How young pedestrians perceive walkways: gender differences

Abstract

Promotion of active mobility is a strategy to discourage motorized mobility and solve problems linked to environment protection. Particularly, walking could be considered as an alternative to short trips made by car in more densely inhabited areas. For promoting pedestrian mobility, the quality levels of pedestrian paths should be increased. At this regard, collecting pedestrians’ perceptions about the path characteristics is fundamental. In this paper, perceptions are collected in terms of Stated Preferences (SP) by detecting the choices pedestrians would make in hypothetical scenarios characterized by certain service quality levels. More specifically, this work aims to analyze pedestrian preferences by highlighting gender differences through discrete choice modelling. An SP survey was addressed to a sample of 240 Italian university students, and mixed logit models were calibrated. The results highlight how women and men perceive differently some walkway characteristics.