How Common is Walking To, From, and Within Shopping Districts?
Growing interest in sustainable transportation systems and livable communities has created a need for more complete measures of pedestrian travel. Many common transportation analysis techniques consider only the primary (i.e., longest-distance) mode used by travelers. Secondary modes, such as walking from a street parking space to a store entrance or from a bus stop to home are often ignored. This tends to oversimplify multimodal travel that is common in urban shopping districts and other areas with compact, mixed-use development.
While some household travel surveys gather detailed pedestrian data, short walking movements are rarely analyzed. This research used an intercept survey to collect the modes used by customers at 20 retail pharmacy stores in the San Francisco Bay Area. Overall, walking was the primary mode used for 21% of the 959 respondent tours and accounted for approximately 5% of total respondent distance traveled. However, an evaluation of modes that were used at least once on each tour showed that 52% of respondents walked along a street or between activity locations at some time between leaving and returning home. Walking was used as the primary mode for 65% of respondent trips between stops within shopping districts. The greatest pedestrian mode share for trips within shopping districts was in Urban Core shopping districts (96%), but a notable share of respondents also walked within Suburban Thoroughfare (30%) and Suburban Shopping Center (40%) shopping districts.
Accurate measures of pedestrian activity can be used for many purposes. These include performance measurement (e.g., track multimodal travel over time), safety analysis (e.g., document pedestrian exposure in order to quantify crash risk), multimodal trip generation (e.g., capture all pedestrian trips to and from specific sites), physical activity assessment (e.g., calculate the number of calories travelers burn), and travel behavior analysis (e.g., identify which individual and neighborhood factors encourage people to walk or drive). The measures can help improve transportation analysis techniques so that they more fully reflect pedestrian movements.
Location: San Francisco Bay Area, California
Funders: United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and University of California Transportation Center (UCTC)
Project Period: August 2009 to July 2011
While some household travel surveys gather detailed pedestrian data, short walking movements are rarely analyzed. This research used an intercept survey to collect the modes used by customers at 20 retail pharmacy stores in the San Francisco Bay Area. Overall, walking was the primary mode used for 21% of the 959 respondent tours and accounted for approximately 5% of total respondent distance traveled. However, an evaluation of modes that were used at least once on each tour showed that 52% of respondents walked along a street or between activity locations at some time between leaving and returning home. Walking was used as the primary mode for 65% of respondent trips between stops within shopping districts. The greatest pedestrian mode share for trips within shopping districts was in Urban Core shopping districts (96%), but a notable share of respondents also walked within Suburban Thoroughfare (30%) and Suburban Shopping Center (40%) shopping districts.
Accurate measures of pedestrian activity can be used for many purposes. These include performance measurement (e.g., track multimodal travel over time), safety analysis (e.g., document pedestrian exposure in order to quantify crash risk), multimodal trip generation (e.g., capture all pedestrian trips to and from specific sites), physical activity assessment (e.g., calculate the number of calories travelers burn), and travel behavior analysis (e.g., identify which individual and neighborhood factors encourage people to walk or drive). The measures can help improve transportation analysis techniques so that they more fully reflect pedestrian movements.
Location: San Francisco Bay Area, California
Funders: United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and University of California Transportation Center (UCTC)
Project Period: August 2009 to July 2011
