Research Information System
Megaron, vol.15, no.3, pp.490-507, 2020 (ESCI)
Walking has become one of the important transportation modes together with the increasing importance of sustainability in urban life, thereby, necessitating the design of and planning for safe, accessible, and well-connected pedestrian routes in developing cities. Sidewalks, which are urban furniture, provide pedestrian access in urban transportation; however, insufficient sidewalks in terms of physical characteristics including width, slope, aspect, material, lighting, security, etc. prevent the users of different ages, genders, and abilities, equally enjoying from public spaces. The cultural and climatic characteristics of the pedestrian route (pedestrian route aspect, azimuth angle, the prevailing wind, shading etc.) should also be considered in the design and planning process. Otherwise, pedestrian routes cannot provide comfortable and preferable routes for individuals. This study aims to determine comfortable pedestrian routes in terms of environmental and climatic features. The study method comprises of the following four steps: (1) The criteria used for designing the comfortable pedestrian routes for the individuals with different abilities, ages, and genders were determined by the review of national and international literature published in the last twenty years and emerging fifteen criteria subsumed under five factors (circulation and accessibility, physical characteristics, security, vegetation, and climatic features) were used to evaluate pedestrian route comfort. (2) The pedestrian routes' suitability has been determined through the Geographical Information Systems (GIS) based multi-criteria analysis method (MCA). This method has helped to integrate multiple criteria in the decision making process. In the CBS analysis, the data were standardized, the characteristics of pedestrian routes were determined by survey studies and their suitability was ranked between 0 (least suitable) - 3 (most suitable) according to the determined criteria and the data layers were overlapped before the classification of comfortable pedestrian routes as five conformity groups, including the lowest, low, medium, high, and the highest suitable. (3) Pedestrian routes have been mapped according to their suitability in terms of environmental and climatic characteristics. (4) Plans, policies, and strategies were developed to guide decision-makers to create comfortable routes. The rapidly developing and urbanizing city of Adana, whose streets and avenues are essential for the public, was selected as the study area to determine the existing pedestrian routes suitability. However, this area was limited due to the comprehensive nature of the study method. The routes within 15 minutes walking distance, which equal to 800 meters, of Hayal Park, a well equipped and big size district park located at the point where many neighborhood boundaries intersect, were selected to evaluate routes' suitability. The study results show that there are similar characteristics in all suitability classes. The surface materials are the same as concrete pavements and suitable for night use on all routes; however, the slope varies between 0-6 % to 6-12%, and the aspect ratio negatively affects the pedestrian comfort. The common vegetation types are wide-crowned tree species in the refuges, the combination of bushes and trees in the building garden adjacent to the road, and narrow and wide-crowned trees on the sidewalk.