Assessing Pedestrians’ Perception of the Urban Environment in Different Times of the Day

Breno Boiani da Costa

Key information

Authors:

Breno Boiani da Costa (Breno Boiani da Costa)

Supervisors:

Filipe Manuel Mercier Vilaça e Moura (Filipe Manuel Mercier Vilaça e Moura); Gabriel Costa Valença (Gabriel Costa Valença)

Published in

12/11/2024

Abstract

This work seeks to identify the attributes of the urban space that are considered barriers to walking from the pedestrians’ perspective. Besides, it intends to analyse if pedestrians perceive them differently throughout the day. A survey was created to capture pedestrians’ perceptions of certain urban attributes. As a case study, respondents in Lisbon were asked to evaluate the statements dichotomously. A Rasch model is used to analyse the data obtained (n=1031), ranking the difficulty of the barriers identified and the pedestrians’ probability to overcome them. When considering the aggregated data, results show that the most difficult barriers were the presence of litter and parked vehicles (both on public parking and illegally on the lane), traffic volume, air/noise pollution, and sidewalk condition. After aggregating the data into three time periods (peak, off-peak, and lunch time), some variation on perceptions was observed. Three out of the five most difficult barriers are the same for all time periods. Sidewalk condition and the presence of many people are identified at peak hours, while issues related to air/noise pollution and illegally parked cars on lane are detected at off-peak and lunch time. These differences on the perceived walkability indicate that public policies can be elaborated to address the barriers on certain hours of the day.