01555086

Component

In light of the numerous benefits of increased walkability, which is commonly defined as the extent to which the built environment encourages conducting walking trips, an increasing number of research efforts have been brought about on the topic by urban planners, transportation engineers, health scientists and many others. This paper investigates the level of satisfaction of students of the American University of Beirut, Beirut, Lebanon, with the walking environment of the university surroundings. This analysis is conducted by developing two structural equation models for estimating the causal relations between the level of satisfaction with the attributes of the walking environment and the level of satisfaction with the walking environment overall. The first model examines the sample of students who are frequent on-foot commuters, whereas the second model studies the remaining sampled students who typically conduct on-foot trips in the university surroundings for purposes other than commuting (shopping, eating, leisure, etc.). The resulting models indicate that specific neighborhood attributes have the greatest impact on the level of satisfaction with the walking environment for both samples, these attributes being the ease of pedestrian crossing, sidewalk blockage, cleanliness of sidewalk, vehicular traffic on streets and motorcycles going against traffic on one-way streets. Other attributes, such as the sidewalk width and quality and diversity of activities, are found to have no to little impact on the level of satisfaction of the two samples. Such findings may contribute to a better understanding of the walking environment in Beirut and aid in future policy interventions.

This paper was sponsored by TRB committee ABE90 Transportation in the Developing Countries. Alternate title: Modeling Satisfaction with Walking Environment: Case of Urban University Neighborhood in Developing Country

01550057

15-3689

English

22p

2015

Transportation Research Board 94th Annual Meeting

Digital/other

Figures; References; Tables

Attitudes; Campuses; Developing countries; Neighborhoods; Pedestrians; Structural equation modeling; Urban areas; Walkability; Walking

American University of Beirut

Beirut (Lebanon)

Pedestrians and Bicyclists; Planning and Forecasting; I72: Traffic and Transport Planning

Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting 2015 Paper #15-3689

TRIS, TRB, ATRI

Dec 30 2014 1:13PM