Measuring walking accessibility in metropolitan areas

Promoting walking trips is considered a key element of achieving more sustainable transportation. This paper presents a new index for measuring walkability in metropolitan areas. This index measures walkability levels for diversity and intensity of uses in spatial areas while considering the travel distance and time as travel impedance between origins and destinations. A walking access index (WAI), which is a location-based measure for accessibility, is formulated for quantifying accessibility within local areas in metropolitan Melbourne, Australia. Geographic information system software was employed to compute distances between origins and destinations. The Victorian Integrated Survey of Travel and Activity (VISTA) was used to evaluate the new index and examine the association between walking trips and levels of accessibility within the metropolitan region of Melbourne. Furthermore, the new index is compared with one of the most common approaches using the VISTA data set. Key findings indicate that the WAI has a stronger association with recorded walking trips, with more walking trips recorded in areas with higher values of the WAI