Role of personal barriers on willingness to walk in daily work trips across Rasht citizens

Document Type : Research Article

Authors

1 Amirkabir University of technology

2 Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering Geotechnics, Roads and Transportation Specialty

Abstract

The walk-oriented pattern is an alternative travel pattern for daily trips; that a person walks more than her/his regular pattern. In order to examine the tendency to fulfill this pattern, it is necessary to examine the role of different types of barriers on pedestrian walking. This study intends to address the role of personal barriers which avoid people to walk more in their daily work trips. The studied barriers include laziness/tend to wake up late, physical/health problems, not interested in more walking, the importance of neat appearance at workplace and not feeling good about being seen on the streets. For this purpose, a sample of 432 employees living in the city of Rasht, Iran has been used. The studied variables are classified into three categories: socio-economic, travel and environmental characteristics. Five ordered logit models have been calibrated to investigate the importance of personal barriers including 11 variables of socio-economic characteristics, 6 variables of travel characteristics and 5 variables of environmental characteristics. The results show that while the effect of socio-economic characteristics on each of the personal barriers studied is different, the contribution of these characteristics on each of the five barriers: laziness/tend to wake up late, physical and health problems, not interested in more walking, the importance of neat appearance at work and not feeling good about being seen on streets are 41, 30, 13, 7 and 8 percent, respectively. Furthermore, the background variable of having at least 5 minutes daily walking in non-work trips of socio-economic characteristics, the total travel time variable of travel characteristics and the variable of walkability index of environmental characteristics are effective in tendency to walk more.

Keywords

Main Subjects

References

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Amirkabir Journal of Civil Engineering
Volume 55, Issue 2
May 2023
Pages 359-388

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