Spatially Varying Effects of Street Greenery on Walking Time of Older Adults

Population aging has become a notable and enduring demographic phenomenon worldwide. Older adults’ walking behavior is determined by many factors, such as socioeconomic attributes and the built environment. Although a handful of recent studies have examined the influence of street greenery (a built...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inISPRS international journal of geo-information Vol. 10; no. 9; p. 596
Main Authors Yang, Linchuan, Liu, Jixiang, Liang, Yuan, Lu, Yi, Yang, Hongtai
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Basel MDPI AG 01.09.2021
Subjects
Adults
Age
Ageing
Aging
Gender
Heterogeneity
Imagery
Machine learning
Mobility
Neighborhoods
older adult
Older people
Patchiness
population aging
Population density
Public health
Regression analysis
Regression models
Socioeconomic factors
Socioeconomics
Spatial heterogeneity
street greenery
street view imagery
Suburban areas
Surveying
Urban environments
Urban planning
walking behavior
walking time
Hong Kong China
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Summary:Population aging has become a notable and enduring demographic phenomenon worldwide. Older adults’ walking behavior is determined by many factors, such as socioeconomic attributes and the built environment. Although a handful of recent studies have examined the influence of street greenery (a built environment variable readily estimated by big data) on older adults’ walking behavior, they have not focused on the spatial heterogeneity in the influence. To this end, this study extracts the socioeconomic and walking behavior data from the Travel Characteristic Survey 2011 of Hong Kong and estimates street greenery (the green view index) based on Google Street View imagery. It then develops global models (linear regression and Box–Cox transformed models) and local models (geographically weighted regression models) to scrutinize the average (global) and location-specific (local) relationships, respectively, between street greenery and older adults’ walking time. Notably, green view indices in three neighborhoods with different sizes are estimated for robustness checks. The results show that (1) street greenery has consistent and significant effects on walking time; (2) the influence of street greenery varies across space—specifically, it is greater in the suburban area; and (3) the performance of different green view indices is highly consistent.
ISSN:2220-9964
2220-9964
DOI:10.3390/ijgi10090596