Attract or repel: how street features shape pedestrians’ leisure walks in cities

ABSTRACT

The paper presents a field study analysing how pedestrians walked for leisure purposes in a familiar urban area, and why they walked as they did. Using mobile-based GPS, the walking trajectories of 44 participants were recorded, followed by the administration of a post-walk survey. Results show that participants gravitated towards five distinct paths that were similar in length (three shorter and two longer paths), yet observably different with respect to specific street features. Correspondingly, participants rated street features associated with these differences as factors that either attracted them towards, or repelled them away, from walking in specific streets.

KEYWORDS:

• Walking
• walkability
• leisure
• street features
• cities
• urban design

Acknowledgments

We would like to express our gratitude to the study participants for their valuable contribution. Additionally, we would like to acknowledge the Atel Fridman Excellence Scholarship, awarded by Tel Aviv’s Municipality Center for Economic and Social Research, for supporting this study.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Regarding the GPS traces in Figure 1, it should be noted that a few data points around Rambam street did not fall on a path. These data points were excluded from the analysis because they were suspected to be a localization error.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a Post.Doc Mobility Fellowship [Grant No. P500PT_206932] from the Swiss National Science Foundation (Schweizerischer Nationalfonds zur Förderung der Wissenschaftlichen Forschung).