Abstract
Children's independent mobility is considered as the core planning goal of child-friendly cities. Children’s active school travel (AST) is an important part of children mobility, which is conducive to children's physical and mental health. Besides satisfying the safety and accessibility, more attention should be paid to improve the comfort of school travel roads at the micro scale under the promotion of fine urban management. By analyzing and quantifying children’s behavioral characteristics and spatial needs of AST, we develops a micro-scale assessment model for the comfort walkability of AST. We choose a school neighborhoods in the central urban area of Tianjin in China as the case study, and determine the service scope of primary school, namely the study area, according to the requirement that "primary schools are public service facilities that should be equipped in the 10-minute community living circle". We segment and number the streets with 50m as the basic unit, collect and analyze the information and data about the walking environment of AST through PSPL survey and GIS technology, to evaluate the comfort walkability from two aspects: street environment and landscape environment. The results indicate clear differences in walking environment of different types of streets. We propose the design strategies for pedestrian comfort for different streets, such as the design of street pavement and interface, the management measures of street effective width, to provide scientific guidance for child-friendly urban street design and management strategies.
