Measuring the Effects of Streetscape Characteristics on Perceived Safety and Aesthetic Appreciation of Pedestrians

Abstract

Streets provide necessary infrastructure in cities, but urban residents rarely have the opportunity to choose a good street and avoid a bad one. Therefore, it is crucial to construct safe and beautiful streetscapes for users, especially pedestrians. This work explores the impact of streetscape characteristics under both daylight and night-time conditions, extracted from photographs, on the perceived safety and aesthetic appreciation of pedestrians in Xuzhou, China. The results show the following. (1) Perceived safety and aesthetic appreciation in the daytime are significantly greater than at night. (2) The higher the percentage of buildings and motor vehicles in the photographs, the lower the perceived safety. The higher the percentage of vegetation, the greater the aesthetic appreciation. (3) Illuminating pedestrians’ immediate surroundings is conducive to improving the perceived safety of pedestrians. Finally, this paper suggests improvements to the perceived safety and aesthetic quality of streetscapes in the daytime and at night. These can be used to facilitate improved city streetscape design. However, these results should be used cautiously as the use of photograph-based analysis may not fully reflect the in situ situation.