The influence of built environment and travel attitudes on walking: A case study of Porto Alegre, Brazil

Studies conducted in cities from developed countries reveal associations between travel behavior and built environment. A priori we would expect that most of these associations hold for cities from developing countries but we do not have any basis to suppose whether or not they will be quantitatively the same because of differences in the nature of urban form between cities of developed and developing countries, and potential differences in attitudes and travel preferences from their travelers. This article analyzes the relationship between walking patterns, travel attitudes, and neighborhood's urban structure in Porto Alegre, Brazil, under the assumption that built environment affects travel attitudes, instead of the more typical assumption that goes the other way around. We develop a two-step ordered choice model enriched with attitudinal variables to integrate travel attitudes, built environment, and travel behavior. A multiple indicator multiple cause (MIMIC) model is used to identify travel attitude as latent constructs that feed a frequency-of-walking ordered logit model with both the built environment and travel attitudes as explanatory variables. Our results support the a priori assumption that we would replicate many of the results already reported in the literature. However, we obtained the same differences in the magnitudes of some key elasticities. The results of the elasticities computed for the number of walking trips with respect to the built environment variables were smaller than in other studies. Only the effect of population density on walking frequency seems to be marginally higher.