Developing a walkability metric to explore the association between built environment and walking behaviour in seven German cities

Question: It is argued that walking behavior is influenced by how „walkable“ our environment is, but there is little research into the association between walking and walkability, and no clear consensus on how to measure it. This proof of concept study proposes a replicable method to measure walkability by making surfaces from public domain data to explore the relationship between walkability and walking behavior in cohort studies. The presentation will focus on the methodology we used. Methods: We generated three metrics which can be applied to any location using OpenStreetMap, an open data mapping resource: 1.…