Walking distance, route choice, and activities while walking: A record of following pedestrians from transit stations in the San Francisco Bay area

Abstract

With the goal of making more walkable urban environments, studies on pedestrian behavior heavily rely on surveys or are increasingly using global positioning system tracking as the main vehicle of collecting data. Alternatively, this study adopts following pedestrians, a direct observation method, to examine pedestrians' walking distance, route choice, and activities while walking from transit stations. Following 139 pedestrians from Glen Park and Rockridge BART stations in the San Francisco Bay Area to their final destinations on weekday afternoons suggests three major findings. Pedestrians walked 548 m on average and up to 1100 m, exceeding 1/4 mile (400 m), a rule-of-thumb distance frequently implemented in practice. Seventy-five per cent of the pedestrians walked along the main streets and twenty-nine per cent chose to walk longer routes. Seventy-four per cent of them engaged in various activities while walking, including shopping, window shopping, conversing with others and using street furniture. This study provides not only quantitative findings that are consistent with those from similar studies, but also descriptive information about pedestrian behavior, which they rarely do.