Using space syntax to model pedestrian movement in urban transportation planning

Transportation planning is changing. What used to be a concern with motorized vehicles only is evolving into a discipline dealing with multimodal systems where priority is given to transit and nonmotorized means of transport, chief among them being walking. The city of Bat Yam in Israel has chosen to pioneer planning for pedestrians as an integral component of its transportation master plan. This article presents a novel use of pedestrian movement modeling within urban transportation planning, by means of pedestrian movement volume prediction maps for the city, both at its current state today and at its future state planned for the year 2030. The study shows that a pedestrian movement distribution can be explained mainly by the spatial variables that represent properties of a street network. Changes to this network structure are relatively rare, and, therefore, pedestrian movement will not change in a fundamental way in the future. Furthermore, by overlaying the models for pedestrian movement and motorized traffic, as well as the underlying public transit and bicycle networks, focus can be on those streets and places where conflicts among the various road users (i.e., pedestrians, bicycles, transit vehicles, and private cars) are expected.