ISSUES AND METHODS IN CAPTURING PEDESTRIAN BEHAVIORS, ATTITUDES AND PERCEPTIONS: EXPERIENCES WITH A COMMUNITY-BASED WALKABILITY SURVEY

The audit tools used to ascertain walking are often poorly adapted to capture individuals’ walking behaviors and their attitudes about walking and characteristics of the built environment as they were not originally designed to focus specifically on this issue. This paper discusses the various issues that have emerged in the literature on this topic and discusses experiences with data collection using a communitybased walkability survey. The paper begins with a discussion of issues surrounding pedestrian studies, a brief review of previous efforts to collect pedestrian data and the challenges and lessons learned from those studies. In the second part, the paper turns its attention to one comprehensive study of pedestrians and the lessons learned from an initial survey of pedestrian behaviors, attitudes and perceptions. The discussion focuses on the process of survey administration and does not report the findings from the data. The paper concludes with a discussion of the potential limits of these methods for future studies and practice.