Analysis of Walking Space in Iran's Sidewalks Considering the Increasing Population of the Elderly

Sidewalks are considered to be the most popular places among all the public places in a city. Not only walking is important for public health, it also helps the city environment to be alive. In addition, people’s walking can attract customers to shopping centers and improve the environmental conditions and increase people’s interactions with each other. In most cases, traffic engineers adopt some models which are used to analyze the vehicle traffic to determine the levels of service of the streams in pedestrians. The new method with which the traffic capacity of Iran›s sidewalks is investigated is the Micro-Simulation method.In order to investigate various types of sidewalks, three different sidewalks with narrow, medium, and wide widths were simulated. Also, three models with 10%, 20%, and 30% presence of the elderly in sidewalks were considered for each model.Increasing elderly people’s ratio resulted in less the walking space of pedestrians for a specific unit flow rate. The decrease of the average of the walking space with only 10% elderly population is negligible in lower flow condition such as E, but in higher levels of service such as A, B, And C with higher elderly people’s population, this decrease is more noticeable.The adopted procedure in this paper can be used to investigate the effects of pedestrians from other age groups on the crossing stream and emergency situations.