Objective vs. subjective measures of street environments in pedestrian route choice behaviour: Discrepancy and correlates of non-concordance

Difficulties in obtaining detailed street environment data is identified as a major obstacle in pedestrian route choice studies. Scholars have used either objectively or subjectively measured street environment data without testing their suitability as a substitute for each other in the route choice literature. This study aims to overcome these gaps by investigating the relevance of subjective data as a less-expensive proxy for objective data—together with identifying the factors affecting the degree of disconcordance between them. Subjective street environment data was collected from 178 pedestrians in Brisbane, Australia. Participants were intercepted and requested to draw their walking routes. They were asked to rate the importance of different street environment attributes influencing the chosen route. A range of objective attributes of these routes was derived through virtual audit and spatial analyses. The concordance of 13 seemingly related street environment variables was tested using ‘Kappa coefficient’ and ‘% agreement’ methods. Additionally, 13 multinomial logistic regression models were estimated, one for each variable, to identify different factors affecting the level of disconcordance. Results indicate a relatively poor agreement between objective and subjective attributes. However, an objective provisioning of some attributes can improve the perception of pedestrians about these attributes. Estimated regression models show that all groups are to some extent at-risk of being mismatched, suggesting the need for population-based policy interventions to improve perceptions. Findings highlight that subjective measures capture different construct of the street environment than those measured objectively, hence, using these two measures are not comparable.