Pedestrian Environment Study Of Routes To Parks Based On Selection

Urban park is the main pro-nature space for residents’ outdoor activities,and an important place for physical activity,which has a positive impact on the health of urban residents.With the growth of residents’ demand for recreation,scholars in the field of urban studies have paid more and more attention to the visitation and use of parkland.As walking is the primary mode of travel for residents to parks,the environment along the walking routes to parks is important to the residents’ travel experience,park visitation,and the promotion of more walking trips.As the link between urban residents and parks,street is also the major part of their travel routes and the carrier of environmental factors.In terms of practice,the lack of effective management of urban streets and the dominance of motorized traffic in urbanization have left much room for improvement in the quality of the pedestrian environment in most cities.In terms of research,there have been many studies on the mechanisms of the built environment affecting walking behavior,but not enough attention has been paid to the walking experience of street users.The current researches on park visitation and park use services are mostly focused on the park accessibility or the influence mechanism of park visitation rate under the level of urban green space system planning,but there is a lack of research on the pedestrian environment of the access routes between "residential areas and parks",which is more abstracted into a time or distance index.This may affect us to develop a deeper understanding of the urban environment through which the walkers go to parks,as well as the spatial differentiation and possible attitudinal tendencies and behavioral choices of residents in this regard based on the meso-scale.This study takes pedestrian environment of routes from residential areas to three large parks in Qinhuai District of Nanjing as the research object.Based on the perspective of residents’ route choice preference,this study analyzes the effect degrees of various pedestrian environment factors on route selection,and takes them as the evaluation criteria of pedestrian environment to analyze the pedestrian environment qualities and distribution characteristics of the routes to the parks from the settlements around three parks.Then the study explores potential problems of street space around the parks,and proposes corresponding improvement strategies,in order to improve walking experience of residents around parks and promote the use of the existing parks.In the research steps,the behavioral choice preferences of residents in the virtual route scenario were first analyzed by the stated preference method,and the discrete choice model was constructed to quantitatively analyze the influence weights of various pedestrian environment factors.Secondly,we retrieved residential POIs within a certain distance through the API interface provided by Baidu Map platform,and delineated the service areas of the parks and crawled the recommended walking routes within the areas as the pedestrian routes for residents to visit the parks.Then,combining the obtained evaluation criteria with the collected geographic information,streetscape images and other data,we described the distribution characteristics of the pedestrian environment quality of the routes from surrounding residential areas to the three large parks in Qinhuai District in a visual way.Finally,the study further analyzed the differences in the pedestrian environment of street spaces around different parks through comparison.The results show that the arrival time,road motorization and greenery have the greatest influence on residents’ route choice to visit parks,while the width of passage,street crossing times and PDR have the least influence on route selection.From the distribution characteristics of pedestrian environment around the parks,the qualities of pedestrian environment around large parks in Qinhuai District show differences.The pedestrian environment around Yueya Lake Park is the best,with the average arrival time of routes,road motorization,separation facilities and the greenery performing well among the three parks.However,the overall pedestrian utility of all the routes around Dongshuiguan Heritage Park is low due to the poor average arrival time,commercial density along the streets,occupied the parking phenomenon and greenery.Based on the above findings,this study proposes reasonable improvement strategies for the street spaces around parks based on four principles: street scale appropriateness,facility humanity,landscape comfort and travel convenience,aiming to provide theoretical references for urban planners and designers in future street planning or renovation.