Assessing built environment correlates of walking trips from home to work, education and shopping places

Background: Many cities exhibit urban sprawl and car dominance leading to poor air quality, increased sedentary behaviour, road network congestion and poor population health. To alleviate this, city planners are turning attention to the promotion of active transport and walking through urban design.
Purpose: To examine correlates of walking, prior research has used walk trips to places of work or education. This approach can confound analyses and give misleading results. This research focusses on walk trips initiated from home to work, education, and shops separately, as a means of examining built environment correlates associated with walking to these destinations.
Methods: This research used 2016-2020 the Victorian Integrated Survey of Travel and Activity (VISTA) data from Melbourne, Australia. Descriptive and GIS analysis of walking trip data and multilevel regression models were used to examine associations between population density, street connectivity, destination and public transport access and walking trips from home to work, education, and shops.
Results: Results indicate 40% of walking trips were from home, with 13% going directly to work, 12% to education and 11% to shops. Education and shopping locations were dispersed across the city, whilst work locations were centrally located. We found significant associations with population density, street connectivity, destination and public transport access and walking trips from home by destination.
Conclusions: Home and destination environments are important determinants of walking trips from home and should be considered in urban planning policies and city planning.
Practical implications: Improving built environments at key destinations has the potential to support walking trips from home and increase active transport uptake through planning policies such as the 15-20 minute city.
Funding: Research funded by UKRI-NHMRC grant (jes2250186-APP1192788), and RMIT University.