As part of enhancing the effectiveness of the walking policies, evaluation tools have been recently developed to assess the local government projects in terms of walking safety, but there remains a lack of effort in measuring the extent of walking convenience. Thus, the purpose of this study was to develop an index that can objectively and efficiently measure the municipal pedestrian convenience level and to explore its potential as an effective government monitoring tool in improving the pedestrian environment and in consulting the direction of the walking policies.

In this study, the pedestrian convenience index is defined as an index for quantitatively evaluating the local physical walking environment that pedestrians can access safely and conveniently from the origin to the destination. To this end, four indicators - rate of pedestrian-only road, pedestrian path efficiency, public transportation accessibility, and park accessibility - comprising the index were determined and tested based on the three municipalities - Jung-gu and Gangnam-gu of Seoul and Chuncheon-si. The test analysis results showed that independence, complementation, and internal consistency of the indicators were secured. Thus, it is feasible to calculate the pedestrian convenience index through the arithmetic mean of these four indicators. The pedestrian convenience index and the individual indicators are calculated as a building-level score 0-100 and based on this, it is feasible to count the scores as an administrative dong-level or a city-level.