Exploring the Intervention Effect of Urban Greenways on Moderate-to-Vigorous Physical Activities of Residents: A Study Based on Natural Experiment

Improving built environment should be given higher priority in promoting physical activities and health status of the population. Two waves of survey data, before and after the intervention in 2016 and 2019 respectively, were collected from 1,020 participants in the neighborhoods around the East Lake Greenway in Wuhan, China. The natural experimental approach was adopted to explore the causal relationship between urban greenways and people’s physical activities. The mixed-effect logistics regression model was also applied to explore the intervention effect and dose-response effect of urban greenways on residents’ moderate-to-vigorous physical activities (MVPA). The results showed that greenways could significantly improve the MVPA of residents within one kilometer from the greenway, and a salient distance-decay effect of greenways on promoting physical activities was also observed. Our results suggest that the improvement of greenway accessibility and neighborhood environment deserves to be highlighted in promoting people’s physical activities and health status.