Desirable Streets

The experience of walking through a city is influenced by amenities and the visual qualities of its built environment. This paper uses thousands of pedestrian trajectories obtained from GPS signals to construct a desirability index for streets in Boston. We create the index by comparing the actual paths taken by pedestrians with the shortest path between any origin-destination pairs. The index captures pedestrians' willingness to deviate from their shortest path and provides a measure of the scenic and experience value provided by different parts of the city. We then use computer vision techniques combined with georeferenced data to measure the built environment of streets. We show that desirable streets are characterized by having better access to parks and sidewalks, more diverse business establishments, a higher presence of urban furniture, and tend to be visually enclosed streets with less complex facades. These results further our understanding of the value that the built environment brings to pedestrians, which enhances our capacity to design more lively and functional environments.