Perception of pleasure in the urban running environment with street view images and running routes

The urban environment affects human behavior and health. Most studies on the feelings of street spaces have not considered a specific kind of realistic scene, such as running. To overcome this limitation, we explored the relationship between the urban environment and the pleasure of running. We collected 8260 street view images from 153 running routes in Beijing and invited more than 400 volunteers of different genders and ages to rate their sense of pleasure in street view images of the urban running environment through an online survey. Then, the proportion of visual elements in street images was extracted based on semantic segmentation, and the landscape was divided. Finally, a linear mixed model was used to predict the pleasure scores of different gender and age groups for different landscapes. The results show significant differences in the pleasure scores for different landscapes and age groups. Middle-aged people's sense of pleasure was lower than that of the young and the elderly. More greenery was associated with a higher pleasure score, while the proportion of urban elements such as buildings was negatively correlated with the pleasure score. The results indicate that running in a natural landscape is pleasurable and beneficial for mental health.