Evaluation and Optimization of Walkability of Children’s School Travel Road for Accessibility and Safety Improvement

(1) Background: In the context of a children friendly city, accessibility and safety are the basic needs of children’s pedestrian school travel. This study proposes a comprehensive evaluation method of pedestrian accessibility and safety for children’s school travel. (2) Methods: Firstly, the school travel network was constructed by simulating the path of children walking to school. Secondly, from the meso and micro dimensions, the impact factors of pedestrian accessibility and safety were combed out, and an evaluation index system was constructed. Finally, pedestrian accessibility and safety were evaluated based on the Space Syntax analysis and ArcGIS spatial analysis, and the results were superimposed and spatially differentiated. The new evaluation method was tested in the Jintang Road area in Hedong District, Tianjin, China. (3) Results: The pedestrian accessibility and safety of children’s school travel road in the study area needed to be improved. It was found that the main impact factors were the effective walking width, the spatial connectivity, the visual integration, the obstruction of pedestrian safety, the completeness of crossing facilities and the influence of traffic flow and put forward optimization strategies. After optimized simulation verification, the overall improvement was achieved. (4) Conclusion: The evaluation method is helpful to calculate the pedestrian accessibility and safety of children’s school travel, and help decision makers determine the design and management strategies of child-friendly streets.

REVIEW AND REASSESSMENT THE RADIUS OF PEDESTRIAN ACCESSIBILITY TO CATERING ESTABLISHMENTS

This article deals with the issues regarding the accommodation of catering establishments in a residential area and to ensure pedestrian accessibility to them to save time and reduce the load on the city's transport system. It is based on a three-stage service system and the average walking speed of the economically active population. To solve the unsatisfactory location of catering establishments in a residential area, a formula for calculating the service radius for each type of catering establishment, and classify catering establishments into fast, leisure, and mixed types are proposed. To conclude, with the implementation of the attached calculations in urban planning, the location of types of catering establishments in the residential area could solve the set goals.

METHODS FOR ASSESSING THE TRANSPORT AND PEDESTRIAN ACCESSIBILITY OF MULTI-STOREY RESIDENTIAL BUILDINGS AND COMPLEXES, AS WELL AS THEIR IMPACT ON THE CITY INFRASTRUCTURE

The paper focuses on the author's method of assessing pedestrian and transport mobility of residents of modern multi-storey buildings and complexes. The study of transport routes in cities is the subject matter of entire scientific and design institutes, therefore, the method has been designed to make architects, researchers, developers and urban planners aware of a housing unit in terms of its accessibility, as well as to assess its impact on the city.

Military Gymnasium in Irkutsk

The article presents the results of the qualification work “Renovation of the territory of Irkutsk Higher Military Aviation Engineering School with the development of a fragment of the military gymnasium complex in Irkutsk”. The historical context, urban planning and space location of the university campus and techniques are described. They allow increasing the density of buildings and pedestrian accessibility of infrastructure facilities, which makes the urban environment more comfortable. The definition of renovation and its main characteristics are given.

A Generalized Framework for Measuring Pedestrian Accessibility around the World Using Open Data

Pedestrian accessibility is an important factor in urban transport and land use policy and critical for creating healthy, sustainable cities. Developing and evaluating indicators measuring inequalities in pedestrian accessibility can help planners and policymakers benchmark and monitor the progress of city planning interventions. However, measuring and assessing indicators of urban design and transport features at high resolution worldwide to enable city comparisons is challenging due to limited availability of official, high quality, and comparable spatial data, as well as spatial analysis tools offering customizable frameworks for indicator construction and analysis. To address these challenges, this study develops an open source software framework to construct pedestrian accessibility indicators for cities using open and consistent data. It presents a generalized method to consistently measure pedestrian accessibility at high resolution and spatially aggregated scale, to allow for both within- and between-city analyses. The open source and open data methods developed in this study can be extended to other cities worldwide to support local planning and policymaking. The software is made publicly available for reuse in an open repository.

Sidewalk Static Obstructions and Their Impact on Clear Width

Data on sidewalks have long been deficient. But advances in remote sensing are beginning to increase data prevalence and accuracy. These sidewalk datasets rarely, if ever, account for static obstructions in the sidewalk such as signs, street furniture, or trees. This paper seeks to determine how much of a difference accounting for static obstructions will make when measuring the clear width of sidewalks. We extracted the minimum width of sidewalk surfaces—both with and without accounting for static obstructions—for the entirety of Cambridge, MA, using new GIS methods described in this paper. We then compared these results against Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) standards for clear width as well as national and federal sidewalk guidelines. The results suggest a significant decrease in the average clear width of sidewalks when accounting for static obstructions. More specifically, the clear width of the average sidewalk drops from 4.5 ft (1.4 m) to 3.5 ft (1.1 m). The percentage of sidewalk segments meeting the 3-ft ADA standard drops from 78% to 51% when accounting for static obstructions. For the proposed 4-ft (1.2-m) ADA standard, it plunges from 59% of sidewalk segments meeting the width threshold to 31%. These results demonstrate that not accounting for static obstructions could lead to a gross overestimation of seemingly adequate sidewalks and an unrealistic assessment of sidewalk infrastructure and pedestrian accessibility.

Exploring neighborhood walkability aspects and their interaction with the urban environment. The case of a residential neighborhood in Athens city centre.

Everyday human activity is crucially defined by walkability at neighbourhood level, and accordingly, this paper sets a dual focus: to map basic pedestrian accessibility infrastructure and to investigate the factors influencing walking patterns in such areas. The study area is Koukaki, a neighborhood in Athens’ municipality. The methodological framework consists of four steps: a) Evaluating neighbourhood-level pedestrian accessibility with emphasis on vulnerable users, b) Selecting a centrality cluster, as an area of dense human activity (high density of non-residential uses), c) data collection of pedestrian flow and d) interpretation of the results. The results showed that human flows have substantial positive correlation with commercial activities, but negative with residential uses. In addition, they appear to have strong positive correlation with local network centrality (space syntax), sidewalk width and functional density. Finally, the evaluation of pedestrian infrastructure demonstrated that pedestrian movement cannot be adequately sustained in Koukaki, thus needing serious interventions.