Walking has been shown to improve the overall health of a community and can predict the prevalence of chronic disease, 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 does not simply depend on the quality of sidewalks nor 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 - where young adults aged 18 to 32, an understudied group in walkability analyzes, 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, among others.
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 their findings in Cities & Health.
