To walk or not to walk? Examining non-linear effects of streetscape greenery on walking propensity of older adults

By Linchuan Yang, Yibin Ao, Jintao Ke, Yi Lu, Yuan Liang. 2021

399 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract Population aging is a conspicuous demographic trend shaping the world profoundly. Walking is a critical travel mode and physical activity for older adults. As such, there is a need to determine the factors influencing the walking behavior of older people in the era of population aging. Streetscape greenery is an easily perceived built-environment attribute and can promote walking behavior, but it has received insufficient attention. More importantly, the non-linear effects of streetscape greenery on the walking behavior of older adults have not been examined. We therefore use readily available Google Street View imagery and a fully convolutional neural network to evaluate human-scale, eye-level streetscape greenery. Using data from the Hong Kong Travel Characteristic Survey, we adopt a machine learning technique, namely random forest modeling, to scrutinize the non-linear effects of streetscape greenery on the walking propensity of older adults. The results show that streetscape greenery has a positive effect on walking propensity within a certain range, but outside the range, the positive association no longer holds. The non-linear associations of other built-environment attributes are also examined.

Subfields: Health, Toxicology and Mutagenesis, Speech and Hearing, Transportation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c551fab95710a5fd16069e8f62e62a470b58c5b6