Street walking quality of the ‘Centro’ district, Madrid

Abstract

Walking provides a number of health, social and environmental benefits for urban sustainability, which is why it has become attractive from the perspective of sustainable transport planning. The concept of walkability is related with the built environment and land use to facilitate walking to activities in an area. The aim of this work is to provide a set of street walking quality maps for the 'Centro' district in Madrid (Spain), covering four categories of walking needs: attractiveness, comfort, safety and accessibility. They classify the streets from least to most walkable in relation to each other. The maps are built using 21 urban environmental factors selected from the literature. The values for each factor are computed in each street from open access databases and combined following the PROMETHEE II method function in order to assign a street value for each of the four classes of walking needs.

Walkability Concept Toward Sustainable City: Comparative Insights of Brisbane and Bogor Urban Areas

“…Areas with high pedestrian activities are mixed-used areas with equal distribution of residence and office functions, as found in Kelvin Grove, Bowen Hills, Fortitude Valley, Indooroopilly, St Lucia, and South Brisbane. A similar result was suggested in a walkability study in Madrid, where roads with the highest walkability value were discovered in areas with commercial activities, cultural activities, town squares, and areas with excellent public transportation coverage, e.g., subway trains and buses (Ortega et al, 2020).…”

“…The TOD-based urban design model implementation in Brisbane is considered able to handle urban challenges, such as massive private vehicle uses, air pollution, and other urban issues. Walkability implementation highly affects the proximity to business centers, proximity to bus and train transportation systems, population density, and land use (Figure 2) (López Baeza et al, 2021;Hellberg et al, 2021;Ortega et al, 2020). Areas with high pedestrian activities are mixed-used areas with equal distribution of residence and office functions, as found in Kelvin Grove, Bowen Hills, Fortitude Valley, Indooroopilly, St Lucia, and South Brisbane.…”

“…Research on walkability has been conducted a lot before. Walkability itself can be studied from several fields of science such as health concerning physical activity from walking (El-zemrany and Kandil, 2019;Isiagi et al, 2021;Rebecchi et al, 2019;Usón and Fernandez-Anez, 2020), behavioral studies (Battista and Manaugh, 2019;Cambra and Moura, 2020;Frank et al, 2005;Hatamzadeh et al, 2017;Lee and Dean, 2018;Prima and Prayogi, 2020), urban design (Meetiyagoda, 2018;Ortega et al, 2020;Ujang and Muslim, 2014), and transportation planning (Al-Thani and Furlan, 2020;Gonzalez-Urango et al, 2020;Middleton, 2021). In Indonesia, research on walkability has also been conducted in Surabaya, Jakarta, and Banjarmasin (Sari et al, 2020;Afkara and Kusuma, 2020;Tanan and Darmoyono, 2017).…”

3D Point Cloud and GIS Approach to Assess Street Physical Attributes

“…Other works, such as Ewing and Handy [22], addressed similar approaches to quantitative attributes. These factors were significant in various studies, including the ones focused on street design quality [12,16,37], as well as studies on walkability [22,23,33,38]. For this research, we considered the width as the distance between two vertical elements or obstructions; the slope or grade as the vertical variation concerning the horizontal distance between two points expressed in percentage; and the scale as the proportion between the width of the street and the height of its adjacent building.…”

Assessing streetscape development effects on walking and cycling in historic contexts: the case study of Afrang district, Port Said, Egypt

“…Then, they selected 48 factors and grouped them into four categories: accessibility, security, comfort Walking and cycling in historic contexts and attractiveness. Accessibility refers to basic factors linked to sidewalks, pedestrian pathways and urban structure; safety refers to the built-environment factors which directly influence whether pedestrians feel safe or not; comfort involves factors related to climate considerations or presence of trees; and attractiveness is related to social interaction, existence of facilities/amenities and design of public spaces (Ortega et al, 2020). This adaptation for walking indicators fulfilled the missing non-measurable factors from other research and provided measurable attributes to each category.…”