The Study on Spatial Elements of Health-Supportive Environment in Residential Streets Promoting Residents' Walking Trips

Residents' walking trips are a kind of natural motion that promotes health and wellbeing by modifying individual behavior. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the major influence of the spatial elements of a health-supportive environment on residents' walking trips. This study analyzes residents' walking trips' elements based on the spatiotemporal characteristics of walking trips, as well as the spatial elements of a health-supportive environment in residential streets based on residential health needs. To obtain the spatial elements that promote residents' walking trips and to build an ordered logistic regression model, two methods-a correlation analysis and a logistic regression analysis-were applied to analyze the elements of residents' walking trips as well as the spatial elements of a health-supportive environment in residential streets by means of SPSS software, using on-site survey results of ten residential streets and 2738 pieces of research data. The research showed that the nine kinds of spatial elements that significantly affect residents' walking trips are density of pedestrian access, density of bus routes, near-line rate of roadside buildings, average pedestrian access distance, square area within a 500 m walking distance, distance to the nearest garden, green shade ratio, density of street intersections, and the mixed proportion of differently aged residential buildings. In order to construct a spatial environment that promotes walking trips, it is necessary to improve the convenience of residents' walking trips, to increase the safety of roadside buildings and pedestrian access, to expand the comfort of "getting out to the nature", and to enrich the diversity of different architectural styles and street density.