Safe, attractive and active: a model to improve walkability in historic park communities

Communities are working to become places where people want to live, work, play and learn, and many use placemaking strategies to attract and retain residents and business owners. One placemaking technique is walkability. A walkable community is one that is safe, attractive, and active and provides useful circulation. The pedestrian environment data scan (PEDS) provides a checklist of physical elements in the landscape that tie together walkability and placemaking. Using the PEDS list, our goal is to understand, through a post-occupancy assessment, the status of physical elements in three communities designed with walkable, Olmsted park systems: Boston, Buffalo and Louisville. To study these cities, we created a standardized scoring system from using the PEDS ratings for a site to be safe, attractive and active. A principal component analysis clustered the analyzed variables from the PEDS list into five standardized and ratio variables. Of the five independent variables, the linear regression shows the most impactful means to improve walkability are improving decencies, walkable infrastructure and pedestrian comfort. Readers will uncover a means for other communities to study and establish key priorities that they may seek to improve walkability with limited resources.