Background

and purpose: The world's elderly population has been dramatically growing during the last few decades, and therefore, a big challenge for many societies will be to meet the future needs of this group especially their health problems. Promoting walking as an active mode of transportation in daily travel could have many benefits on the healthy lifestyle of the elderly. However, it has not received so much attention in the literature especially in developing countries. The main objective in this study was to understand the walking mode choice behavior of the elderly males and elderly females inside the urban areas of Rasht, the capital city of province Gilan, Iran which has the highest percentage of the elderly population among provinces in the whole country.

Method

Data for the analysis comes from the Rasht household travel survey (RHTS) containing information about travel characteristics and individual/household characteristics. In this study, trips made by individuals aged 60 years or more (representing the elderly) were selected for further analysis. This group contained 600 persons which account for about 3.4% of all participants in the RHTS. Of all elderly, more than 60% were males and the rest were females. This study treats travel as if it was just a trip for a single purpose with a single destination. In order to understand what will affect the likelihood of walking versus not walking a whole trip, separate binary logit models were developed for elderly males (using 774 trips) and elderly females (using 299 trips).

Results

Factors such as having a car and a presence of small children in household, trips for purpose of work, making trips between 8 and 10 a.m., and higher ratio of minor roads to major roads was only found with significant effect on older males' likelihood to walk. However, factors such as land-use mix measures representing diversity of an area and travel distance were found with significant effect on both groups. Result showed that while choosing walking in trips longer than 0.25 mile is a matter for older males'; older females’ do not mind walking up to 0.5 mile in daily trips.

Implications

According to the results found, the top priority policy that may led to higher probability of choosing walking as a mode of transportation among elderly is to plan for higher mixed-use developments that could provide more accessibility and make the place more exciting for the elderly which could itself increase the propensity to walk and consequently enhance the community health indicators.