Environmental Factors Causing Inconvenience of Store Accessibility for Older Adults in Tokyo: Objective Indicators of Road Environments for Estimating People’s Inconvenience

The problem of disadvantaged shoppers has become more serious in Japan. People feel difficulties for grocery shopping. Inconvenience of store accessibility is a factor of the difficulties. To address this problem, it is necessary to specify the elements in the concepts. However, few studies have focused on factors other than distance. Focusing the older adults, this study aims to (1) clarify the characteristics of dissatisfaction with various road environments, (2) clarify what kinds of road environment dissatisfaction affect inconvenience, and (3) to develop decision tree models that estimate people’s dissatisfaction with the objective condition. A series of analyses were conducted based on data from an online questionnaire survey. First, the results indicated that the degree of tolerance and the amounts of each road elements were related to dissatisfaction. Elderlies tend to avoid several elements. Second, several road element can lead to inconveniences in accessing stores. Additionally, we created decision tree models by combining these data with indicators of objective road conditions. These models provided the threshold values of the objective conditions that significantly changed the subjective evaluation. These results allow us to compare the conditions of regions more efficiently or to identify regions requiring a more detailed survey.