Tourism Walkability Index: A Data-Driven Tool for Tourism Urban Planning

Abstract

Walking plays a central role in how tourists experience cities, yet most walkability measures remain oriented toward residents and do not reflect the specific spatial behaviours, sensitivities, and motivations of visitors. Existing indices typically overlook the importance of cultural access, environmental comfort, and safety perceptions for tourist mobility. As a result, there is a need for tourism-specific approaches that can capture how walkability varies within cities and how it relates to tourist mobility patterns. This paper proposes the Tourism Walkability Index (TWI), a fully geospatial and street-level framework designed to quantify walkability from a tourist perspective. The TWI integrates three dimensions – accessibility to relevant points of interest, access to public and shared transport systems and comfort conditions shaped by infrastructure and environmental quality.  These dimensions are operationalised using a pedestrian network with slope-adjusted travel times and geospatial datasets describing urban amenities, mobility services, and comfort-related variables such as lighting, pedestrianisation, heat exposure, air quality, noise and traffic safety. The TWI is applied to four cities in northern Portugal – Porto, Braga, Guimarães and Vila Real – representing contrasting data environments and urban morphologies. Across all cities, the TWI reveals a recurring spatial structure: historic centres emerge as the most walkable areas, while peripheral zones consistently score lower. The fine spatial resolution reveal micro-scale contrasts that broader neighbourhood metrics obscure, including highly accessible but low-comfort streets, and comfortable yet poorly connected areas. These patterns highlight opportunities for targeted interventions, improved tourist dispersal, and enhanced alignment between tourism mobility and urban liveability goals. The multi-city application further demonstrates that the TWI yields coherent results even when only open data are available, indicating that its conceptual structure is robust and transferable. By providing a replicable, open-source workflow and fine-grained urban diagnostics, the TWI offers a practical tool for integrating walkability into tourism planning and sustainable mobility management.