Spatial Analysis of Walking with a Focus on Accessibility to Grocery Stores at the Neighborhood Scale

Keywords: health geography, walkability, co-location, network spatial analysis, GIS
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Saturday
Session Start / End Time: 2/26/2022 03:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/26/2022 05:00 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 19

Abstract

Walkability studies attract great attention because these studies contribute to improving the living environment for human health. To measure how walkable an area is, the 5D framework is widely used. As one of the 5Ds, destination accessibility is listed but the distance that people are willing to walk in real is not well discussed. In addition, while the diversity of destinations is also included in the 5Ds, the spatial configurations of the destination facilities have not been studied in depth. To deal with these concerns, this study focuses on the daily shopping environment and analyzes the relationships between the walking of residents and the accessibility of grocery stores including meat, fish, vegetable shops, and patisseries. The study area is Minami Ward in Yokohama City located in the suburb of the Tokyo Metropolitan Area in Japan. Individual's daily step count data was obtained from research participants in the Yokohama Walking Point Program, who had city-provided pedometers. Analyzing the proximity to food stores and its degree of co-location on a network-constrained space, we found some interesting relationships between participants’ step counts and food accessibility in their neighborhood environments. Overall, our findings indicated that high accessibility of food stores and high co-location levels among these food stores would help to increase people’s daily step counts. In conclusion, this study corroborated the 5D framework by providing new empirical evidence and advanced our understanding of how neighborhood environments affect walking.