An Investigation on Safety, Comfort and Convenience of Pedestrian in Addis Ababa: A Case of Arterial Street’s Sidewalks
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Date
2020-06
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Addis Ababa university
Abstract
All major cities including Addis Ababa experience heavy pedestrian flows. Because of the shortage
of satisfactory sidewalks, pedestrian roadways are often difficult to walk on. Since pedestrians are
more vulnerable than other mode users, the primary objective of this research is to develop an
understanding of the root cause to safety, comfort and convenience problems while using
sidewalks, using pedestrian level of service and user rating methodology. Sidewalks play an
essential role in transportation. Sidewalks deliver an isolated safe route for people to walk along
a separated trail from motorized traffic movement. Instead of taking traffic flow operation as the
assessing standard for pedestrian comfort convenience and safety, this research has studied the
methods of assessing pedestrian level of service by analyzing both the pedestrian’s subjective
perceptions and objective quality of the service. This study has used two types of PLOS methods,
the Australian method and the Highway Capacity Manual integrating with both objective
measurement and subjective assessment. The study also uses sidewalks with street vendor activities
on them. The presence of street vendors along the sidewalk is neutrally considered, neither
unimportant nor important. Their existence is noted because of the negative impact they may have
on the available space for walking. The subjective assessment is mainly based on the user’s rating
of pedestrian amenities using 821 individuals in 21 selected sidewalks in order to identify the
perception of users for that designated segment. The objective measurement was taken in 21
selected sidewalk parts that are located throughout the city of Addis Ababa in order to identify the
service level by fulfilling all the affecting factors required by the two PLOS methods. The results
of the study indicate that both the PLOS and the perception assessment describes the studied
sidewalks similarly with problem caused by vendor activities, pedestrian volume, and the number
of pedestrian who interact with street vendors along with the shortcoming of the street network
and sidewalk infrastructure in the form of physical and user characteristics. In order to generate
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Keywords
Safety,, Comfort,, Convenience,, Sidewalk,, Pedestrian Level of Service,, Street Vending