Among a number of variables shown to affect pedestrian route choice, path length and turns have stood out as the most consequential. Turns have been considered the superior variable by some architectural scholars of urban street networks, while transportation planners and geographers believe distance to be paramount. The longstanding debate between these two approaches has been reinvigorated with the emergence of big data and advanced computational methods. In this paper, we provide much-needed clarity to this debate by demonstrating how the relative effect of turns depends on the spatial properties of street networks. We postulate that certain properties of street networks make it possible to reduce the number of turns without substantially increasing route distance, and suggest that data from such environments are likely to show a large effect of turns on route choice. Conversely, networks where a reduction of in turns is necessarily accompanied by an increase in distance are expected to reduce the effect of turns. We test these hypotheses by examining the effects of both distance and turns on pedestrian route choice using a path size logit model calibrated on over 10,000 anonymized GPS traces of pedestrians each in San Francisco, CA and Boston, MA. We find that the effect of distance is consistently larger in magnitude, while the effect of turns depends on network geometry. Only in specific street networks can turns alone explain route choice behavior as well as distance. Our findings suggest that turns, as well as other environmental qualities of a route, should be considered in addition to, not in lieu of, distance.

在影响行人路线选择的众多变量中，路径长度和转弯最为重要。一些城市街道网络的建筑学者认为转弯是最重要的变量，而交通规划师和地理学家则认为距离是最重要的。随着大数据和先进计算方法的出现，这两种方法之间长期存在的争论重新焕发了活力。在本文中，我们通过展示转弯的相对影响如何取决于街道网络的空间特性，为这场辩论提供了急需的清晰度。我们假设街道网络的某些特性可以在不显着增加路线距离的情况下减少转弯数量，并建议来自此类环境的数据可能显示转弯对路线选择的巨大影响。相反，减少转弯必然伴随着距离增加的网络预计会减少转弯的影响。我们通过使用路径大小 logit 模型检查距离和转弯对行人路线选择的影响来测试这些假设，该模型在加利福尼亚州旧金山和马萨诸塞州波士顿的 10,000 多个匿名行人 GPS 轨迹上进行了校准。我们发现距离的影响在幅度上始终较大，而转弯的影响取决于网络几何形状。只有在特定的街道网络中，转弯才能单独解释路线选择行为以及距离。我们的研究结果表明，除了而不是代替，还应考虑转弯以及路线的其他环境质量