Pedestrian Mobility Research Articles

Analysis and Optimization Strategies of Pedestrian Environment around TOD Rail Transit Stations in Guangzhou

This study extensively examines the urban dynamics of Guangzhou, a city that has notably embraced and incorporated the concept of Transit-Oriented Development (TOD) into its urban structure. Through a comprehensive and meticulously designed questionnaire survey, the research aims to understand different demographic groups' diverse preferences and needs. The main focus is comprehending individuals' views and experiences regarding the pedestrian environment near Transit-Oriented Development (TOD) stations. The study findings reveal a wide range of outcomes, indicating significant variations in walking distance tolerance and environmental satisfaction among different populations. Notably, walking distance emerged as a crucial factor, as a positive correlation was found between shorter perceived distances and higher levels of enjoyment. Evaluating pedestrian amenities reveals their insufficiency and emphasizes the need for improved pedestrian comfort and infrastructure. Various factors influence individuals' satisfaction with the walking environment. The assessment of pedestrian infrastructure in Guangzhou's Transit-Oriented Development (TOD) areas generally shows positive feedback, but there is still room for improvement. This study analyzes the current shortcomings in pedestrian infrastructure and proposes practical recommendations for enhancement. Its purpose is to provide a basis for policy formulation and future renovations to enhance pedestrian mobility near TOD train stations in Guangzhou.

Do women perceive pedestrian path attractiveness differently from men?

The objective of this work is investigating on differences in pedestrians’ perceptions in terms of gender. Specifically, we want to verify differences between male and female in perceiving aspects characterizing pedestrian paths and influencing their satisfaction, perceived service quality, and behavioural intentions. We propose a methodology based on Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modelling (PLS-SEM) approach. From the model calibration we derived different coefficients for male and female, representing the importance that each category of users gives to the various aspects characterizing the paths. Data were collected through a sample survey addressed to pedestrians walking on paths placed in an urban area of the southern Italy. We discovered interesting findings about gender differences. In general, females are more sensitive than males concerning many important aspects such as environmental aspects in terms of air pollution and noise, or personal security from robbery or theft, or presence of furnishing along the path and cleanliness of the environment. On the other hand, male consider more the continuity of pedestrian path and the condition of the walking surface, as well as the nuisance due to the vehicle flow. In terms of similarities in perceptions, male and female equally appreciated the comfort due to the presence of trees providing shade along the path. The findings from the model could be useful for planners, who should invest on those aspects considered as important by both the categories, but also on the aspects that determine an inequality between male and female. As an example, since women do not feel secure along those paths, planners could improve this aspect in such a way as to make paths attractive to both women and men, as well as the aspects considered more relevant for men, to incentivize pedestrian mobility.

Pedestrian Citizenship: Frederick Law Olmsted’s Democratic Landscape Architecture

Abstract Amid the massive project of national reconstruction—characterized by urbanization and social upheaval—that followed the American Civil War, Frederick Law Olmsted reenvisioned built environments across the nation. This article claims that, for Olmsted and his contemporaries, who were simultaneously curious about, skeptical of, and fearful of the new cities, his designs attempted to show the democratic potential of urban environments. Reading his speeches and essays alongside his designs, it suggests that Olmsted promised the new cities and their parks and parkways as sites of democratic inclusion and democratic virtue. These built environments, as material rhetorics shaping our everyday, pedestrian habits, cultivated a specific practice of citizenship, one that was, this article argues, characterized by a countercultural temporality, pedestrian mobility, recreation, and civic scopophilia. Today, we inherit the parks and cityscapes that Olmsted designed as well as their aspirations for democratic citizenship.

Urban Park Design and Pedestrian Mobility—Case Study: Temuco, Chile

Pathway design features in urban parks are vital in facilitating leisure walking and maintaining a minimal rate of physical activity, hence enhancing public health. This study investigated the relationships between the design aspects of Cautin Park, Chile’s largest urban park in the Araucania Region, and the tendency for walking, as well as walking behavior. The objectives were investigated using a combination of quantitative and qualitative methodologies. Several design elements were discovered to be connected to walking tendency and walking behavior in this urban park, including path paving, pathway width, (dense) trees, green spaces and vegetation, connectivity with programs and activity zones, tranquility along pathways, more shade along pathways, pathways that provide better connectivity between different parts of the park, and the presence of benches along the urban park’s pathways. These insights could be used by urban planners and designers in the future planning of urban parks in this region.

