Lessons Learnt from METU Campus Walkability Evaluations

Date

2015-01-11

Author

Tüydeş Yaman, Hediye
Altıntaşı, Oruç

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To encourage a modal shift to walking, first, it is important to understand and evaluate walkability. While walkability assessment studies mainly deal with perception and built environment aspects, engineering studies focused on evaluation based on pedestrian level of service (PLOS) that rely on flow and infrastructure capacity aspects. This perspective difference and methodological details resulted in requirement of a wide range of data, which vary greatly based on the scope of the study. To evaluate walkability on the campus of Middle East Technical University (METU), Ankara, different analyses were performed with different data sets. The pedestrian flows, counted manually and multiple times a day, were studied in GIS environment, which revealed the change of the directionality and volumes of pedestrian activity over time. PLOS evaluations of the campus using Highway Capacity Manual (HCM) and Gainesville methods resulted in high rating with the former and very low ones with the latter. These contradicting ratings for the same campus clearly showed the potential biasedness in evaluations based on the selected approach. Finally, Bluetooth readers were employed at four locations on the pedestrian alley to study dwell and travel times. Despite the low sampling levels, the high variability in pedestrian travel characteristics showed the need for more improved pedestrian data collection and modeling. Lessons learnt from the walkability evaluations on METU Campus are used to develop a list of recommendations on the required pedestrian data types and display for more integrated walkability studies.

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/71754

Conference Name

Transportation Research Board 94th Annual Meeting (2015)

Collections

Department of Civil Engineering, Conference / Seminar

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Citation Formats

H. Tüydeş Yaman and O. Altıntaşı, “Lessons Learnt from METU Campus Walkability Evaluations,” presented at the Transportation Research Board 94th Annual Meeting (2015), 2015, Accessed: 00, 2021. [Online]. Available: https://hdl.handle.net/11511/71754.