A stated preference survey for evaluating pedestrians’ expectations on walkways

Abstract

Pedestrian mobility is the oldest form of transport in urban areas. Due to the increase of private vehicles, transport planning has mainly focused on traffic congestion problems, neglecting pedestrian mobility and public transport. Given the current situation of pollution and climate change, walkability is again one of the most important transport modes to achieve urban sustainable mobility in the next future. As reported in the literature, city dwellers are willing to walk to carry out daily activities but complain about the lack of adequate pedestrian infrastructure. For promoting pedestrian mobility, the quality levels of pedestrian paths should be increased. Many researchers suggest methodologies for determining the pedestrian level of service. Among these, some studies consider both path physical characteristics and users' perception about the walkway. Investigating on users’ perception represents a good strategy for implementing interventions aimed at increasing the quality of service. In addition to users’ perception about the different characteristics of the pedestrian path, it is also necessary to take over the importance that users assign to each aspect. This work proposes the design of a Stated Preferences survey and the analysis of the preliminary results. A questionnaire was addressed to a sample of 240 pedestrians on a walkway located in the University Campus of Rende (Italy). The aim is recording pedestrians’ perception about the characteristics of the path and detecting the choices they would make in a hypothetical scenario. Then, the collected data has been analysed by means of a discrete choice model for assessing the weights assigned by pedestrians to each aspect included in the analysis. The results have allowed the most relevant pedestrian path aspects for users to be identified. Just on these aspects it is necessary to intervene in order to make pedestrian paths increasingly attractive and to encourage users towards active mobility.