The impacts of the micro built environment on pedestrian route choice: a stated preference experiment

This paper reports the results of a stated preference experiment that was administered to estimate the impact of the micro built environment on pedestrian route choice from/to metro station and their final destination. The micro built environment was varied in terms of 8 attributes, which are street length, average number of building floors on sides of the street, shops in the front line of streets, street crossing facilities, width of sidewalks, greenery, the density of street lamps and crowdedness of pedestrians. In total, 803 respondents were recruited in Tianjin, China to complete face to face interviews. A multinomial logit model was applied to estimate preference functions. Results indicate that pedestrians are more likely to choose street segment with either trees or green hedge. In addition, preferences significantly vary with age and motivation to walk as a transport mode. People who are 10 to 22 years old have a lower probabilities to choose street segment with 50% shops than people in other age. People who are 23 to 45 years old are more likely not choose the street segment with sidewalk wider than 3.5 meters, and also likely not choose street segment with either trees or hedge than people in other age. People who are more motivated to walk are more likely to choose street segments with both trees and hedge, and with sidewalk wider than 3.5 meters, than people who are less motivated.