Brasilia neighborhood unity: a re-reading of its meaning, limits and possibilities

The objective of this article is to analyze the limits and possibilities of the pilot neighborhood unity, anchored in the existing literature on the history and experience of the neighborhood unity in Lúcio Costa's urban project. Among the significant concepts in the debate about Brasília's residential superblocks are “isolation” and “exclusion” in relation to preserving intimacy and tranquility of living. Limitations and possibilities are part of the experience of a neighborhood unity in Brasília in the opinion of people who live in the superblock. Limiters include vacant spaces on holiday days and weekends, violence, lack of parking, great noise, great mobility of cars and pedestrians due to events on the main axis. On the other hand, public schools, subway station, proximity to public and private health units, commerce, transportation and job opportunities stand out as favorable aspects. The article allowed us to understand more clearly the concept of neighborhood unity and its relationship with the city of Brasília, as well as serving as an incentive to continue researching the topic.

Energy Harvesting Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface for UAV Based on Robust Deep Reinforcement Learning

Integrating unmanned aerial vehicles with RIS (UAV–RIS) can offer ubiquitous deployment services in communication-disabled areas, but is limited by the on-board energy of the UAVs. In this paper, a novel energy harvesting (EH) scheme on top of the UAV–RIS system, called EH-RIS scheme, is developed for the next generation high performance wireless system. The proposed EH-RIS scheme extends the simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) system by splitting the passive reflected arrays on the geometric space for transporting information and harvesting energy simultaneously. However, pedestrian mobility, and rapid channel changes post challenges to efficient resource allocation in wireless systems. Thus, a robust deep reinforcement learning (DRL)-based algorithm is developed to improve the proposed EH-RIS scheme for guaranteeing the quality of service (QoS) under dynamic wireless environments. The simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed robust DRL-based EH-RIS system, which not only outperform the existing state-of-the-art solutions but also approach to the performance of the exhaustive search method.

Mobility in pedestrian communication simulations: Impact of microscopic models and solutions for integration

Modeling Pedestrian-to-X (P2X) communication plays an important role for use-cases such as crowd networking, wireless contact tracing or the evaluation of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) for the protection of Vulnerable Road Users (VRUs). Since in general the mobile communication depends on the position of the pedestrians, their mobility needs to be modeled. Often simplified mobility models such as the random-waypoint or cellular automata based models are used. However, for ad hoc networks and Inter-Vehicular Communication (IVC), it is well-known that a detailed model for the microscopic mobility has a strong influence — which is why state-of-the-art simulation frameworks for IVC often combine vehicular mobility and network simulators. Therefore, this paper investigates to what extent a detailed modeling of the pedestrian mobility on an operational level influences the results of P2X communication and its applications.We model P2X scenarios within the open-source coupled simulation environment CrowNet. It enables us to simulate the identical P2X scenario while varying the pedestrian mobility simulator as well as the used model. In a first step, two communication scenarios (pedestrian to server via 5G New Radio, pedestrian to pedestrian via PC5 Sidelink) are investigated in different mobility scenarios. Initial results demonstrate that time- and location-dependent factors represented by detailed microscopic mobility models can have a significant influence on the results of wireless communication simulations, indicating a need for detailed pedestrian mobility models in particular for scenarios with pedestrian crowds.While for scenarios with a focus on pedestrian communications this can be achieved by applying locomotion models available in pedestrian dynamics simulators, modeling vehicle-to-pedestrian communication is challenging: Commonly used vehicular mobility simulators apply very simplified pedestrian mobility models; pedestrian dynamics simulators often have no or very limited support for modeling vehicular traffic. Therefore, in a second step, we present a simple approach to simultaneously couple two microscopic mobility simulators (one for modeling pedestrian and one for modeling vehicular mobility) with a pedestrian communication simulation. We implement the concept and apply it in an example scenario modeling vehicle-to-pedestrian communication in a part of the city center of Munich, where we evaluate the influence on application metrics such as the accuracy of the position information received for a pedestrian.

Taking steps forward: Innovative evaluation of pedestrian infrastructure through a multivariate analysis

This study presents a detailed evaluation of urban pedestrian infrastructure in an emerging economy. By leveraging Google Street View, the research measures different variables that affect pedestrian mobility and safety. Descriptive data analysis, factor analysis, and cluster analysis are used to interpret and display the collected data. The study’s primary contribution is a comprehensive assessment of urban pedestrian infrastructure, identifying factors that influence pedestrian mobility and safety, as well as revealing patterns in the built pedestrian environment. Secondly, the research highlights the importance of evaluating pedestrian infrastructure and their consequences for pedestrian mobility and safety, suggesting public policies to enhance infrastructure.In general, a longitudinal comparison of pedestrian infrastructure, based on a comprehensive case study conducted in Barranquilla, Colombia, clearly illustrates the positive impact resulting from substantial investments in pedestrian safety, mobility, and crossing facilities. The extraction of data from both pre-investment (2014) and post-investment (2022) periods allows to conduct an innovative and robust assessment of pedestrian infrastructure. Overall, this study provides valuable insights of the design, maintenance, and pedestrian infrastructure improvement, while stressing the need for ongoing focus on this vital aspect of urban planning.

