2023 Volume 22 Issue 1 Pages 76-82
In Japan, alarm over passive smoke has grown in recent years, and installation of smoking areas as well as separation of smoking and non-smoking areas is progressing in various facilities and urban space. Considering this trend, this study aims at proposing a new concept of optimal placement of public smoking areas so that smokers can smoke appropriately while non-smokers are protected from passive smoking. First, we grasp the trade-off factors of the demands of both smokers and non-smokers by search of newspaper articles and by field surveys. Second, using those indicators induced from the trade-off factors, we derive the appropriate placement of public smoking areas in an actual city. As a result, the indicators affecting the highly rated smoking areas are "the sidewalk width", "the number of local employees", "the nearest distance to nursery schools or kindergartens", " the nearest distance to parks", and " the nearest distance to schools". The result of the appropriate placement shows that, the more the number of smoking areas increases, the more the smoke disperses, leading to the prevention of passive smoking, but that the cost performance deteriorates.
