How would travel contexts affect people’s perceptions and evaluations of urban green space?

Abstract

Urban green space may impact human health through complex pathways and the effect can vary across different travel contexts. Revealing these disparities in health pathways between different travel contexts may provide essential and practical suggestions for sustainable developments in urban environments. In this study, we investigated the impacts of travel contexts on people’s perceptions and evaluations of green space using a cross-sectional dataset collected in Hong Kong, China. Eight hundred participants in 4 representative communities were recruited through stratified sampling, and we identified 2,913 travel events from their two-day activity-travel diaries after rigorous cross-validation with GPS-derived trajectories. We also derived two green space exposure representations using fine-grained remote sensing imagery and 8 representative green space exposure indicators. Eighty logistical regression models and mixed-effects models were developed to investigate the associations with control of a range of potential uncertainties. Our results indicate solid and consistently positive associations between participants’ measured green space exposure and perceived green space, and significant but variable effects of travel purposes, travel modes, and travel time on participants’ perceptions and evaluations of green space. Walking significantly promotes participants’ perceptions and positive evaluations of urban green space, buses are not significantly associated, and metro trains may depress the perception and evaluation. Our results provide solid evidence on how travel contexts may influence people’s perceptions and evaluations of urban green space and, thus, provide essential insights into environmental health studies and sustainable urban planning that consider green space as an important urban environmental setting.

Keywords

Green space / Perception and evaluation / Exposure measurements / Travel contexts / Urban planning / Well-being

Ethical statement

The study was reviewed and approved by the Survey and Behavioral Research Ethics Committee of the Chinese University of Hong Kong (Protocol SBRE-19-123 approved on 8 January 2020; Protocol SBRE(R)-21-005 approved on 1 November 2021). Written informed consent was obtained from all participants prior to data collection. Consent to publish is not applicable to this study.

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Yang Liu: Writing - review & editing, Writing - original draft, Visualization, Validation, Methodology, Formal analysis, Conceptualization. Jianying Wang: Writing - review & editing, Writing - original draft, Validation, Formal analysis. Mei-Po Kwan: Writing - review & editing, Writing - original draft, Resources, Project administration, Methodology, Funding acquisition, Conceptualization. Dong Liu: Writing - review & editing. Liuyi Song: Writing - review & editing, Formal analysis.

Declaration of competing interests

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Mei-Po Kwan is an Editorial Board Member for this journal and was not involved in the editorial review or the decision to publish this article.

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by grants from the Hong Kong Research Grants Council (General Research Fund Grants No. 14605920, 14606922, 14603724; Collaborative Research Fund Grant No. C4023-20GF; Research Matching Grants RMG 8601219, 8601242, 3110151), a grant from the Research Committee on Research Sustainability of Major Research Grants Council Funding Scheme (Grant No. 3133235) of the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK), a grant from the 1+1+1 CUHK-CUHK(SZ)-GDSTC Joint Collaboration Fund (Grant No. 4760974), and a grant from the Vice-Chancellor’s One-off Discretionary Fund (Smart and Sustainable Cities: City of Commons) (Grant No. 4930787) of CUHK. Dong Liu also thanks the funding support from the Research Grants Council General Research Fund (Grant No. 14618324); the Research Committee Direct Grant for Research (Grant No. 4052336) and the Strategic Partnership Award for Research Collaboration (Grant No. 4750474) of the CUHK, the University Development Fund (Grant No. UDF01003932) from CUHK(SZ), grants from the “1+1+1” CUHK-CUHK(SZ)-GDSTC Joint Collaboration Fund (Grants No. 2025A0505000083, 2025A0505000062). Jianying Wang was supported by an RGC Postdoctoral Fellowship (Grant No. PDFS2324-4H04). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

Data availability

The dataset contains confidential private information that cannot be deidentified, and thus cannot be shared.

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