Walking supports healthy aging, but older adults often prioritize safety and comfort over speed. This study uses a scoping review to examine these preferences and guide age-inclusive routing systems.
Walking is one of the most accessible and adaptable forms of physical activity for older adults, offering physical, cognitive, and social benefits. As aging populations grow worldwide, creating supportive walking environments has become a public health priority. For many, walking remains the last feasible form of active mobility, making the design of safe, pleasant, and accessible pedestrian routes critical.
While routing technologies and walkability assessments increasingly shape mobility decisions, they typically optimize for distance or time, neglecting factors such as pavement quality, gradient, lighting, or traffic. Although pedestrian route-choice research provides methods to account for such preferences, studies rarely focus on older adults, and very few quantify the trade-offs they make between route attributes.
This paper presents a scoping review of pedestrian route-choice studies that include older adults, following PRISMA-ScR guidelines. We examined environmental and personal factors influencing older adults’ route selection and identified gaps limiting the integration of these insights into routing tools and walkability measures.
The empirical findings point to a new routing paradigm. Recreation-aware navigation must (i) search for looped or multi-stop itineraries instead of a single origin-to-destination path, and (ii) optimize a non-linear, multi-objective cost function that balances preferred distance ranges with scenery, benches, shade, and perceived safety. These costs should be fed by dynamic, user-specific coefficients derived from the models above, not by fixed, one-size-fits-all penalties.
The research was conducted within the Silver Ways project; more information is available on the project webpage: Silver Ways
Reference: Fulman, N., Huber, J., Lloyd, A. T., Foshag, K., Grinblat, Y., Türk, U., Lautenbach, S., Amcoff, J., Toger, M., Jokinen, J., & Zipf, A. (2025). Route choice to inform navigation system design and accessibility analysis for older pedestrians: A scoping review. Journal of Transport & Health, 44, 102151. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jth.2025.102151
