PEDESTRIAN MOBILITY ENVIRONMENTS: DEFINITION, EVALUATION AND PROSPECTS

Promoting and building walking environments in our cities is believed to be a relevant goal in achieving sustainable mobility patterns. Furthermore, walking has relevant effects on the economy and lifestyle in cities. Despite the fact that over the last years there has been a growing interest regarding the development of new tools and planning concepts related to the pedestrian mobility, evidence demonstrates problems when transferred into practice. A certain number of factors seem to explain this. On the one hand, there is a complex and an uneasy interrelationship between urban structure and pedestrian mobility. On the other hand, personal preferences are crucial to understand pedestrian flows. Therefore, a comprehensive approach is advocated by academics, professionals and governments. The paper aims to gain insight into this problem through a literature review oriented towards analysing what factors are relevant to define Pedestrian Mobility Environments (PME) and assess their performance. PME will be presented as an instrument for planning practice and its definition will be based on different factors which are grouped into three dimensions: (i) Urban-Land-Use; (ii) Transport modes; (iii) Pedestrian profile. This comprehensive literature review provides the background to support the authors’ proposal for a set of general principles to develop an audit for the quality of PME.