Street walking quality of the ‘Centro’ district, Madrid

Abstract

ABSTRACT Walking provides a number of health, social and environmental benefits for urban sustainability, which is why it has become attractive from the perspective of sustainable transport planning. The concept of walkability is related with the built environment and land use to facilitate walking to activities in an area. The aim of this work is to provide a set of street walking quality maps for the ‘Centro’ district in Madrid (Spain), covering four categories of walking needs: attractiveness, comfort, safety and accessibility. They classify the streets from least to most walkable in relation to each other. The maps are built using 21 urban environmental factors selected from the literature. The values for each factor are computed in each street from open access databases and combined following the PROMETHEE II method function in order to assign a street value for each of the four classes of walking needs.