Role of personal barriers on willingness to walk in daily work trips across Rasht citizens

The walk oriented pattern is an alternative travel pattern for daily trips; that a person walks more than her/his regular pattern. In order to examine the tendency to this pattern, it is necessary to examine the role of different types of barriers on pedestrian walking. This study intends to address the role of personal barriers which avoid people to walk more in their daily work trips. The studied barriers include laziness/tend to wake up late, physical and health problems, not interested in more walking, the importance of neat appearance at work and not feeling good about being seen on streets. For this purpose, a sample of 432 employees living in Rasht has been used. Therefore, the studied variables are classified into three categories: socio-economic, travel and environmental characteristics. Five ordered logit models have been calibrated to investigate the importance of personal barriers including 11 variables of socio-economic characteristics, 6 variables of travel characteristics and 5 variables of environmental characteristics. The results show that firstly, the effect of socio-economic characteristics on each of the personal barriers studied is different and secondly, the contribution of these characteristics on each of the five barrier: laziness/tend to wake up late, physical and health problems, not interested in more walking, the importance of neat appearance at work and not feeling good about being seen on streets are 41, 30, 13, 7 and 8 percent, respectively.