A meta-synthesis of experimental studies of pedestrian movement in single-file flow

The single-file pedestrian flow experiment is a simplified system for investigating the fundamental walking characteristics of pedestrians and their dependence on various individual factors. Despite numerous experimental studies emerging in recent years, a comprehensive review and meta-analysis of the literature is lacking. Abundant research results and findings have not been thoroughly compared and examined in a unified manner. To address this gap, this paper comprehensively gathers existing experimental studies and compared the basic characteristics of pedestrian walking in a single-file flow, highlighting consistencies, inconsistencies, and controversies across different studies. Furthermore, this review emphasizes the need for future investigations to address theoretical inconsistencies and controversies. Specifically, we suggest more efforts in single-file flow experiments should be made for the open-boundary scenarios and the high-density conditions for normal and emergency conditions. Additionally, we recommend that future studies should also consider the effects of distractions, diverse age composition and disabilities on pedestrian walking characteristics as these factors are less examined in existing single-file flow experiments. Furthermore, we suggest that future studies should continue to reveal the underlying mechanism that governs the speed-headway relations of pedestrians and develop a universal standard form of the fundamental diagram. Finally, we propose the development of a hybrid model in the future that integrates behavioural rules, motion dynamics, and stepping locomotion to simulate single-file pedestrian movement from a microscopic to a macroscopic level. Addressing these gaps will lead to a more comprehensive understanding of single-file pedestrian flow and improve the design and management of pedestrian-traffic environments, ultimately enhancing pedestrian mobility and safety.

Neuroadaptive LBS: towards human-, context-, and task-adaptive mobile geographic information displays to support spatial learning for pedestrian navigation

ABSTRACT Well-designed, neuroadaptive mobile geographic information displays (namGIDs) could improve the lives of millions of mobile citizens of the mostly urban information society who daily need to make time critical and societally relevant decisions while navigating. What are the basic perceptual and neurocognitive processes with which individuals make movement decisions when guided by human- and context-adaptive namGIDs? How can we study this in an ecologically valid way, also outside of the highly controlled laboratory? We report first ideas and results from our unique neuroadaptive research agenda that brings us closer to answering this fundamental empirical question. We present our first implemented methodological solutions of novel ambulatory evaluation methods to study and improve Location-based System (LBS) displays, by critical examination of how perceptual, neurocognitive, psychophysiological, and display design factors might influence decision-making and spatial learning in pedestrian mobility across broad ranges of users and mobility contexts.

Estimating pedestrian traffic with Bluetooth sensor technology

ABSTRACT The increasing availability of ubiquitous sensor data on the built environment holds great potential for a new generation of travel and mobility research. Bluetooth technology, for example, is already vastly used in vehicular transportation management solutions and services. Current studies discuss the potential of this emerging technology for pedestrian mobility research, but it has yet to be examined in a large urban setting. One of the main problems is detecting pedestrians from Bluetooth records since their behavior and movement patterns share similarities with other urban transportation modes. This study aims to accurately detect pedestrians using a network of 65 Bluetooth detectors located in Tel-Aviv, Israel, which record on average over 60,000 unique daily Bluetooth Media-Access-Control addresses. We propose a detection methodology that includes system calibration, effective travel time calculation, and classification by velocity that takes into consideration the probability of vehicular traffic jams. An evaluation of the proposed methodology presents a promising pedestrian detection accuracy rate of 89%. We showcase the results of pedestrian traffic analysis, together with a discussion on the data analysis challenges and limitations. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first to analyze pedestrian records detection from a Bluetooth network employed in a dynamic urban environment setting.

Planning policies for the driverless city using backcasting and the participatory Q-Methodology

Autonomous vehicles (AVs) can potentially bring about major changes in cities. Anticipatory planning approaches may provide valuable opportunities for fostering desirable transitions and pre-empting undesirable impacts. This research employs a combination of two methods to define the key policies to support a transition to the desirable driverless urban futures: the backcasting approach and the participatory Q-method. The combination of these techniques aims to identify different viewpoints about policies with the purpose of determining more effective and more acceptable options. The article analyses viewpoints from 20 citizens and 10 experts. The results point to the existence of two main viewpoints about the most and least desirable policies. The first viewpoint centres around increasing pedestrian mobility and promoting a more compact city. The second viewpoint centres around expanding transit-oriented development (TOD) and new networks of green spaces. Meanwhile, support for regulation-oriented policies to discourage the use of private motorised vehicles was relatively low. This research not only sheds light on the different viewpoints on the policies to achieve more desirable urban visions, it also illustrates the tensions and disagreements that may arise in the process of policy-making.

