Satisfaction or compensation? The interaction between walking preferences and neighbourhood design

Abstract

This paper describes a study on preferences, neighbourhood design and walking in a northern European setting. The aim was to examine how preferences for residential choice and modal choice play out regarding walking frequency in three neighbourhoods in the Swedish city of Malmö. The study design, unlike most earlier studies on the walkability of neighbourhoods, treated preferences as explicit variables predicting the amount of walking in a neighbourhood, rather than as control variables that alter the estimated effect of the built environment. The empirical material was examined with analysis of variance and multiple regression, which indicated that heterogeneous preferences resulted in a heterogeneous response, in terms of walking frequency, in one of the neighbourhoods. The suggestion for policy is that pedestrian planning should take the heterogeneity of preferences, and thus, of demand, into account