Indicators for sustainable pedestrian mobility

Pedestrians walk everyday to satisfy their basic necessities. They need anenvironment that reflects their requirements and expectations, in other words“liveable” as much as possible. So we should offer tools that could allow acomplete and clear evaluation of the existing walking environment, taking intoaccount both pedestrian requirements and urban environment schemes. Tomeasure pedestrian mobility performance we usually use indicators, whichmeasure performances and grant a quick estimation of progress. Indicators areuniversally acknowledged synthetic and standard parameters that should helppolicy makers gauge whether things are going in the right direction or not. Theyshould be outcome measures, rather than inputs, and they should capture broadresults. The advantage of using indicators is to recognize the quality of urbanmobility through economical and social view of an environment. The aim of thispaper is to estimate and compare pedestrian mobility indicators, evaluating theirvalue in relation to the quality of walking environment. It is important to analyzeall the aspects that make it possible to clarify a definition of “sustainablepedestrian mobility”. Their analysis has to be related to the individuation of a setof indicators that simultaneously take into account the users’ needs and allow thecomplete comparison between different urban pedestrian mobility strategiespolicies. Variables such as visual attractiveness, comfort, system continuity,safety, security, accessibility and infrastructure quality of urban walkingpathways are taken into account in our analysis. Finally, we analyze thegeneralized role that the proposed set of indicators could play in sustainableurban and transport development and planning, even in different economic socialand urban contexts.