The Walking Suitability Index of the Territory (T-WSI): a new tool to evaluate urban neighborhood walkability.

AIM: To design an easy method to evaluate the walkability of an urban neighborhood, in order to support Public Administrations in the decision making related to urban health policy and local development. METHODS: The tool, called the Walking Suitability Index of the territory (T-WSI), has been further developed by our team. T-WSI is applied to each street of an environmental area. It includes 12 indicators subdivided into 4 categories: practicability, safety, urbanity, pleasurableness. Data collected in each street are inserted in an algoritm to perform weighted sums and to aggregate the indicators and the categories, up to compute the final index. To validate T-WSI an experimental study was carried out in two environmental areas of Rome: "San Saba" and "Sacco Pastore". RESULTS: The average index is: 58.6 for the neighborhood "San Saba" and for 55.1 for "Sacco Pastore. Both results detected gaps in the design for pedestrian use of public spaces. Among the analysed categories, Safety showed the worst results in both neighborhoods, mainly for the lack of "protection from vehicle speed". CONCLUSIONS: The developed tool is easy to use, inexpensive, sensible and reproducible, offering a good basis for urban health policy decisions. The relevance of the tool stands on the survey methodology, based on the direct and objective observation of the context.