Anciaes, P; Jones, P; (2021) Pedestrian priority in street design - how can it improve sustainable mobility? Presented at: XXV International Conference Living and Walking in Cities - New scenarios for safe mobility in urban areas, Brescia, Italy.

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Abstract

Re-designing streets to give more space to pedestrians has several positive effects, on the local economy (e.g. more expenditure on local businesses), communities (e.g. more social interaction), and environment (e.g. less emissions). However, street design guidelines rarely make explicit the pathways through which the different street designs contributes to achieve those various effects. Guidelines also do not fully acknowledge the effects on other street users. For example, widening footways may imply reducing space allocated to bus lanes. This may result in a net negative effect on sustainable mobility, if it leads to a switch from bus to car use. These are important gaps, because urban streets are currently under pressure to accommodate increased mobility levels and provide attractive spaces to support walking and street activities (e.g. outdoor cafés), all within fixed street widths. Street designs that reallocate space to pedestrians should therefore attend to a range of policy objectives and to the effects on other types of sustainable mobility (e.g. cycling, public transport). This presentation shows a new method for the design and assessment of interventions for reallocating street space to pedestrians. The goal is to find options that maximize the societal benefits of pedestrian priority while promoting a shift from private cars to sustainable modes. The method was developed by a consortium of universities, international associations of street user groups (pedestrians, cyclists, and bus users), and the governments of five European cities: London, Lisbon, Budapest, Malmo, and Constanta. In the presentation, we show the application of the method to generate and assess options for the static and time-based reallocation of street space to pedestrians in busy corridors in the five cities. The method starts with the generation of design options - a stage that is usually neglected in street planning. We have developed two new online tools that allow planners to specify the street uses that should be prioritized (e.g. walking) and those that should not be made worse off (e.g. passengers waiting at bus stops), as well as objectives that should be achieved (e.g. safety, clear air). One tool presents options that, based on previous studies, fulfil those conditions. The other tool presents all possible combinations of design elements (e.g. footways, bus stops), in a cross-section view of the street, that fulfil the conditions and fit in the available street width. Further options are generated by the local community, in 'design days'. Participants are provided with a toolkit with blocks and acetates representing different design elements (e.g. bus stop, cycling parking area), at the same scale. Participants then experiment (negotiating with each other) with different arrangements that fit into the available street width. The options generated with these methods are finally assessed using another new tool that incorporates a multi-criteria procedure, based on weights provided by stakeholders and the results of the microsimulation of street use.

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