The Effect of Access to Waterbodies and Parks on Walking and Cycling in Urban Areas

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

This study investigated whether neighbourhoods in urban areas with good and bad access to waterbody and park have different impacts on walking and cycling. Some issues should be further addressed: (1)  In the introduction, works related to big data should be brief summerizing, and explain the advantages of using survey questionnaires in this article. (2) Some literature on physical activity should be cited and compared with existing research conclusions. Such as

Unraveling nonlinear and interaction effects of multilevel built environment features on outdoor jogging with explainable machine learning

Author Response

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Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

 

The study and contribution present, how the vicinity of natural element (waterbodies and park) contribute to motivation for walking or cycling as means of mobility. The study has been conducted in Paris.

The issues, research design, conditions, results and implications are decently developed and presented. There is a room for improvement in some details, expanded below. Lower scores on novelty and significance were attributed mainly because the research questions and research design reinforce previous findings but do not bring a lot of new findings into the field nor do they tackle particularly fresh questions or introduce new methodology. Nothing wrong with that as we not only need the invention, where the contribution is not as significant as well as width of studies, that this research mainly contributes to.

In research design I am rather concerned that not much attention has been paid to the experience and contribution of the links themselves on the users' experience in terms of quality of these connections beyond maintenance and ease of use. The paths from A to B and their qualities can affect the decisions and inclinations to choose one mobility mode over the other. Also, when dealing with links to the green urban areas, the research has not asked in particular, whether the level of green and blue infrastructure on pathways and connecting streets would affect choice of mode of mobility and choice of the connection that would not be based on the shortest or fastest attribute, etc.

At times some parameters in the research feel oversimplified, such as access to two observed elements. It is based on a very binary setting in terms of presence in the neighbourhood.

There is a discrepancy between the research and survey design (simplification, whole Paris under observation, vast size, 2.2 million inhabitants) that is oriented towards big data and numerous respondents – large sample, and then the resulting sample that yields 50+ respondents per group and in essence reaches 110 inhabitants out of 2.2 million. This leaves us with less than one participant per neighbourhood (80 neighbourhoods, 50-60 respondents per group in your research) and indicates many were not covered at all, much less so in a statistical sense, where we count on large numbers to get rid of anomalies and skewed results. Although well designed, the results are thus on a very shaky grounds and one has to be extremely cautious how to interpret them. It cannot be by any means representative. With this sample size, the research would have been much better of and much more insightful if it chose a focus groups method. Also, participant recrutation mainly through academic channels (not even all universities in Paris involved, just one) is adding to the distortion of the outcomes. Some of these issues are addressed by the authors themselves in subchapter 6, but I believe they should be brought forward more clearly and preferable shift the attention from the results to the design of study, where the results can be seen as a prototypical run, and for finetuning purposes of a larger, future study with a more representative sample.

The benefits of blue-green infrastructure and systems in introduction should be expanded to at least highlight the climate control and climate issues mitigation benefits. The definitions of utilitarian, recreational and physical are not entirely clear, especially the distinction between the recreational and physical purposes.

Author Response

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Reviewer 3 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Dear Authors,

The overall idea of the research as well as the quality of presented material is satisfactory and brings into focus a very important issue when development of cities is in question.

Though, it seems that the scope of the research, as well as methods applied are insufficient to give valuable results. Therefore, in order to advance and further develop the complexity of the research I would suggest adding another method like, for instance interviews with local community representatives of neighborhood analyzed or quantitative method that can be provided through GIS platform or spatial syntax method applied for this particular issue.   

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Our comments all well addressed.

Reviewer 3 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Dear authors

Thank you for the answer provided

You developed the paper sufficiently

Regards