Josephine ROPER, University of New South Wales, Australia
Matthew NG, University of New South Wales, Australia
Christopher PETTIT, University of New South Wales, Australia
Walking is a vital mode of transport in the pursuit of sustainable, liveable 15-minute cities, but quantification of walking access is historically understudied compared to faster modes. Interest in measuring walkability has primarily been from those concerned with public health and environmental sustainability [1], and not focused on the value of walking in its own right for access to proximate destinations.
This research presents a new walkability index distinguished from most commonly used indices by being open source and designed to be easily reused and modified in different geographies and to answer different questions, and that considers both network-based proximity and variety of everyday destinations. This index makes use of cutting-edge algorithms to enable it to be rapidly calculated [2] - even over a large city such as Sydney at the scale of every building. This people-scale approach preserves the fine grain of detail within neighbourhoods that is vital to understanding the 15-minute city.
Traditionally, walkability indices have been validated by their alignment to walking behaviour, but this is not the only way to understand the value of walkability to citizens (or the physical nature of the urban landscape). An alternate approach is the measurement of land or property value in order to capture the hedonic value of the built environment – how much utility do city residents derive, based on how much they are willing to pay to live in a walkable area [3]. Results from hedonic modelling of residential property prices in Sydney, Australia are demonstrated. Our new index is positively related to price for both houses and units, but geographically weighted regression shows variation across the city, highlighting the importance of local context and understanding particular local mobility and land use patterns, with implications for sustainable planning.
Mots clés : walkability|accessibility|mobility|residential property
A104113JR