Design of pedestrian network friendliness maps

Abstract

This article introduces the concept of pedestrian, or walking friendliness, and presents a methodology for obtaining maps thereof. Walking friendliness is a quality of walking indicator, defined for any given origin in a city, which combines accessibility measures, based on impedance between that origin and destinations, with performance scores for the pedestrian infrastructure linking those origins and destinations. The methodology uses geographic information systems to obtain walking friendliness values and represent them in a map. The approach is demonstrated through a case study for the city of Coimbra, Portugal, for which friendliness maps were derived. The procedure and maps that were produced can be scaled to any size of city.

Benchmarking City Layouts—A Methodological Approach and an Accessibility Comparison between a Real City and the Garden City

“…Table 1 shows the weights chosen for this research, with higher weights meaning trips to the corresponding destinations are likely to be more frequent. For urban facilities, these weight values are consistent with trip frequencies per facility type found by the UK Government [47] and were also used in [48,49]. For jobs, the percentage of commuting trips was considered, and a weight was assigned accordingly.…”