Why choose active travel over driving? Investigating the impact of the streetscape and land use on active travel in short journeys

Abstract

The increase in the share of motorization in short-distance trips is a significant contributor to the decline in the share of active travel (AT) and will further pose a challenge to sustainable transport. While many studies have explored the relationship between the built environment (BE) and AT, few have focused on short trips. Additionally, most studies have ignored the important role of the streetscape. To address these gaps, this study utilizes street view big data to quantify street view elements and applies extreme gradient boosting decision trees (XGBoost) to 2020 household travel data in Wuhan. The results indicate that streetscape attributes are more important than land use in predicting short-distance AT, with streetscape being more than 40% relative importance in both models. The contribution of almost all streetscape elements cannot be ignored. Among them, the percentage of driveways showed the highest predictive power. Among land use attributes, population density has the highest relative importance. In addition, most of the independent variables are nonlinearly correlated with the explanatory variables, and this study quantified these association thresholds. These results suggest that optimizing the street built environment has the potential to promote a shift from short-distance driving to AT. The quantification of correlation thresholds provides precise empirical evidence for built environment interventions that promote short-distance AT.