Nonlinear influences of landscape configurations and walking access to transit services on travel satisfaction

Walking, as a form of active travel, has played a significant role in facilitating sustainable transport and the development of the built environment. A growing number of studies have examined the relationships between the built environment and active travel trips around transit stations. However, travellers’ propensity to walk to transit stops and their travel satisfaction with doing so, particularly for first-mile trips, and its relationship with the built environment, in developing countries, have so far received little attention in the literature. Thus, this paper examines the nonlinear influences of landscape configurations, walking access to transit services and the interactions between them on travel satisfaction. Gradient boosting decision tree models are used to control for trip attributes and factors related to the built environment both in residential areas and business/commercial districts where a lot of transit stations are located. We combine street view data and individual survey data for the Beijing metropolitan area to document that improving walking access to transit services has significant effects on travel satisfaction. The results show that landscape configurations tend to have nonlinear associations with walking access to transit services as well as having pronounced interaction effects on travel satisfaction. The findings of this study demonstrate the importance of planning the spatial placement of stations to make them more convenient and improve people’s travel satisfaction with first-mile journeys made on foot.