Multiple marked foot crossings can be used in village or town centres to increase pedestrian amenity through improving safety, accessibility and driver awareness, whilst also reducing vehicular speeds. They typically consist of a number of marked foot crossings placed 80-120m apart. Wollongong City Council has recently developed a transport plan for the Thirroul town centre which is the commercial and retail focus for the attractive Northern Coastal villages. As a result of the strong community viewpoint towards creating a pedestrian focussed environment, council was obliged to test the appropriateness of adopting this relatively new concept, prior to investing resources into a detailed town centre traffic model. Council took this opportunity to undertake a theoretical exploration to test a number of pedestrian priority crossing options using a simplistic microsimulation analysis. The resultant outcome from this process was the development of a number of speed-flow profiles for the range of scenarios tested. Through the sharing of this knowledge gained, other practitioners may use these flow profiles as a rule of thumb to better guide road authorities prior to deploying resources to undertake larger scale modeling/planning exercises. (a) For the covering entry of this conference, please see ITRD abstract no. E216297.
Abstract