Assessing Pedestrian Environment: A Review on Pedestrian Facilities in Rajshahi City Corporation Area

Abstract

Traffic congestion and lack of public pedestrian space are faced by most urban areas in Bangladesh. Provision of facilities for pedestrian is not increased as a rate of increase in population. Consequently pedestrians are at greater risk for their safety, especially in the commercial zones of large cities. In Rajshahi, walkways are constructed recently; but the facilities are not enough for providing friendly environment. The demand for the improvement of pedestrian facilities is raised due to the reasons such as difficulties in crossing busy intersections, conflicts among pedestrians and vehicles, physical barriers, low visibility, improper design of handicapped accessible ramps and so on. The purpose of the study is to assess pedestrian environment to show how extent the pedestrian facilities are friendly for walking. The pedestrian friendly environment is evaluated under five criteria i.e. Connection, Convenience, Convivial, Comfortable and Conspicuousness. Rajshahi City Corporation area is divided into four zones for comparative view of existing pedestrian planning condition such as Residential Zone, Commercial zone, Recreational zone and Industrial zone. For fulfilling the objectives, questionnaire survey has conducted for user perception on pedestrian environment. Sample size was 267 according to the population of RCC area in 2017 with 95% confidence level. The method of the sampling is random selection. This study reveals that pedestrian environment is not friendly everywhere and worse in commercial zone rather than other three zones. Main lacking of pedestrian friendly environment is Conviviality among five criteria. Pedestrian’s recommendation is also included. It is expected that the results will be highly useful for improvement of walkways for efficient, adequate and safer movement of the pedestrians.