Keywords: Walkability, Walkability Index, Footpath, Extreme Weather, Urban Planning and Design, Weather Data, Urban Environmental Data
Encouraging walking as the main mode of transport in people’s daily lives have distinct environmental, economic and personal health benefits. Street conditions, function of environment and personal comfort can all have influences on encouraging or discouraging walking. By identifying and quantifying indicators, a Walkability Index (WI) can be assessed to represent the walkability potential of the location on the footpath in the city. In the literature, the analysis of walkability potential at the footpath scale rather than the neighbourhood scale is lacking. Existing methods for developing personal comfort indicators and thus assessing WI mainly involve questionnaires rather than the objective ways. Moreover, the assessment of WI in multiple weather scenarios is often lacking. Therefore, it was decided to upgrade these considerations and incorporate them into a new GIS-based WI that was developed. This study assessed WI at the footpath scale for four extreme weather and one common weather scenario by collecting urban environmental and weather data, combining six WI indicators from the categories of street condition, function of environment and personal comfort, with equal weighting by default. Two different types of neighbourhoods in the city were selected for analysis and comparison under the 5 scenarios, suggesting the high priority and enhancement needed in specific areas by urban planners or designers. The end result was also expanded into 50m size hexagonal and neighbourhood level WI maps. A web viewer was created to visualise WI maps combined with 3D city models and interactive functions to provide additional insights for urban planners or designers.