Detecting the Pedestrian Shed and Walking Route Environment of Urban Parks with Open-Source Data: A Case Study in Nanjing, China

The propensity for visiting urban parks is affected by the park’s attractiveness and travel convenience, where walking provides the most basic and fair access. Walking routes from residences to parks, in terms of duration and perception, have received insufficient attention in the literature, particularly in the urban form context in China. Using the case study of Xuanwu Lake Park in Nanjing, we acquire walking routes from residences to the park through open-source data scraping in order to depict the pedestrian shed and pedestrian environment reasonably along these routes. The results show that the walking routes vary significantly with regards to distance, turns, street views, and so on. Proximity to urban parks, in terms of Euclidean distance, does not necessarily correspond to actual route distance, which may have a more direct influence on travel convenience and, hence, visiting propensity. Palpable differences in green visual ratio, image elements, and points of interest along these routes may also contribute to pedestrian environmental disparity. Analyzing data obtained from an online map provides a rapid and objective approach to detect pedestrian sheds and diagnose pedestrian environments, which can facilitate urban planners and policy makers in siting new parks and assessing the service capacity of parks.