Steps in Reserve

“Steps in reserve” are the steps that people could take but do not take because they choose to travel by using a motorized mode for short trips instead of walking. Many studies have already confirmed that the potential to walk is important and that a shift from motorized mode to walking for short trips could be beneficial to many people from a physical activity perspective. The current research is an extension of this study of latent walk trips and proposes a comparison of steps in reserve in two large Canadian metropolitan areas—Montreal, Quebec, and Toronto, Ontario—for various population segments and neighborhood densities. It also adds measures of how these steps in reserve have evolved over time and discusses whether current travel behaviors have been influenced by ever-increasing promotional campaigns to be more active. The research relies on rich sources of microdata on daily travel behaviors; data from four large-scale origin–destination travel surveys (1998 and 2003 for the Montreal area and 1996 and 2001 for the Toronto area) are processed in order to estimate the impacts of a theoretical mode shift scenario on the number of steps people could add to their volume of physical activity on a daily basis. Results show that steps in reserve are quite consistent across metropolitan areas. Around 15% of the population have steps in reserve, an average of 2,430 steps per day. Moreover, the estimated models confirm that both the propensity to have steps in reserve and the number of steps in reserve vary according to individual, household, and neighborhood features. For instance, living alone and owning a driver's license will increase the probability of having steps in reserve, whereas being a full-time worker decreases the average number of steps in reserve per day.