) and one in El Cerrito (El Cerrito Plaza). The
other three were in Portland, Oregon (Hollywood, Gresham, and Rockwood). The primary
criteria for selecting the station areas was to find neighborhoods where pedestrians would have a
reasonably high number of different route options. We assumed that people would not be willing
to walk more than a little bit out of their way to find a nicer route, and so we selected only
neighborhoods with streets laid out in a grid pattern. With a grid street pattern, respondents had
multiple routes to choose from that were all approximately the same distance. We also chose
TRB 2007 Annual Meeting CD-ROM Paper revised from original submittal.
Weinstein, Bekkouche, Irvin, and Schlossberg 4
neighborhoods where walkers would have a mix of local and collector or arterial streets, as well
as both residential and mixed-use or commercial streets.
Surveys were distributed at transit stations to people who walked to the transit stop.
Between one and three surveyors distributed surveys, depending on the day and station, and they
worked between 6 a.m. and 10 a.m. on mostly weekday mornings, from February to May 2006.
Each surveyor was instructed to approach all people waiting at the station and ask how they
arrived at the station. The surveyors followed a script for consistency. Those people who
responded that they walked to the station were asked follow-up questions to determine their
eligibility for the study: (1) If they were over 18 years of age, and (2) If they would be willing to
participate in the study anonymously. Willing survey respondents received a six-page written
survey and a pen. They were told they could either return the completed survey to the surveyor
at the station or mail it back in a pre-stamped envelope.
The survey included three sections:
1. Questions on walking behavior, preferences, and route choice.
2. A map inserted in the survey on which respondents were asked to trace their walking
route. Respondents were also asked to mark intersections and streets they avoided on
their walk if they had not indicated them in writing in the first part.
3. Questions on basic demographics of the respondents.
A total of 328 surveys were returned by respondents. Table 1 shows the number returned per
station, as well as the response rate per station. Almost two-thirds of the surveys (64%) came
from the two Bay Area stations; over a third of the surveys came from El Cerrito Plaza station
and just over another quarter came from the Japantown. Of the remaining surveys, almost a
quarter came from Portland’s Hollywood station (24%), and the Gresham and Rockwood
stations in Portland provided the remaining few surveys.
TABLE 1 Survey Response Rates, by Station
Station
#/Completed,
Usable Surveys
Response Rate
a
(%)
El Cerrito Plaza 120 71
Japantown 90 49
Hollywood 78 45
Gresham 15 15
Rockwood 25 23
TOTAL 328 45
a
Response rate is defined as the number of surveys returned as a proportion of
the number of surveys distributed. Some riders contacted were not given a
survey because they had not walked or refused to participate.
The response rate for the survey was quite high. For the total population, the response rate
was 45%. El Cerrito Plaza had the highest response rate, at 71%, while response rates from the
other stations ranged from 15% to 49%. We calculated the response rate as the number of
surveys returned as a proportion of the number of surveys distributed. Some transit riders
TRB 2007 Annual Meeting CD-ROM Paper revised from original submittal.
