Resident experience matters in estimating neighborhood walkability, study shows

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Walking has been shown to improve the overall health of a community and can predict the prevalence of chronic disease, such as obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular disease, according to the World Health Organization. Because of this, city planners assess neighborhoods’ walkability, which measures how built environments support walking, when planning improvements. However, walkability does not simply depend on the quality of sidewalks nor the proximity of nearby amenities, but also on how safe and comfortable residents feel when walking in their neighborhoods, according to a study by a team of geographers in Penn State’s College of Earth and Mineral Sciences who analyzed the walkability of San Francisco.

The researchers focused on San Francisco because of the availability of data from a 2014 to 2020 survey — part of a longitudinal study led by the University of California, San Francisco, on the health of young adults in the San Francisco Bay Area — where young adults aged 18 to 32, an understudied group in walkability analyzes, were questioned on their perceived neighborhood walkability, socioeconomic status, self-rated health measures and racial and ethnic self-identification. The team visited the area in 2020 and completed a walking survey across 138 census blocks of San Francisco to mark observable characteristics, such as the quality of roads, access to amenities, sidewalk safety and maintenance, and neighborhood aesthetics, among others.

The researchers found that traditional, observable measures of walkability identified in the walking survey do not necessarily reflect how residents experience their neighborhoods. They also found that while walkability was not significantly associated with young adults' self-rated health across San Francisco as a whole, relationships emerged at the neighborhood level, revealing differences that citywide analyses would have missed. The team published their findings in Cities & Health.

“By comparing resident feedback with observed characteristics, we were able to determine that observed and perceived measures of walkability are not the same,” said Louisa Holmes, associate professor of geography and demography and corresponding author of the paper. “How residents experience their own neighborhoods can be fairly different than what you’re able to see by walking past a neighborhood.”

For example, in the Outer Sunset and Outer Richmond neighborhoods, residents reporting better health also tended to see their neighborhoods as more walkable. But researchers' assessments of the physical environment told a different story: In Outer Sunset, there was no significant relationship between observed walkability and self-rated health, while in Outer Richmond, residents reported poorer health even though the neighborhood had higher observed walkability.

“We were curious why some people rate their health very differently from people who may live just four miles away,” Holmes said. “Our findings show that residents' experiences can reveal aspects of neighborhood environments that conventional measures of walkability don't capture, which has important implications for how we plan healthier communities.”

When it came to measuring socioeconomic status differences against perceived and observed walkability, people in more socioeconomically advantaged neighborhoods, such as Nob Hill, the Financial District or Fisherman’s Wharf, generally rated the perceived walkability of their neighborhoods as lower, despite scoring higher on observed walkability. People in more socioeconomically disadvantaged neighborhoods, on the other hand, such as Parkside in the southwest portion of San Francisco, rated walkability higher despite having observably worse walkability.

The researchers also identified racial and ethnic disparities in neighborhood walkability. Areas with larger proportions of Black residents showed particularly strong associations with lower observed walkability, while areas with larger proportions of Latino and Asian residents showed stronger associations with lower perceived walkability, highlighting inequalities across neighborhood environments.

“These findings likely reflect both historical inequalities in neighborhood development and investment and differences in how residents experience their environments,” Holmes said. “This underscores that it’s not safe to assume that people in the same city, or even the same block, have the same experience living in their neighborhoods.”

When leaders plan neighborhoods and amenities, they often rely on observed measures of walkability, which completely misses the lived experience of residents, the researchers explained.

“Built environment measures capture the structural inequalities in San Francisco quite well, but they explain far less about how young adults actually feel walking in their neighborhoods,” said Suraiya Parvin, a doctoral student in geography at Penn State and co-author of the paper. “Walkability is not only about infrastructure and amenities, but also about safety, comfort and social dynamics. Considering these findings, we would encourage city planners and local governments to regularly hear from residents in order to make neighborhoods both physically and socially walkable.”

In addition to Holmes and Parvin, Nafisa Anjum, a doctoral student in geography at Penn State, and Benjamin Townsend, who earned a master’s degree in geography from Penn State in 2023, were co-authors of the paper.

This work was funded by the California Tobacco-Related Disease Research Program under award number TRDRP 25FT-0009; the National Cancer Institute of the National Institutes of Health under award number U01CA154240; and the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities of the National Institutes of Health under award number P60MD006902. This content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily reflect the views of the funders.