Chapter 4: Design of Pedestrian Facilities

Chapter Overview

In this chapter, we introduce the challenges of using pedestrian facilities first. Next, we discuss the processes to analyze a given sidewalk for the measures of safety, efficiency, and comfort. Students are trained to find inconsistencies in the existing pedestrian facility design and apply corrective measures to improve safety, efficiency, and comfort of pedestrian operations.

Chapter Topics

1. Challenges of using pedestrian facilities
2. Process to analyzing sidewalks
3. Pedestrian facility improvement approaches

Challenges of Using Pedestrian Facilities

Pedestrian facilities refer to sidewalks, crosswalks, grade separated pedestrian crossings, shared use paths. In 2017, on a typical day in the United States, approximately 38.9 million trips were undertaken primarily by walking, representing 10.5% of trips made by all modes, making walking the second-most prevalent transportation mode after driving or riding in a private motor vehicle. Furthermore, most trips involving private vehicles or public transit involve an element of walking, whether walking to and from parking places or walking to or from transit stops and stations.

As a transportation mode, walking is healthy for individuals and beneficial for the environment. Twenty five years ago, the US Surgeon General highlighted the importance of walking for exercise as a means of combating obesity, diabetes, and other diseases. Since then, a wealth of studies published in public health and medical journals have extolled the virtues of walking. Moved by concerns about climate change, energy, and congestion, transportation planners now view walking as an inexpensive and enjoyable activity that could replace short auto trips, thus reducing congestion and fossil fuel consumption. Yet despite the general consensus that walking brings many benefits, policymakers still aren’t sure how to increase the amount of walking people actually do. One of the most obvious approaches is to improve pedestrian infrastructure. Walking is harder in places without good sidewalks, and the sidewalks in many cities are in terrible disrepair. Many other places have no sidewalks at all. But good sidewalks, while  important, will not by themselves lead to more walking. Changes in the built environment are a necessary but not sufficient condition for a pedestrian-friendly city.

Urban areas where people enjoy walking have more than just a functional pedestrian infrastructure. Sidewalks are not like major streets, many of which are designed solely to move cars. Sidewalk users are more exposed to their environments than drivers, both because pedestrians are not encased in vehicles and because they move through their environments more slowly than do people in cars. For this reason sidewalk users also require more from their environments. A successful sidewalk is more than just a route for getting from Point A to Point B; it is also a place to abide, to meet others, and to participate in neighborhood life. Urban sidewalks, as Jane Jacobs once argued, are a city’s “most vital organs,” where people experience city life, enjoy neighborhood rhythms, and watch what goes on. Pedestrianism—moving on foot, in a wheelchair, or with other mobility devices—is only one dimension of the sidewalk experience. Sidewalks thrive as multi-use environments, not as pure pedestrian thoroughfares.

Many sidewalks in US cities lack the people and variety of activities that characterize sidewalks in Europe, Asia, or Latin America, but this was not always the case. Nineteenth and early twentieth century US sidewalks were vibrant spaces.  Policy-makers began to perceive sidewalks exclusively as transportation infrastructure; however, they used the goal of unrestricted movement as a justification to restrict other activities, including public speaking, vending, socializing and loitering. Removing these activities sapped the sidewalk of life and vitality. The singular view of streets and sidewalks as transportation routes, later combined with policies that overwhelmingly favored motorists over pedestrians, inadvertently made walking a less critical dimension of urban living.

Planners who want to reinvigorate pedestrian spaces today face a difficult challenge. Building infrastructure alone will not work, because people are more likely to walk in areas that host a diversity of uses. Some uses, however, potentially conflict—a panhandler and a shopper can occupy the same space, but the panhandler might make the shopper uncomfortable. Planners have tried to finesse this problem by encouraging certain kinds of uses, and by encouraging pedestrianism only in certain places, creating upscale pedestrian hubs and leisure destinations. These efforts at control often raise hard questions about democracy and legality, and in any event are rarely effective ways to encourage more walking. We propose that more people will walk or roll in wheelchairs when sidewalks are spaces that accommodate the full range of activities that make cities interesting.

We first discuss how a singular focus on sidewalks as spaces of movement contributed to the decline of sidewalk life, and to walking as well.

