Traffic Planning

Street and network planning with pedestrians

The planning of a street, a square and a street network should always start with at least four basic focus points:

1. General modal split data in town or in the quarter of the city to plan.

2. Be sure that the planner has all the needed mobility data. This includes the number of pedestrian trips along and crossing the street/streets and the modal split on the nearby street spaces.

3. Prediction of future number of pedestrians, including persons moving to and from public transport stops and car garages.

4. The street planning and design should start from the facade defining the - minimum pedestrian space needed to accommoddate the pedestrains at peak hours - before a decision on number of car lanes should be taken.

The network through the city should offer main pedestrian routes with sufficient space for these users, taking into account that not all pedestrians walk and cross streets with the same speed, and in many main streets overtaking space for pedestrians could be needed.

The routes with best pedestrian facilities and access to main attraction points in the city should indicated by information signs with indication on time to destiny.

The street network could be divided in two main groups: Arterial and local streets. The arte-rial streets include not more than 25 % of the street length and should serve not less than 75 % of car-kilometres in town. The local streets, with maximum 30-km/h speed limit, can be di-vided into several groups: normal local streets (speed-limit-30-zones), streets of coexistence (20 km/h, pedestrian priority zones), and pedestrian streets or zones.

It is important to plan the traffic volumes, also in arterial streets, keeping the pedestrians in mind. Noise and emission levels should be acceptable for these users. This obliges to limit number of cars in a street and the traffic lanes in accordance with an environmental volume, often smaller than the physic traffic capacity of the street.

The streets have three main functions: Move along, cross and stay. This means that side walks should be wide enough and without obstacles, pedes-trian crossings so close that most pedestrians are not invited or obliged to pass outside the crossing and that space to stop and talk and to sit down should exist along the street.
More about this you find in the EU-Project "Arterial Streets Towards Sustainability ARTISTS".

An example from the website of ARTISTS:

The minimum sidewalk width in a city area should not be less than 3.00 meters (2.0 to 2.25 meters free of obstacles) and at least 40 % of the street space should be dedicated to pedestrians.

The pedestrian crossings should be situated closest to the straight walking line. This itinerary should have priority over considerations related to car drivers and capacity. If not so, pedestrians tend to cross outside the marked crossings, exposing themselves to much higher accident risk.

Light signals should take into account the walking speeds of elderly and handicapped users (reference speed not higher than 0.75 m/s). To the resultant signal phase 5 to 10 seconds should be added as starting performance to ensure that pedestrians receive a minimum of 10 % of the total time to start the crossing process. Signal cycles, to offer acceptable delay to pedestrians should no be longer than 60 seconds.

In the planning and designing process, pedestrians should not be obliged to cross more than 4 lanes without refuges or medians.
As conclusion, the traffic planner must incorporate the presence and needs of pedestrians all way through the planning and project phase of a mobility plan and/or street design.

This section is taken care of by:
Ole Thorson; Spain; thorson(at)ysi.es

Pedestrian Priority

To give pedestrians teh priority, there is not only the possibility to mark a zebra crossing on the ground, but Suares, streets, boulevards, and other public spaces may be declared pedestrian priority zones with the following signal (Here two variations, below the European, and above the new Swiss sign including the speed limit of 20 km/h used in dowtown areas as well as in residential areas):

(The photo shows two variations: below the European sign, and above the new Swiss sign including the speed limit of 20 km/h used in downtown areas as well as in residential areas)

In the movie "Putting Pedestrians First" you may see how freely pedestrians move through car traffic across a square (Zentralplatz/Place Centrale) which is a pedestrian priority zone in Biel/Bienne, Switzerland. There are 12'000 vehicles plus 1000 busses per day on that square.

Many papers on traffic planning by authors from different countries
you find on the search-page of the walk21-website