The 15-minute city beyond home: walking and cycling across home and non-home activity origins

The 15-minute city has been widely advocated as an urban planning strategy to promote active travel. However, existing studies have predominantly focused on residential neighbourhoods, overlooking the differences across journey contexts and the behavioural mechanisms underlying active travel. Using large-scale GPS-based travel data from the Netherlands, this study distinguishes between home-based and non-home-based journeys and separately examines active travel mode choice and travel duration using zero-inflated Gamma mixed-effects models.
The results show that the built environment influences active travel through multiple behavioural pathways. Potential accessibility consistently increases the likelihood of choosing walking and cycling, while its influence on travel duration is comparatively modest. In contrast, urban form and transport infrastructure primarily affect travel duration after an active mode has been chosen, with substantially stronger effects observed for non-home-based journeys. Walking and cycling also exhibit distinct environmental responses: walking duration is mainly associated with environmental characteristics in non-home activity spaces, whereas cycling remains responsive to multiple environmental attributes across both home-based and non-home-based contexts. Furthermore, several environmental factors demonstrate contrasting associations with active travel participation and travel duration, indicating that these two behavioural dimensions are governed by different mechanisms.
These findings suggest that evaluating the 15-minute city solely from the perspective of residential accessibility is insufficient. Incorporating an activity-space perspective provides a more comprehensive understanding of how the built environment shapes active travel and offers new behavioural evidence for evaluating and designing 15-minute cities.