Walking as a Transport Mode

Abstract

Walking is viewed from many different perspectives, but lacks both informed advocacy groups and a unified policy treatment. As a result, the weight given to pedestrian movements is inconsistent, and an appropriate view will permit a more coherent assessment of walking and pedestrian aspects of movement and access. The importance of road-related and off road walking activities are discussed, and the role of walking in shopping activities used as an illustration of the shortfalls in systematic treatment of pedestrian activity. Walking is treated as a full transport mode in this paper. New data derived from Australian travel surveys is presented. The relative importance of walking to other transport modes is illustrated in terms of the fractions of trips and of travel time for Australia as a whole and for individual cities. The treatment of walking in major studies means that in many cases the surveys may cover it - but the coding manuals actually require whole categories of walking to be excluded: this was the case for several of the earlier NSW major surveys, for example. However, times of day and the levels of activity by age and sex for walking alone are useful, but even more so when aligned with bicycle usage to pick out the NMT travel market segment. Cross checks of the time and distance estimates for pedestrian travel confirm that the data is reasonably consistent, leading to mean walk speeds of 5 km/hr male and 4 km/hr female. The levels of walking activity, trip rates and the times and distances spent in walking are analysed for Australia. The treatment of walking as a travel mode means that both bicycles and pedestrian movement can profitably be analysed together, as they comprise almost all of the non-motorised travel. This has been done for Australia as a whole, and a balancing effect between genders is noted. Walking and bicycling are in many ways complementary, and analysis of non-motorised movements should therefore pay attention to both modes and genders.