Speaker
Description
Understanding pedestrian route choice is crucial for achieving sustainable urban planning. Walking helps reduce vehicle usage, improves public health, and enhances street vitality. Pedestrian route choices are influenced by various factors such as safety, attractiveness, and perceptions of the built environment. While most pedestrians prioritize travel distance and prefer the shortest routes, this is not always the case depending on the purpose of the trip. For example, routes with fewer directional changes or equipped with safety-enhancing features may be preferred. From the perspective of safety and security, pedestrians, particularly at night, prioritize routes they perceive as safe, favoring well-lit streets and areas with low speed limits. Women pedestrians are especially inclined towards such routes (Basu et al., 2023).
In terms of attractiveness and the built environment, mixed-use or residential land use increases the attractiveness of routes during the day, whereas vacant lots can hinder nighttime walking. Pedestrians prefer routes with shorter walking times, gentle slopes, and visually pleasing environments (e.g., tree-lined streets and park paths) (Basu et al., 2023; Tong & Bode, 2022). Regarding geometric characteristics, physical features such as the number of intersections and simple street layouts influence route preferences (Ti et al., 2023; Hu et al., 2022).
This study explores pedestrian route choices by incorporating immersive virtual reality (VR) to investigate route selection behaviors through specific urban scenarios. It aims to quantitatively analyze how route features influence choices based on the purpose of travel (e.g., commuting, shopping, leisure). Scenarios implemented in VR simulate factors such as travel distance, safety threats, attractiveness of the built environment, and geometric physical properties of streets to collect wayfinding behavior data. Statistical analysis will be employed to examine the results of immersive VR experiments.
The expected outcomes include identifying variations in wayfinding behaviors depending on travel purposes, revealing how the designed elements affect dwell time and wayfinding processes such as the sequence of movements. These findings are anticipated to provide valuable insights for improving pedestrian efficiency and guiding urban design strategies.
| Keywords | Immersive Virtual Reality; VR; Route Choice; Pedestrian; |
|---|---|
| Best Congress Paper Award | No |
