This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Walking has been shown to improve the overall health of a community and can predict the prevalence of chronic diseases, such as obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular disease, according to the World Health Organization. Because of this, city planners assess neighborhoods' walkability, which measures how built environments support walking, when planning improvements.
However, walkability depends not only on the quality of sidewalks or the proximity of nearby amenities, but also on how safe and comfortable residents feel when walking in their neighborhoods, according to a study by a team of geographers in Penn State's College of Earth and Mineral Sciences who analyzed the walkability of San Francisco. The researchers focused on San Francisco because of the availability of data from a 2014 to 2020 survey—part of a longitudinal study led by the University of California, San Francisco, on the health of young adults in the San Francisco Bay Area—in which young adults ages 18 to 32, an understudied group in walkability analyses, were questioned on their perceived neighborhood walkability, socioeconomic status, self-rated health measures and racial and ethnic self-identification. The team visited the area in 2020 and completed a walking survey across 138 census blocks of San Francisco to mark observable characteristics, such as the quality of roads, access to amenities, sidewalk safety and maintenance, and neighborhood aesthetics.
The researchers found that traditional, observable measures of walkability identified in the walking survey do not necessarily reflect how residents experience their neighborhoods. They also found that while walkability was not significantly associated with young adults' self-rated health across San Francisco as a whole, relationships emerged at the neighborhood level, revealing differences that citywide analyses would have missed. The team published its findings in Cities & Health.
"By comparing resident feedback with observed characteristics, we were able to determine that observed and perceived measures of walkability are not the same," said Louisa Holmes, associate professor of geography and demography and corresponding author of the paper. "How residents experience their own neighborhoods can be fairly different from what you're able to see by walking past a neighborhood." For example, in the Outer Sunset and Outer Richmond neighborhoods, residents reporting better health also tended to see their neighborhoods as more walkable. But researchers' assessments of the physical environment told a different story: In Outer Sunset, there was no significant relationship between observed walkability and self-rated health, while in Outer Richmond, residents reported poorer health even though the neighborhood had higher observed walkability.
"We were curious why some people rate their health very differently from people who may live just four miles (6.4 kilometers) away," Holmes said. "Our findings show that residents' experiences can reveal aspects of neighborhood environments that conventional measures of walkability don't capture, which has important implications for how we plan healthier communities." When the researchers compared socioeconomic status with perceived and observed walkability, people in more socioeconomically advantaged neighborhoods, such as Nob Hill, the Financial District or Fisherman's Wharf, generally rated their neighborhoods' walkability lower, even though those neighborhoods scored higher on observed walkability. Discover the latest in science, tech, and space with over 100,000 subscribers who rely on Phys.org for daily insights. d research that matter—daily or weekly.
People in more socioeconomically disadvantaged neighborhoods, on the other hand, such as Parkside in the southwest portion of San Francisco, rated walkability higher even though their neighborhoods had lower observed walkability. The researchers also identified racial and ethnic disparities in neighborhood walkability. Areas with larger proportions of Black residents showed particularly strong associations with lower observed walkability, while areas with larger proportions of Latino and Asian residents showed stronger associations with lower perceived walkability, highlighting inequalities across neighborhood environments.
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