Lessons Learnt from METU Campus Walkability Evaluations

To encourage a modal shift to walking, first, it is important to understand and evaluate walkability. While walkability assessment studies mainly deal with perception and built environment aspects, engineering studies focused on evaluation based on pedestrian level of service (PLOS) that rely on flow and infrastructure capacity aspects. This perspective difference and methodological details resulted in requirement of a wide range of data, which vary greatly based on the scope of the study. To evaluate walkability on the campus of Middle East Technical University (METU), Ankara, different analyses were performed with different data sets. The pedestrian flows, counted manually and multiple times a day, were studied in geographica information systems (GIS) environment, which revealed the change of the directionality and volumes of pedestrian activity over time. PLOS evaluations of the campus using Highway Capacity Manual (HCM) and Gainesville methods resulted in high rating with the former and very low ones with the latter. These contradicting ratings for the same campus clearly showed the potential biasedness in evaluations based on the selected approach. Finally, Bluetooth readers were employed at four locations on the pedestrian alley to study dwell and travel times. Despite the low sampling levels, the high variability in pedestrian travel characteristics showed the need for more improved pedestrian data collection and modeling. Lessons learnt from the walkability evaluations on METU Campus are used to develop a list of recommendations on the required pedestrian data types and display for more integrated walkability studies.