Empirical channel models for 5G at 3.6 GHz in foliage-free suburban environments

In this paper, we propose empirical channel models for 5G fixed-to-mobile technology at 3.6 GHz for foliage-free suburban environments. Four test campaigns were held, where the transmitter (Tx) in each campaigns was placed at a different height. On the other hand, the collecting receiver (Rx) antenna was placed outside the front windshield of the test vehicle while moving at a walking speed (3–5 km/h) to represent a typical mobile pedestrian user. Based on the collected measurements, single-slope and dual-slope path loss as well as large-scale (shadowing), small-scale, and multi-scale fading empirical models are proposed. It was found that the path loss exponent for this channel varies between 1.9 and 3.8; the large-scale component’s standard deviation of this channel was found to be 2∼4 decibels (dB); the small-scale component followed the generalized extreme value (GEV) distribution with a mean of 1.1∼1.3 and a variance of 0.2∼1.7; and the multi-scale component followed the GEV distribution with a mean of 1.2∼1.4 and a variance of 0.4∼4.0.

Urban Green Infrastructure Accessibility: Investigating Environmental Justice in a European and Global Green Capital

Access to green spaces offers numerous benefits to citizens and is key to achieving environmental justice. This article explores accessibility to green infrastructure (GI) in Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain, the European and Global Green Capital in 2012 and 2019. Vitoria-Gasteiz was selected as a case study because it combines actions aimed at promoting green infrastructure in the city along with an urban model that in recent years has favored more expansive urbanism. Manhattan distance and configurational analysis is used to investigate accessibility to the most relevant elements of the GI system and their integration in the urban tissue. Considering the actual pedestrian mobility network, configurational accessibility is examined globally and locally with 1 km and 300 m radii. The analysis reveals great differences both in global and local configurational accessibility across fifty components of the GI system that are greater than 0.5 ha and open for public use. It also shows that, while almost all inhabitants (97.9%) reside within 1 km from these green areas, 27.7% of the population live more than 300 m away. The investigation demonstrates the need to improve the city’s GI to provide universal accessibility to green spaces. It offers useful methods that planning professionals and local administrations can use to assess residents’ access to green areas and guide future GI transformation and development towards environmental justice.

Automating the inventory of the navigable space for pedestrians on historical sites: Towards accurate path planning

Pedestrian mobility networks have a primary role on historical urban areas, hence knowledge of navigable space for pedestrians becomes crucial. Collection and inventory of those areas can be conducted by exploiting several techniques, including the analysis of point clouds. Existing point cloud processing techniques are typically developed for modern urban areas, which have standard layouts, and may fail when dealing with historical sites. We present a complete and automated novel method to tackle the analysis of pedestrian mobility in historic urban areas. Starting from a mobile lasers canning point cloud, the method exploits artificial intelligence to identify sidewalks and to characterize them in terms of paving material and geometric attributes. Output data are vectorized and stored in a very accurate high-definition shapefile representing the sidewalk network. It is used to automatically generate pedestrian routes. The method is tested in Sabbioneta, an Italian historic city. Paving material segmentation showed accuracy of 99.08%; urban element segmentation showed an accuracy of 88.2%; automatic data vectorization required only 1.3% of manual refinement on the generated data. Future advancements of this research will focus on testing the method on similar historical cities, using different survey techniques, and exploiting other possible uses of the generated shapefile.

Home-to-school pedestrian mobility GPS data from a citizen science experiment in the Barcelona area

The analysis of pedestrian GPS datasets is fundamental to further advance on the study and the design of walkable cities. The highest resolution GPS data can characterize micro-mobility patterns and pedestrians’ micro-motives in relation to a small-scale urban context. Purposed-based recurrent mobility data inside people’s neighbourhoods is an important source in these sorts of studies. However, micro-mobility around people’s homes is generally unavailable, and if data exists, it is generally not shareable often due to privacy issues. Citizen science and its public involvement practices in scientific research are valid options to circumvent these challenges and provide meaningful datasets for walkable cities. The study presents GPS records from single-day home-to-school pedestrian mobility of 10 schools in the Barcelona Metropolitan area (Spain). The research provides pedestrian mobility from an age-homogeneous group of people. The study shares processed records with specific filtering, cleaning, and interpolation procedures that can facilitate and accelerate data usage. Citizen science practices during the whole research process are reported to offer a complete perspective of the data collected.