The Rise of Single Purpose Sidewalk

In the 19th century, curbs and sidewalks became common along heavily traveled city streets. These early sidewalks were often constructed by the abutting businesses and property owners. By the century’s end, sidewalks had become important elements of the urban infrastructure, and thousands of miles of sidewalks had been paved in American cities. Because sidewalks were often paved before the rest of the street, they were the easiest place to walk, and the easiest place to carry out various economic and social activities. In commercial areas, sidewalks extended the realm of adjacent shops; shopkeepers displayed their merchandise on sidewalks and stored deliveries and overstock on them as well. Street peddlers made a living outdoors while street speakers and newsboys conveyed information to passersby. Sidewalks were also a realm for social encounters where friends, acquaintances, and strangers mixed. The sidewalks were thus both a route and a destination; a way to move through the city, but also a place of commerce, social interaction, and civic engagement.

As sidewalks proliferated, municipalities began to standardize them. Cities specified sidewalk dimensions, construction standards, and materials to ensure consistency and durability. At the same time, cities began to standardize streets and to require durable paving for the roadbed and travel lanes. With this standardization, the nature of the urban sidewalk began to change, and its range of uses began to contract. Municipal engineers began to focus narrowly on efficient transportation and the importance of clean streets. Cities prohibited abutting property owners from using the sidewalks as extensions of their businesses, and the courts—when businesses challenged cities—upheld the cities’ authority to do so. In the process, walking for transportation became sidewalks’ primary purpose and the pedestrian the primary user. The pedestrian’s unobstructed mobility justified subsequent municipal restrictions on other sidewalk activities. Consequently, the pedestrian became the sole “public” for whom the sidewalks were provided.

Cities applied a similar logic to streets. The advent of local planning further changed the street from a locally-oriented public space to a transportation corridor.Municipalities developed public paving projects whose primary goal was traffic movement. In the late 19th century pedestrians grumbled about the hindrances that blocked sidewalks; by the turn of the century pedestrians found they had become the hindrance, regarded by local planners as “obstructions” to the automobile. The sidewalk shifted from being the most convenient space for walking to the only legitimate space for walking. As pedestrians became “encroachers” into the roadbed, they were viewed as a source of accidents and congestion. City councils restricted pedestrian crossings to intersections, required pedestrians to obey traffic signals and instituted fines for jaywalking.

As automobiles proliferated in the early twentieth century, newspaper editorials blamed pedestrians for accidents because they defied the rules of the road and walked into moving vehicles. “The dumb pedestrian really is pretty dumb,” a columnist from Westways magazine wrote in 1937: “As a pedestrian the average man is not very bright…. As an incorrigible individualist, the pedestrian is intellectually inferior to the motorist in his traffic conduct.” As early as 1912, urban infrastructure trade magazines such as American City advised widening streets at the expense of sidewalks. Pedestrians were banned from streets to make room for cars, and a myriad of activities were banned from sidewalks to make room for pedestrians. But the sidewalks had never been about walking alone, and so in the process of creating an efficient transportation system, public officials, municipal engineers and the courts also enervated sidewalk life.

Too Much Control

When cities redefined sidewalks as transportation corridors, they also gave themselves another reason to control sidewalk life. Anything that impeded pedestrian circulation could be restricted or prohibited. Cities throughout the nation issued ordinances to regulate sidewalk activities including loitering, panhandling, street vending, public speaking, and expressions of political dissent.

By the middle of the 20th century, urban sidewalks were used for fewer activities, and more people spent time in controlled environments like malls. And despite the recent popular and scholarly attention to walking, in a 2003 survey of the ten largest California cities, we found that public officials continued to deploy four strategies that devalued sidewalks as multi-use spaces. First, they de-emphasized sidewalks by developing sunken and raised plazas and elevated walkways. Second, they gentrified select sidewalk segments to make them attractive destinations with shopping, restaurants and bars while making few if any improvements to the remaining sidewalk network. Third, they privatized particular sidewalks through the designation of business improvement districts and by fencing and enclosing outdoor seating. And lastly, cities sought to contain undesirable sidewalk activities they could not eliminate.We will discuss each of these strategies in turn.

De-emphasis. In downtown and commercial areas, cities let (and sometimes encourage) developers of privately provided plazas and open spaces to use enclosing walls, blank facades, and entrances through parking structures, all of which separate their properties from public sidewalks. Cities nationwide have built underground and overhead spaces—sunken plazas and skywalks—to provide pedestrian circulation that avoids the street. In cities such as Minneapolis-St. Paul, Detroit, Boston and Cincinnati, skywalks link high-rise towers to a network of tunnels leading people from underground garages to office cubicles, allowing workers and visitors to move through the downtown without setting foot on public sidewalks. While initially meant to address harsh winters, skywalks also appear in cities with warm climates such as Dallas, Los Angeles, Miami, San Francisco, and Santa Cruz.

