State Key Laboratory of Ocean Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China.
JSTI Group, Nanjing, China.
Front Public Health. 2024 Jun 28;12:1418733. doi: 10.3389/fpubh.2024.1418733. eCollection 2024.
Walking plays a crucial role in promoting physical activity among older adults. Understanding how the built environment influences older adults' walking behavior is vital for promoting physical activity and healthy aging. Among voluminous literature investigating the environmental correlates of walking behaviors of older adults, few have focused on walking duration across different age groups and life stages, let alone examined the potential nonlinearities and thresholds of the built environment.
This study employs travel diary from Zhongshan, China and the gradient boosting decision trees (GBDT) approach to disentangle the age and retirement status differences in the nonlinear and threshold effects of the built environment on older adults' walking duration.
The results showed built environment attributes collectively contribute 57.37% for predicting older adults' walking duration, with a higher predicting power for the old-old (70+ years) or the retired. The most influencing built environment attribute for the young-old (60-70 years) is bus stop density, whereas the relative importance of population density, bus stop density, and accessibility to green space or commercial facilities is close for the old-old. The retired tend to walk longer in denser-populated neighborhoods with better bus service, but the non-retired are more active in walking in mixed-developed environments with accessible commercial facilities. The thresholds of bus stop density to encourage walking among the young-old is 7.8 counts/km, comparing to 6 counts/km among the old-old. Regarding the green space accessibility, the effective range for the non-retired (4 to 30%) is smaller than that of the retired (12 to 45%).
Overall, the findings provide nuanced and diverse interventions for creating walking-friendly neighborhoods to promote walking across different sub-groups of older adults.
步行对于促进老年人的身体活动起着至关重要的作用。了解建筑环境如何影响老年人的步行行为，对于促进身体活动和健康老龄化至关重要。在大量研究老年人步行行为的环境相关性的文献中，很少有研究关注不同年龄组和生命阶段的步行持续时间，更不用说研究建筑环境的潜在非线性和阈值了。
本研究采用中国中山的出行日记和梯度提升决策树（GBDT）方法，以揭示建筑环境对老年人步行持续时间的非线性和阈值效应在年龄和退休状态上的差异。
结果表明，建筑环境属性总体上对老年人步行持续时间的预测贡献了 57.37%，对高龄（70 岁以上）或退休老年人的预测能力更高。对于年轻老年人（60-70 岁），最具影响力的建筑环境属性是公共汽车站密度，而对于高龄老年人，人口密度、公共汽车站密度和绿地或商业设施可达性的相对重要性较为接近。退休人员倾向于在人口密度较大、公共汽车服务较好的社区中走更长的路，但非退休人员在可到达商业设施的混合开发环境中更积极地参与步行。鼓励年轻老年人步行的公共汽车站密度阈值为 7.8 个/公里，而高龄老年人为 6 个/公里。关于绿地可达性，非退休人员（4%至 30%）的有效范围小于退休人员（12%至 45%）。
总体而言，这些发现为创造适合步行的社区提供了细致入微和多样化的干预措施，以促进不同年龄段老年人的步行活动。
