Indicators for sustainable pedestrian mobility

Pedestrians walk everyday to satisfy their basic necessities. They need an environment that reflects their requirements and expectations, in other words “liveable” as much as possible. So we should offer tools that could allow a complete and clear evaluation of the existing walking environment, taking into account both pedestrian requirements and urban environment schemes. To measure pedestrian mobility performance we usually use indicators, which measure performances and grant a quick estimation of progress. Indicators are universally acknowledged synthetic and standard parameters that should help policy makers gauge whether things are going in the right direction or not. They should be outcome measures, rather than inputs, and they should capture broad results. The advantage of using indicators is to recognize the quality of urban mobility through economical and social view of an environment. The aim of this paper is to estimate and compare pedestrian mobility indicators, evaluating their value in relation to the quality of walking environment. It is important to analyze all the aspects that make it possible to clarify a definition of “sustainable pedestrian mobility”. Their analysis has to be related to the individuation of a set of indicators that simultaneously take into account the users’ needs and allow the complete comparison between different urban pedestrian mobility strategies policies. Variables such as visual attractiveness, comfort, system continuity, safety, security, accessibility and infrastructure quality of urban walking pathways are taken into account in our analysis. Finally, we analyze the generalized role that the proposed set of indicators could play in sustainable urban and transport development and planning, even in different economic social and urban contexts.