The Pleasure of Walking: An Innovative Methodology to Assess Appropriate Walkable Performance in Urban Areas to Support Transport Planning

Letizia Appolloni, Maria Vittoria Corazza and Daniela D’Alessandro
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Letizia Appolloni: Department of Civil, Building and Environmental Engineering, Sapienza University of Rome, 00185 Rome, Italy
Maria Vittoria Corazza: Department of Civil, Building and Environmental Engineering, Sapienza University of Rome, 00185 Rome, Italy
Daniela D’Alessandro: Department of Civil, Building and Environmental Engineering, Sapienza University of Rome, 00185 Rome, Italy

Sustainability, 2019, vol. 11, issue 12, 1-26

Abstract: The Walking Suitability Index of the Territory–T-WSI is an innovative methodology to assess walkability. Unlike other methods and tools in this field designed to evaluate walkability on given origin-destination paths, T-WSI is conceived for area-wide assessments, typically at the neighborhood level. This can be achieved by visual surveys to collect data, which are easy to perform at street level, their further process via an algorithm, and their aggregation to assess the walking performance levels of the test area. The paper describes such methodology, which includes the development of 12 indicators associated with four main evaluation categories ( Practicability, Safety, Urbanity and Appeal ), and its application to a case study in a medium-size town in central Italy. Results are described and elaborated to highlight T-WSI’s contribution to help decision makers in the urban governance process, typically in the fields of land use, mobility management and maintenance, coherently with the research objective to enlarge the potential of walkability methodologies thus far available up to area-level assessment.

Keywords: walkability; urban environment; neighborhood; pedestrians (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (12)

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