Sustainable transport in neighbourhoods: effect of accessibility on walking and bicycling

ABSTRACT

A growing number of recent studies have focused on improving the sustainability of transportation systems by routinely converting motorised travel to walking and conventional bicycling. The importance of physical activity has recently attracted the attention of practitioners as well as planners and policy-makers. In order to identify effective strategies for increasing active transportation, planners need to identify how current levels of accessibility in neighbourhoods affect walking and cycling trips. Despite a substantial amount of research on modelling active transportation, there have been limited studies on the importance of accessibility considering availability of activities and travel distances for pedestrians and cyclists. Hence, this study employs new approaches for measuring cycling and walking accessibility against land-use features in separate models to examine how accessibility can affect participation in active transportation. Key findings indicate that more accessible neighbourhoods have more active trips, while models using accessibility measurements show better fit on data.

KEYWORDS:

• Built environment
• accessibility
• active transportation
• walkability and cycleability

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 SMOTE is a well-known algorithm to overcome this problem. The general idea of this method is to artificially generate new examples of the minority class using the nearest neighbours of these cases. Furthermore, the majority class examples are also under-sampled, leading to a more balanced dataset.