Pedestrian Cognition of Street Structure and Route Choices When Strolling: Comparative Study Based on Two Experimental Methods

Abstract

This study aimed to consider the street structure and the relationship between such structure and people's route choices as well as people's street structure concerns or preferences based on a common mapping tool. We used the map recording method to conduct a route choice experiment, captured the street structure-strolling route relationship, and performed a route choice experiment in actual space, preliminarily testing the results of the previous experiment. We also conducted interviews to determine how participant perceptions of street space on the map differed from perceptions of actual street space and how paths were chosen. The results show that the participants' route choice tendencies change with street structure characteristics. Despite a rich built environment in real space, the participants give considerable attention to street structure. Based on the route choice strategies, the participants could recognize the streets on blank maps as real streets and imagine themselves walking on those streets. However, the map recording method has limitations, e.g., the influence of pedestrians' physical strength on their route choices is not considered.

A Novel Method for Extracting and Analyzing the Geometry Properties of the Shortest Pedestrian Paths Focusing on Open Geospatial Data

“…Nonetheless, "alternative routing" suggests that distance (or travel time) is not the only factor affecting the pedestrian's route choices [1,2]. Other preferences, such as accessibility, convenience, comfort, etc., could be involved in such decisions [3]. The geometry properties of the shortest paths, including route curviness, the number of turns and intersections along roads, road gradients, sidewalk conditions (surface type, width, texture, etc.…”