Les relations entre le transport actif et l'environnement urbain : le cas d'usagers du train de banlieue de Montréal
In a society where it is quite normal to spend much time sitting, we study from an environmental design standpoint, the integration of physical activity for recreation and transportation activities and everyday places. This integration is relatively little studied in its entirety because it requires taking into consideration the factors of physical and social environment, both types of physical activity, the various places visited daily and it puts in that many challenges of methodology. This overview of the phenomenon is needed because more and more researches have reported associations between specific dimensions of the built environment and specific behaviours, and these results are occasionally contradictory. To understand the phenomenon, we set the eco environmental model and have adapted to better represent the population mobility. We have therefore chosen a unit of analysis including the residential area, the area of workplace and travel between the two. Thus, using multiple data sources, we characterized the community as restricting or facilitating physical activity and people living there as being sufficiently active or not. We then highlighted the important elements of interviews based on this pairing. Among the themes explored in the interview, characteristics of the physical environment that are important, the impact of the social environment at work and at home, the logic underlying the errands, etc. Key findings of this research show that users of the commuter trains are sufficiently active although they live in the suburbs. In this sense, our sample is more active than the provincial average. We note that the influence of the environment is obvious but under the principle of communicating vessels, that is to say that the residential pole and employment center has both a contribution that is often complementary. The influence of the social environment is through the significant role of relatives rather than by their geographical proximity while environmental design has a huge contribution to make the journey enjoyable and thereby give an added value to the time required to use them. The purpose of environments, the type of walking and the expectations of the users must guide the design. Consequently, there is not one formula or one single prescription to increase the walkability of the community; that being said, the characterization tools must be tailored. In conclusion, ideas for future developments following this research are proposed.
Physical activity Environmental design Suburb Time