Development and application of the Pedestrian Environment Index (PEI)

•New measure of walkability called the Pedestrian Environment Index (PEI).•PEI is based on four sub-indices that capture characteristics relevant to walking.•PEI is zone-based and therefore especially suited for MPOs.•The PEI is applied to Chicago.•Reverse analysis can show missing elements in neighborhoods. The objective of this work is to develop a new and easily computable measure of pedestrian friendliness for urban neighborhoods that makes the best use of the available data and also addresses the issues concerning other models in use. The Pedestrian Environment Index (PEI) is defined as the product of four components representing land-use diversity (based on the concept of entropy), population density, commercial density, and intersection density. The final PEI is bound between 0 and 1, and uses data that typically are readily available to planners and metropolitan planning organizations (MPO). The results of this method are region-specific; they are comparable only between the zones within the given study area. As a case study, the city of Chicago is analyzed at the sub-traffic analysis zone (sub-TAZ) level. The results agree closely with the expectation of pedestrian friendliness across different parts of the city. Possible extensions are also listed, including a further study to determine statistical relationships between the PEI and common socio-economic characteristics. The method could also be further improved should more types of data become available.