Neighborhood Design, Neighborhood Location and Three Types of Walking: Results from the Washington DC area

Abstract

Understanding how the built environment at a neighborhood scale is associated with individuals’ walking has been a common research objective in public health and city planning. In contrast to the extant literature, we examine whether a neighborhood’s location defined at a regional scale is associated with walking and whether this association is separately identifiable from the association of the neighborhood built environment and walking. The findings indicated that walking for commuting purposes was associated more strongly with neighborhood location than with the neighborhood built environment, whereas walking for shopping-eating purposes had a stronger association with the neighborhood built environment. The results suggest that, without the provision of better public transportation services to suburban neighborhoods, walkable neighborhood development in suburbs may not be successful for encouraging walking for commuting. Keywords: built environment, travel behavior, walkability