The Pedestrian Realm On the Main & Mixed-Use Streets Of Cities in Israel

Student: Galit Yerushalmi
Advisors:  Prof. Moshe Margalith and Dr. Yodan Rofe

In recent years there is growing awareness of what happens on the urban street and of the health, social and environmental benefits of walking on foot and of spending time in the public domain. Awareness of the pedestrian situation permeates the road safety and injury field. This is mainly due to the large extent to which pedestrians are being injured out of all urban and interurban road accidents in Israel.

 

This study examines the connection between the pedestrian realm and how pedestrians feel on mixed use streets in city centers. The mixed use streets are the cities’ beating hearts and the location of many varied social activities. The connection between the physical elements and the dimensions of the public space allocated on the street for pedestrians’ activities, and how they feel on the mixed use streets in Israel, is not clear enough. The purpose of the study is to find the correlation between the physical space and the overall sense of being safe from injury.

 

This is achieved by studying the space division on a cross-section of the street among its various users: pedestrians and motorized traffic. The study’s hypothesis is that allocating a wide space for pedestrian activities relative to the street section effects and contributes to pedestrians’ sense of security on the street and to a generally better feeling. The inquiry focused on two main fields, the physical and the social, on the mixed use main streets. The study’s main conclusion is that certain physical components improve pedestrians’ general feeling and sense of safety from being injured by vehicles on the street. The main components which effect pedestrians’ feeling on the street are the street division ratio between the various users, connectivity and arterially, street furnishings which encourage social interaction and the presence of a colonnade.

 

The study succeeded in showing the correlation between the pedestrian realm’s size (the pavement) and pedestrians’ feeling on the street and the advantage of the relative size and street division between users measurement over the absolute size allocated. 

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