Gentrification. In the last few decades, many municipalities have invested in historic districts and main streets to draw middle class residents and shoppers back to the city. Their efforts include upgrading the streetscape through a mix of public art, street furniture, and decorative lighting, renovating buildings, and converting old warehouses into trendy shops and restaurants. Cities have also enacted ordinances designating some “pedestrian-oriented” districts, and encouraging specific retail uses (cafes, bakeries, restaurants, flower shops, boutiques, bookstores, galleries, art shops) in these districts. Architectural and landscape design guidelines promote specific themes to retain or enhance an area’s historic character. The objective is to increase land value and overall economic viability. In the process, small, independent businesses such as nail salons, tattoo parlors and small food stores are often replaced by chain stores and upscale retailers. The new consumer orientation reflected in the higher prices and more upscale merchandise creates a subtle but effective screening mechanism and makes the sidewalks comfortable for only higher income populations.

Privatization. Many states have enabled Business Improvement Districts (BIDs) in which business owners tax themselves to augment public services or provide improvements for a designated district. Services offered by BIDs typically include sidewalk beautification, cleaning and maintenance, and private security officers. BID security officers ensure that sidewalk activity is not disruptive to businesses. Some urban residents become nuisances if they do not fit the BID’s desired image for the neighborhood. Fencing a part of the sidewalk for outdoor seating is another form of privatization. Fences are boundaries that separate the privatized realm from public space. This might be required by ordinance, as is the case of California where state law stipulates that alcohol can be served only in enclosed and demarcated areas. While cafes can blend seamlessly into the city sidewalks, as they do in Paris, too often in the US hard boundaries privatize public space and thus preclude different public uses.

Containment. Who has access to which sidewalks is controversial. To contain undesirable uses, cities directly or indirectly sanction activities in one area to keep them out of another. Local governments restrict prostitution to red light districts and homelessness to skid rows. Some cities have extended this logic to street vending, allowing it in some areas while prohibiting it in others. At times, cities have attempted to confine protest events and political speech to officially-approved protest zones.

Some of the strategies above have helped empty public sidewalks of people and activities. Others have encouraged the use of sidewalks, but only by a subset of the population, and in doing so they make the sidewalk less public.

Pedestrian Level of Service (PLOS)

The Highway Capacity Manual Multimodal Level of Service (MMLOS) outlines a detailed process to analyze a sidewalk. Usually, this detailed approach is used in facility planning or interchange area management plan (IAMP), project development, and development review. However, the Qualitative Multimodal Assessment (QMA) methodology is most suited when comparing different alternatives side-by-side to each other. This methodology uses the roadway characteristics and applies a context-based subjective “Excellent/Good/Fair/Poor” rating.

For example, a six foot sidewalk is standard in a residential area and would be rated Good (or Excellent if it had a buffer). Ratings can be “averaged” to obtain one for every mode, or they can be shown for every element if more detail is desired e.g. in a technical appendix. This method is most appropriate when one or more of the following conditions apply:

1. The subject roadway does not easily divide into segments with uniform characteristics between intersections.
2. The subject roadway has rural/suburban characteristics with infrequent or no signal control, where the MMLOS methodology is not applicable.
3. Insufficient data are available to complete a MMLOS analysis
4. Future alternatives may not have enough detail to properly quantify roadway characteristics required by other methodologies.

For calculating the pedestrian level of service using QMA, the following factors are considered at the segment level:

Outside travel lane width: Wider travel lanes are rated better than narrower travel lanes because of the larger buffer space between vehicles and pedestrians.

Bicycle lane/shoulder width: The addition of bicycle lanes or shoulders creates greater separation between vehicles and pedestrian traffic and acts as a buffer. Wider facilities are rated better than narrow or non-existent facilities.

Presence of buffers (landscaped or other): Buffer presence that separates pedestrians from traffic results in an improved rating. Wider buffers are rated better than narrower or non-existent ones.

Sidewalk/path presence: The presence of sidewalks or paths will rate higher versus shoulders or no facilities at all. Wider sidewalks/paths rate better than narrower or non-existent ones.

