A microsimulation based method to evaluate shared space performances

Abstract

Shared space is a concept of urban street design which implies the creation of a level surface within the whole road reserve and is aimed at encouraging different road users to interact spontaneously and to negotiate priority with each other. To build successful shared spaces, traffic engineers can rely at present on specific guidelines as well as technical reports. Nevertheless, there is no method available to compute the performance of shared spaces in terms of Level Of Service (LOS). In order to address this gap, a new indicator of traffic quality for pedestrians is being developed. This measure of performance considers aspects of comfort related to the crossing, which pedestrians use to go from one side of the roadway to the other. During this movement, discomfort is generated by the necessity to solve the conflicts with vehicles. Therefore, factors which potentially influence comfort are mathematically formulated. Later, the performance indicator can be calibrated on the basis of the opinion of a group of respondents, who evaluated real-world crossing movements in video sequences. The effectiveness and usability of the developed indicator is demonstrated in an exemplary case study. A shared street in the district of Bergedorf, Hamburg (D) is selected and filmed. To reproduce the interaction of road users and the mechanism of space negotiation, an innovative modeling approach based on social force model (SFM) is proposed. The model is calibrated and implemented in a Java-based simulation tool. Alternative shared space scenarios, as well as conventional ones with space segregation, are simulated. The goal of this dissertation is to establish a method to evaluate the performances of shared spaces through traffic microsimulation. This method includes the data survey and acquisition, the definition of performance indicators, the development of a microsimulation approach, the calibration of the motion model on the basis of real-world data and finally the execution of simulations to collect the results. In addition, this work shows the necessity to employ a comfort-based indicator for pedestrian traffic quality in shared spaces. The benefits of this approach, with respect to conventional efficiency-based indicators as time delay, is properly shown in real-world situations and successively demonstrated by help of statistical methods.