The improvement of quality of life and the environment at urban areas relies on an effective transportation system and has become a primary objective for both central government and local authorities all over the world during the last two decades. More especially, the provision of a safe environment for the pedestrians is of great importance in order to meet the aforementioned objective. The use of traffic calming techniques aims at the provision of such an environment at the urban areas that face severe traffic and safety problems. Traffic calming measures have been recently designed and implemented in some major cities in Greece. Until then, the main "tool" for the transportation engineers and town planners for the prevention of all the unwanted impacts from traffic at city centres has been the implementation of pedestrianisation schemes. Within the framework of this paper, an attempt is made to evaluate the impact of traffic calming measures at various municipalities that are part of the Thessaloniki Metropolitan Area. All such measures in the study area were recorded and evaluated using multi-criteria analysis techniques. The main criteria chosen for the analysis include traffic, environment, safety and commercial impact. Special attention was given to the examination of the traffic safety impacts for both pedestrians and drivers through the analysis of accident data "before" and "after" the implementation of the traffic calming measures. The data come from the official police records and are evaluated both in quantitative and qualitative terms. The overall analysis indicates that traffic-calming measures do have positive effects on traffic, safety and the environment. However, some negative effects are likely to occur at roads surrounding the areas where the measures were implemented. For the covering abstract see ITRD E123863.
Abstract