Ways to study changes in pedestrians’ behaviour in the artificially lit urban outdoor environment

Abstract

Lighting technologies have been rapidly developing in recent years together with the advancement in digital and connected technologies. Nevertheless, while achieving quantitative goals with the help of technical developments, there is always a need to correlate them with their impacts on users’ experience. This paper focuses on the changes in human behaviour whilst walking under an artificially lit outdoor environment. A systematic literature search was conducted from which three groups of a pedestrians’ behaviour were identified, namely walking (including activity levels and walking patterns), microscopic mobility (including walking speed, gait characteristics and use of walkway space) and gaze behaviour. An additional round of a literature search was done for each of the group mentioned above. Final set of the articles consisted of 41, 13 and 12 papers for walking, microscopic mobility behaviour and gaze behaviour subgroups respectively. The existing knowledge on possible changes in pedestrian behaviour caused by various artificial lighting settings was summarized. In addition, the methods to gather data about these changes applied in the selected papers were reviewed, and the perspectives for video-based analysis and online public participation geographic information system methodologies were discussed.