Quantitative-Comparative Evaluation of Urban Walkability Based on Sustainable Development Criteria, Case Study: Streets leading to Vanak Roundabout

Research Problem: 

Urban walkability is one of the qualities which some of the best–known urban designers have recently put the finger on, especially throughout the world›s metropolitan areas such as Istanbul, Paris, Copenhagen, Rome, London, and New York (Manhattan). Tehran, the most significant metropolitan area in Iran, has never been a pedestrian-friendly city. Regarding transit, priority in Tehran has been given chiefly to the private transportation mode. As evidence of this claim, the number of urban highways, multi-story roads, and urban tunnels in Tehran has been increasing, especially in recent decades. However, this kind of development would not address the problems of Tehran as a city with a centralized structure entirely dissimilar to American urban sprawl. The traffic congestion and environmental pollution arising from it have been Tehran›s most significant urban challenge during the last several decades. In addition, the increasing trend of socio-economic needs for public places in Tehran demands a more public transportation mode in this city.Nevertheless, the proliferation of vehicles has led to diminishing human-based scale in cities, to decline in face-to-face interactions, reduced safety and security for pedestrians, increased probability of accidents through the roadways, and finally, degraded quality of place and environment. In general, the mentioned concepts bring the city into challenging circumstances that make pedestrian environments more vulnerable and fragile. Due to the consequences above, urban designers and planners need to pay more attention to the defects of pedestrian environments. The article’s question is how to evaluate walkability in urban spaces, focusing on one of the most crowded nodes in Tehran city, Vanak Square, through quantitative measurement of sustainability criteria.

 Due to these considerations and by accepting the fact that changing Tehran into a pedestrian-oriented city is a gradual and incremental process, this paper has focused on the routes leading to Vanak square (one of the most crowded and chaotic intersections in Tehran), and evaluated their walkability by using quantitative methods. It is necessary to meet two sub-goals to achieve this primary goal: identifying evaluation criteria and achieving a quantitative method for evaluating the rate of city walkability.  Significance: Although there have been several research papers about walkability, most of these researches have emphasized one street using a qualitative approach that makes them inadequate for measuring walkability. So, the main goal of this research would be a quantitative and comparative evaluation of the streets leading to Vanak square to be more sustainable and pedestrian-friendly by discovering the criteria for pedestrian-oriented capability. Such an assessment makes achieving more strategic decision-making, planning, and design of urban spaces possible. Moreover, comparing the concepts facilitates the creation of new concepts. This research measures a quantitative method in a common between different spaces. Also, another difference in the current paper is introducing new standards along with sustainable concepts with an emphasis on walkability, so we have achieved parallelism with sustainable development and proposed new ideas.

 There are two significant paths to answer the questions: we utilize the qualitative methods to extract the qualitative criteria and implement the quantitative methods to evaluate the mentioned criteria related to the case study. To analyze the data and estimate the walkability of Vanak Square malls, we use an Analytical Hierarchy Process, which allows us to be able to give scale to each criterion and their sub-criteria, to utilize both qualitative and quantitative criteria simultaneously, to categorize each criterion in a hierarchy, and to simplify the complexities of the problems. It is noteworthy that, since the network-based relationship between criteria in questionnaires has not been approved, this technique is prior to the network-based analysis process. 

 This paper evaluates every single street based on sustainability. In doing so, we educe criteria including concepts such as sustainable development, compact city, safe city, new urbanism, T.O.D, and echo city. This facilitates configuring different dimensions of sustainable development as the supporting ground to evaluate walkability. These dimensions can be explained as economic, social, and environmental sustainability. Social sustainability brings the opportunity for public welfare services, accessibility to public transitions, the safety of riders and pedestrians, security, human scale, visual corridor quality, imagery, and identity. Economic sustainability includes the diversity of activities, simplicity of movement, and the interconnection between attractive zones. Environmental sustainability brings environmental quality and climate comfort. After a survey based on these steps, we estimate Vanak Square streets› walkability: Vanak Street, northern Vali-e-asr Street, Haghani Street, southern Vali-e-asr Street, Mollasadra Street, and Brazil Street. Accordingly, the results show that Vanak Street is the most walkable street in Vanak square. We also found that a market-friendly space affects both the sustainability and walkability of the environment.