Lighting: The presence of lighting, whether roadway or pedestrian-scale, is rated better than roadways without lighting.

Travel lanes and speed of motorized traffic: Less travel lanes and lower vehicle speeds will rate higher than more lanes and higher speeds.

At intersections, the following factors are considered:

Traffic control: Intersections with a traffic signal or all-way stop control, or with marked crosswalks are rated better than locations with only two-way stop control or locations without marked crosswalks.

Crossing width: Fewer turn or through travel lanes to be crossed is rated better than more turn/though lanes because the exposure to traffic and potential conflicts are less.

Median islands: The presence of a median island is rated better than no islands as two-stage crossings significantly improve the associated safety and ease when using a crossing.

Pedestrian Facility Improvement Strategies

Contributing factors to pedestrian crashes often include a high density of driveways along a roadway segment, high motor vehicle speeds and volumes, and poor pedestrian facility conditions (e.g., cracked or raised sidewalks, significant potholes in pedestrian crossings).

Other potential contributing factors include the state of crash-involved drivers and pedestrians, such as levels of alcohol or drug impairment, distraction, and demographic factors including age and gender.

In identifying factors that may have contributed to a vehicle–pedestrian crash, the analyst can examine police-provided crash diagrams or other available contextual information to consider the following:

• Vehicle speed;
• Driver and pedestrian compliance with regulations and traffic devices;
• Pedestrian crossing behaviors;
• Human factors related to sight distance and the density of distractions in the environment (e.g., signs, signals, noise);
• Built environment or land use area type;
• Intersection presence and types of tra­c control devices;
• Pedestrian crossing distance;
• Time of day/day of week/seasonal factors;
• Alcohol impairment on the part of pedestrians or drivers;
• Distraction on the part of pedestrians or drivers;
• Demographics;
• Special populations, such as school-aged children, older adults, and persons with disabilities;
• Presence of transit stops; and
• Density of driveways along a segment or corridor.

The following pedestrian safety countermeasures have the potential to improve pedestrian safety. The effectiveness of these countermeasures lies in their ability to reduce vehicular speeds by adding friction to the driving environment, by enhancing the visibility of pedestrians, or both.

High-visibility crosswalk:

Vertically arranged street markings designed to improve the visibility of the crosswalk as compared with traverse parallel lines.

Raised crosswalk/speed table:

An elevated section of pavement with a marked crosswalk to encourage drivers to slow down.

Median crossing (refuge) island:

A protected space placed in the center of the street to facilitate pedestrian crossings by allowing pedestrians to cross only one direction of traffic at a time.

In-roadway “Yield to Pedestrian” sign (R1-6) installed as a gateway treatment:

R1-6 signs placed at a crosswalk along the edge of the road and on all lane lines, thus requiring drivers to slow down to drive between two signs.

Pedestrian hybrid beacon (HAWK):

A traffic control device used to stop motor vehicle traffic to allow pedestrians to cross safely.

Leading pedestrian interval:

Provides pedestrians with a 3- to 7-second head start when entering an intersection relative to the green signal for parallel vehicular traffic.

Rectangular rapid-flashing beacon:

User actuated amber LED blocks that supplement warning signs at unsignalized intersections or midblock crosswalks. They can be manually activated by pedestrians using a push button or passively activated by a pedestrian detection system.

Curb extension:

An extension of the pedestrian space at intersections designed to increase the visibility of crossing pedestrians and reduce their crossing distance

Pedestrian lighting:

Humanscale lights that illuminate spaces where pedestrians walk along and across roadways

Glossary: Key Terms

Crosswalk: a marked part of a road where pedestrians have right of way to cross.

Median: the strip of land between the lanes of opposing traffic on a divided roadway.

Shared use paths: A shared-use path, mixed-use path or multi-use pathway is a path which is “designed to accommodate the movement of pedestrians and cyclists”. Examples of shared-use paths include sidewalks designated as shared-use, bridleways and rail trails.

Sidewalk: A paved path for pedestrians set along the side of a roadway.

References

• Transportation Officials. (2004). Guide for the planning, design, and operation of pedestrian facilities. AASHTO.

AttributionS

• Vibrant Sidewalks in the United States: Re-Integrating Walking and a Quintessential Social Realm by Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris and Renia Ehrenfeucht is licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0