Pedestrian Safety Studies on Urban Infrastructure: A Review

Abstract

The walking environment has become center of attraction while dealing with safety in urban transport environment for the fact that it has been kept at the edge of the safety bar or even been neglected while designing urban mobility from several decades. Sidewalk and crosswalk walkability is an important consideration to be made while planning and designing the city infrastructure. Pedestrian safety is the most important when a safe, sustainable and inclusive urban mobility is aimed at. Examination of the current ability of sidewalks and crosswalks could be done based on two methods, namely, subjective and objective. Subjective method deals with understanding the perceptions of users on the facilities that are available. On the other hand, objective method concerns with measurements, presence or absence of a facility condition of a facility as viewed by the user or expert, etc. This study aimed at understanding important factors considered for safer pedestrian sidewalk walkability, factors considered in finding Pedestrian Level of Service (PLOS), important factors as per the perceptions of users. On thorough understanding from 27 journal papers which we selected from Web of Science core collection, SCI and Scopus indexed journals, we were able to divide the whole study under three groups, viz., factors affecting walkability, factors affecting PLOS and perceived factors for better walkability. Methodologies followed by various authors in finding latent variables are discussed in detail. This review, apart from giving details regarding Latent Variables (LVs), throws more light on gaps identified from the survey of literature. Scope for further research on aforementioned objectives is also presented at the end of the study. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2024.