People need to walk. The quality of their experience however can vary greatly and this in turn is known to directly impact on their decisions to choose to walk against other modes and the frequency, length, scope and enjoyment of their trips. Walking is such a basic way of travelling that one tends to forget its importance. Walking can be seen as the lubricating oil of the transport system. Although almost everyone agrees that it is important to have pedestrian facilities, hardly anyone has it at the top of their list, except in public areas where there is a dominant economic or social reason to care for pedestrians, like shopping streets and malls, or monumental parks. It has become clear that policy development and implementation on the pedestrian issue needs a new impulse. The Pedestrians' Quality Needs Project (PQN) has been established to innovate policy development thinking and to show how policy development can be taken to a higher level. The project aims to identify what people need for their safe and agreeable mobility in public space, to show the added value of a systems approach compared with sectoral approaches. PQN is informed by and build upon the research published by previous studies (including WALCYNG, ADONIS, PROMPT, Vulnerable Road Users and HOTEL). The project networks 20 countries and is supported by the COST office of the European Commission. PQN objectives are: 1. Improve the understanding of how the public space, the transport system and the social, legal and political context interrelate with pedestrians' quality needs. 2. Advance the effectiveness and efficiency of future policy and research by developing a new and coherent system of concepts, theories and models which influence the quality and provision of pedestrian facilities. 3. Enable relevant organisations to work together to identify, prioritise, tackle and prevent current and future restrictions on the full potential for pedestrians by providing an accessible knowledge base and easy to use auditing tools. 4. Stimulate partners to innovate tools and disseminate knowledge that help to shed new light on the issue and stimulate a new enthusiasm to provide for safe and agreeable mobility. 5. Provide recommendations for further research. The present report is Part B — Documentation provides detailed insight in the research that four PQN working groups carried out within the context of the conceptual framework. (Author/publisher)
Abstract