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Abstract
This paper examines the relationship between research and practice in pedestrian planning, focusing on the pedestrian plan in the United States. A preliminary review of plans and research was used to identify 17 aspects of pedestrian planning. These were ranked in importance through a survey of pedestrian planners at the local and metropolitan levels. A qualitative comparison of the importance attributed these features in planning research, the planners' rankings of these features, and presence and use of these features in plans was conducted. Areas of considerable discrepancy were analyzed more thoroughly, indicating areas where planning practice can benefit from present research, and where planning research could be informed by planning practice.
Notes
1. The primary measures include including block length, block size, block density, intersection density, street density, link–node ratio, and pedestrian-route directness. Pedestrian-route directness is a ratio of route distance to straight-line distance, can identify routes with poor connectivity, and enables direct comparison of connectivity between areas of different size. Randall and Baetz (Citation2001) demonstrate the application of this method to a case study in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada using GIS, which enables one to quickly conduct analyses linking all trip origins with any desired destination within a given area.
2. Some of the municipal-level planners surveyed felt pedestrian-intensive land uses was among the least important features, as their communities had little or no transit service; thus its importance to planners may be underestimated here.
3. The merits of small blocks have been part of planning education since Jane Jacobs' (1961) ‘Death and Life of Great American Cities’, and more recently Andres Duany (2000) advocated them in his widely read ‘Suburban Nation’.
4. Pedestrian-intensive land uses and other trip attractors are buffered and loaded onto a range of cells with distance decay effects, and thus overlap with population data, which are loaded directly onto the cells. These results emphasize areas connecting residential concentrations and trip destinations, in contrast to the latent demand approach, which emphasizes arterial links adjoining areas with residential concentrations and trip destinations.