Estimating Walk Score and Examining Its Association with Safety Factors of Neighborhood Environment in Kumamoto, Japan

Abstract

With the increase in urban sprawl and traffic congestion, an increasing number of cities have committed to building compact, walkable cities. Accessibility of facilities and safety of the walking environment is regarded as the two most important conditions for convincing people to walk. The Walk Score is an effective walkability measurement tool confirmed in many studies. However, no study has explored the relationship between the Walk Score and pedestrian traffic safety. This research aims to estimate the Walk Score of each residential address in Kumamoto City and explore the relationship between Walk Score and the safety of the neighborhood environment with data on pedestrian traffic accidents and crime. Based on urban network analysis in GIS, by focusing on the diversity of facilities and fitting Gaussian distribution in Python to obtain the distance decay function, the Walk Score of all 215,309 residential addresses in Kumamoto city were calculated. Subsequently, pairwise Pearson correlations were conducted to determine the association between the Walk Score and neighborhood environment safety. The results showed that Kumamoto City had reached a certain level of walkability, with an average score of 63.16. However, the possibility of pedestrian traffic accidents and crime in places with higher Walk Scores may also increase, with the correlation coefficients reaching 0.613 and 0.588, respectively. The correlations revealed that the use of the Walk Score to measure walkability has some limitations and warns us that it is crucial to improve the safety of walkable environments while increasing the accessibility of facilities.