Elderly Fitness-Oriented Urban Street Design: Case Study in Nanchang, China

Abstract

Urban streets are a prominent component of building environments that enable movement and characterize neighborhoods, offering the public spaces for social participation. Considering the increasingly aging society, this research focuses on the elderly fitness-oriented urban street design. First, collector streets, local streets, and commercial streets are targeted. Second, the elderly fitness-orientation level of the streets is estimated based on a factor evaluation model. Fifteen attributes pertaining to street features were classified into three factors: safety, legibility, and comfort. The results revealed that the collector street, Minde Street, has the highest elderly fitness-orientation level, while the commercial street, Zhongshan Street, has the lowest. Third, a face-to-face survey was conducted in Nanchang, a medium-sized capital city in Jiangxi province, China. A total of 498 valid data samples were obtained, including 237 elderly people (over 64 years old). To obtain what street features facilitate elderly mobility and to what extent, a structural equation model (SEM) was constructed to capture the relationships among individual attributes, the residential environment, evaluation of the street characteristics, and travel behavior. The results showed that sidewalks, crossing facilities, and traffic signage systems of the streets affect the travel decisions of the elderly to a great extent, compared with other street characteristics. Finally, based on the three aspects of safety, legibility, and comfort, useful strategies are proposed for elderly fitness-oriented urban street design. The study further confirms that the built environment at the street scale affects the travel behavior of the elderly.