Investigation and satisfaction evaluation on influencing factors of pupils' commuting safety in the winter city of china

A safe commuting environment can promote children to adopt a positive way to get to and from school, increasing their physical activity level and reducing health problems such as obesity. Most of the existing studies on children safety focused on open spaces such as parks and squares, the commuting environment of children needs more attention. And studies focusing on the correlation between built environment and children’s commuting safety are rarely carried out in winter cities. The purpose of this paper is to take Harbin, a winter city of China, as an empirical case to explore the built environment factors affecting pupils’ commuting safety. Urban primary schools in China are built near residential areas. The neighborhood environment is the primary commuting environment for pupils. The current residential areas in China are mainly divided into two categories: open blocks and gated communities. They differ greatly in construction time, location, characteristics of residents and built environment. Therefore, this study is carried out at the neighborhood level, and the two types of residential areas are discussed respectively. This study adopts questionnaire survey, behavior observation and other environmental behavior research methods to explore the relationship between the spatial and temporal behavior characteristics of primary school students and the built environment. And based on the optimized Importance Performance Analysis method (IPA) whose evaluation process was optimized with the Analytic Hierarchy Process(AHP) and Delphi method, this study explores the meeting point and the conflict point between the importance degree and satisfaction degree of commuting security factors from three aspects, which are activity safety, defense security and traffic safety. The results show that the influencing factors of traffic safety have the highest impact on pupils‘ commuting safety, including safety guardrails between motor vehicle lane and non-motor vehicle lane, crossing facilities, etc. In addition, neighborhood relationship and environmental identifiability in defense security aspect also has a high impact. With respect to satisfaction, the satisfaction of the gated communities is higher than that of the open blocks, and there is a large gap between them in the number of landmark nodes and motor vehicle flow, but the satisfaction of open block is higher in neighborhood relationship and street thermal environment. By coupling the importance and satisfaction of influencing factors, the study finds that safety guardrails between motor vehicle lane and non-motor vehicle lane, crossing facilities, pavement width and anti-skid pavement are in urgent need of renovation. Based on the above results, this paper proposes some strategies for residential renewal planning to provide a safe commuting environment for pupils in winter cities, such as planning the time sequence of community updating reasonably, enhancing the local participation degree of community planning and updating, and paying more attention to the street safety design.