There has been relatively little work done on route choice for pedestrians. The present
paper addresses this issue by using a sample survey of daily walks in a UK urban area.
The walks undertaken are reconstructed using a geographical information system and
compared with the shortest available route. It was found that about 75 per cent of
walkers in the sample chose the shortest available route. Two strategies were used to
synthesise sets from which pedestrians could have chosen their routes. These choice sets
can then be used in discrete choice modelling to study route choice and to determine
which factors are important to pedestrians in this. At the time of writing, it is proposed
to proceed with this modelling.
The structure of the paper is as follows. Section 2 describes the various sources of data
used in this work, section 3 discusses the choice set generation strategies that were
developed, section 4 briefly compares the walks with the corresponding shortest routes,
while section 5 presents the conclusions that were drawn from this
