The experience of walking through a city is influenced by amenities and the visual qualities of its built environment. This paper uses thousands of pedestrian trajectories obtained from GPS signals to construct a desirability index for streets in Boston. We create the index by comparing the actual paths taken by pedestrians with the shortest path between any origin-destination pairs. The index captures pedestrians' willingness to deviate from their shortest path and provides a measure of the scenic and experience value provided by different parts of the city. We then use computer vision techniques combined with georeferenced data to measure the built environment of streets. We show that desirable streets have better access to public amenities such as parks, sidewalks, and urban furniture. They are also sinuous, visually enclosed, have less complex facades, and have more diverse business establishments. These results further our understanding of the value that the built environment brings to pedestrians, enhancing our capacity to design more lively and functional environments.

穿越城市的体验受设施和建筑环境的视觉品质的影响。本文使用从GPS信号获得的数千条行人轨迹来构建波士顿街道的期望指数。我们通过将行人的实际路径与任何起点-终点对之间的最短路径进行比较来创建索引。该指数记录了行人偏离最短路径的意愿，并提供了衡量该城市不同地区所提供的风景和体验价值的指标。然后，我们将计算机视觉技术与地理参考数据结合使用，以测量街道的建成环境。我们表明，理想的街道可以更好地使用公共设施，例如公园，人行道和城市家具。它们也是弯曲的，在视觉上是封闭的，具有较少复杂的外观，并具有更多不同的业务机构。这些结果进一步加深了我们对建筑环境带给行人的价值的理解，增强了我们设计更生动和功能性环境的能力。