| Pedestrian trips—as potential replacements for automobile trips—are the lynchpin of many current public policies, including public health approaches to encouraging physical exercise, attempts to reduce car traffic on roadways, and efforts to revitalize urban commercial districts. However, little is known about the behavioral basis for individual pedestrian mode choice. Perhaps because advocates of walking represent a variety of professional disciplines, studies on pedestrians posit a wide variety of possible “causes” of walking—from neighborhood household density to a lack of income for purchasing and operating a car. However, no research to date has integrated potential influences on walking trips into a single behavioral model. The present research attempts to ascertain the relative importance of each type of influence on walking, in order to assess the potential of policies to encourage pedestrian travel.; The data are drawn from the 1995 Nationwide Personal Transportation Survey (NPTS), available through the United States Department of Transportation. Logit models of the binary variable “pedestrian trip?” are used to assess the influence of three types of variables—costs, resources, and preferences—on choosing to walk for an urban trip. Variables are further broken into categories such as time costs, monetary costs, spatial resources, monetary resources, and personal demographic characteristics. Individual trips by travelers aged 16 years or older are considered, in order to include the possibility of driving.; As measured in the NPTS, personal preferences or factors concerning urban density, per se, did not evince a strong influence on pedestrian mode choice. By far, the strongest influences were the distance of the trip and the availability of an automobile to make that trip; that is, either a distance of more than about a half-mile or the option to drive greatly reduces the likelihood of walking for an urban trip. While transit availability near home has a positive impact, this is not a result of walking to transit, but may be due to other urban form factors associated with transit availability. Finally, more daily trips—and concomitant trip—chaining behavior-reduce walking, implying that even where destinations are close, time limitations may prohibit walking. |
