Surveying walking habits and opinions

I completed an online survey yesterday issued by my local Council.  "This survey is designed to help the Borough Council find out how many local residents are walking and to identify any barriers preventing you from walking. The results will be used to support Local Transport Plan projects." This is very welcome and the Council is to be commended for undertaking it. It also raised some interesting and difficult questions of definition and measurement.

First, of course, is what is "walking". The Council's answer is "any walking you do as part of a journey, for example walking to a bus stop or to a train station, as well as walking all the way to a destination, and any walking you do just for enjoyment, including walking the dog. We include any walking even if you use a mobility aid, for example a wheelchair, or a skateboard, micro-scooter or skates. Jogging also counts."

Does this make sense? The elements in the list from skateboarding onwards all seem to be leisure activities which use pavements, but is it helpful to include them in "walking"? I think not. Including them means that people are responding to the survey in relation to very different activities.

The more puzzling definitional question however is whether there is some sort of de minimis level of walking that isn't worth counting. The first question in the survey asks about "journeys made the previous day that included walking" and tries to capture the nature of the walking element, the time spent walking and the purpose of the journey. The walking element could include walking to use public transport or private transport (e.g. a parked car). But what if the car is in the drive or the bus stop is outside the front door? All journeys involve you taking some steps, but are these ancillary steps usefully understood as "walking"?

I suppose it depends on your purpose. If the purpose is transport planning and you are interested in the "modal split" of journeys to work or school or to some public facility, then you are most interested in identifying the people who walk all the way or who have to walk some material part of the way. It would be crazy for every car owner to describe their journey to work as involving walk-car-walk as the modes of travel. In this context, the implicit focus is on the factors which influence the choice of mode of transport, perhaps with the goal of increasing the proportion who walk, for all the well-known benefits that flow from it.

From a step-counting perspective however, the more the merrier, all steps are equally valuable. But this is walking viewed purely as a physical activity.

Thirdly, you might be interested in promoting walking as a leisure activity. In this case "walking" is just going out for a walk, as distinct from undertaking a "journey" for a purpose. The implicit focus here is on the choice of walking over other forms of leisure activity. A survey of walking in this sense also opens up issues about walking in the country, issues of access, the state of paths and styles and of choice whether the walk started from home or whether some other mode of transport was used to get to the start.

So it seems to me that you can view walking as a mode of transport (in competition with other modes),  as a leisure activity (in competition with all other leisure activities) and as a physical activity (in contrast with inactivity). It is all of these things of course, but a survey which muddles them up will collect data that is very hard to interpret, perhaps meaningless.

However, I am grateful to the Council for getting me thinking about this. The survey is being done in partnership with Walk England, a social enterprise dedicated to promoting walking, that I wasn't previously aware of. It has some very useful resources, so that is a useful discovery.

That site in turn led me to Walk 21- Walking Forward in the 21st Century, an international organisation which "exists to champion the development of healthy sustainable and efficient communities where people choose to walk". There is a section on Measuring walking, which I will study with interest.