Refining Pedestrian Behaviour of an Urban Stretch

Abstract

Walkability provides a foundation for a sustainable city. It provides safety, security and comfort for the city dwellers while traveling as well as cleanliness and transparence in mobility by reducing street congestion, pollution, vehicle fuel cost and road fatalities. Rapid motorization combined with limited attention to pedestrian facilities is a challenge to the planners in favor of conversion of motorized cities to walkable cities. In this paper, the prospects for walkability and related issues would be analyzed and discussed for one of the streets of Jalandhar, that has an existing population of 21,81,753 with a growth rate of 11% every year.  The city has seen rapid urbanization and developed into a highly industrialized centre of commercial activity in the recent years.  Pedestrian space has been converted into road space in order to accommodate the constantly rising number of vehicles. An effort has been made to investigate the issues of walkability in an existing urban stretch of around 2.5 km from Dr. Ambedkar Chowk to Guru Ravi Das Chowk so that more people will opt for walking as their first choice instead of using personal automated vehicles. Through this paper, an effort shall be made to propose strategies and identify possibilities of transforming the streets of Jalandhar into walkable streets where more people will opt for walking as their first choice instead of using personal automated vehicles. The research finally reveals that there are ample opportunities to make the stretch walkable, however, detail investigations and quantification of walkability indices are required for implementation.

Keywords: Walkability, Pedestrian movement, Walkability Index, Issues & Strategies