POTENTIAL OF USING MACHINOEKI AS PUSH FACTOR TO ENCOURAGE COMMUNITY WALKING IN TOWN

Prior studies have identified that enhancing a city’s walkability could be helpful in revitalizing an old, decayed or blighted downtown. While the benefits of walking are obvious and have been widely explored especially in terms of health and environment, this paper explores the potential of Machinoeki as a push factor in changing the mindset of a community about walking. A pilot survey was conducted to understand the interests of people in selecting their mode of transport and to communicate with the willingness of respondents to change their attitude by introducing facilities that can promote walking needs. To gather a collection of respondents and further to illustrate the role of Machinoeki, a simple random sampling method was used. The paper concludes that while Machinoeki has the right facilities to encourage walking, more research is needed to demonstrate the link between facilities with the community's preference for walking in town. In this analysis, however, we found that the Machinoeki components have the potential to be a push factor with respect to the positive responses of 72 percent of respondents to Machinoeki's ability to encourage walking. Keywords: Walkability, Machinoeki, Public Transportation, Taiping