A street-point method to measure the spatiotemporal relationship between walkability and pedestrian flow

Walkability indicators are a pivotal method to evaluate the role of the built environment in peoples' decisions regarding active mobility, supporting the application of public measures that contribute to more sustainable and resilient regions. Currently, data used to evaluate associations between walkability indicators and travel behavior is obtained via traditional methods of data collection, like questionnaires, that are costly and hard to scale in large urban environments. Moreover, the spatial resolution of most indicators may not be sufficient to support granular local public interventions. To face these issues, we propose a novel walkability indicator that provides a score of walkability for every one-meter street point, based on street conditions and accessibility to points of interest calculated with a Cumulative-Gaussian impedance function. Resorting to Linear and Geospatial Weighted Regressions, we evaluate the associations between walkability features and pedestrian flow data retrieved from mobile phone communication signals for a week in March 2022. The relationship between walkability features and pedestrian flow is stronger during workdays, in which accessibility to education, food amenities and government services are the most important predictors. On the weekend, the features with more explanatory power are accessibility to crosswalks and leisure amenities. Accessibility to public transport, sidewalk width and slope seem to impact pedestrian decisions independently of the day type, although the impact is stronger on weekends. This study provides policy makers and urban planners with a practical tool to effectively support the evaluation of current street conditions and access areas that are underserved, as well as plan and gauge new local interventions, while objectively understanding their impacts on pedestrian mobility.

Analysis of the injury severity of motor vehicle–pedestrian crashes at urban intersections using spatiotemporal logistic regression models

This paper conducted a comprehensive study on the injury severity of motor vehicle–pedestrian crashes at 489 urban intersections across a dense road network based on high-resolution accident data recorded by the police from 2010 to 2019 in Hong Kong. Given that accounting for the spatial and temporal correlations simultaneously among crash data can contribute to unbiased parameter estimations for exogenous variables and improved model performance, we developed spatiotemporal logistic regression models with various spatial formulations and temporal configurations. The results indicated that the model with the Leroux conditional autoregressive prior and random walk structure outperformed other alternatives in terms of goodness-of-fit and classification accuracy. According to the parameter estimates, pedestrian age, head injury, pedestrian location, pedestrian actions, driver maneuvers, vehicle type, first point of collision, and traffic congestion status significantly affected the severity of pedestrian injuries. On the basis of our analysis, a range of targeted countermeasures integrating safety education, traffic enforcement, road design, and intelligent traffic technologies were proposed to improve the safe mobility of pedestrians at urban intersections. The present study provides a rich and sound toolkit for safety analysts to deal with spatiotemporal correlations when modeling crashes aggregated at contiguous spatial units within multiple years.

A journey through pedestrian mobility and the sustainable city: discussing walkability

The form of the built environment, walkability, and society are directly related, being points that influence not only mobility but several structural areas of a city, ranging from its social dynamics as well as the health of individuals, local and global politics, economy, comfort, safety, the identity of spaces, attractiveness and several other influencing factors. The perception of passers-by is influenced by several aspects, such as lighting, sense of safety, the width of sidewalks, attractiveness of facades and of the public space itself, as well as the potential of the space to promote social interaction, which is one of the essential focuses of contemporary urban planning. This research has the general objective of listing the essential factors when analyzing the walkability of spaces, discussing the aspects of the form of the built environment that favors walkability, thus expressing concepts, indexes, methods, and studies that enable and contextualize pedestrian mobility and its relationship with users, urban form and its potentials. As a methodological contribution, bibliographic review research was used, using studies already done in the thematic axes to systematize and generate the result that meets the objectives of the work. Therefore, a dynamic portrait was obtained concerning walkability and its multisystemic relations with the city, as well as applications in techniques and methods of urban studies.

Pedestrian mobility in Mobility as a Service (MaaS): sustainable value potential and policy implications in the Paris region case

Pedestrian mobility remains neglected in MaaS solutions, yet it has the potential to become a tool for promoting public policies and more sustainable lifestyles away from excessive private car use. This research identifies the potential for sustainable value creation and the transversal implications for policymakers and other MaaS stakeholders of overlooking walking in innovations like MaaS. To do so, we explore how walking is currently integrated into four MaaS solutions in the Paris region. Our main findings show heterogeneity in the hierarchy given to walking in the user interfaces and the determinant roles of governance and policy in supporting the prioritization of pedestrian mobility in MaaS.