The Pedestrian Quality Inspection is one of the developments of the EU COST Action 358 Pedestrians Quality Needs. It describes a systematic, on site review of the existing situation concerning the performance of requirements to identify hazardous conditions, faults and deficiencies that may lead to less pedestrian demand, worse pedestrian conditions or serious accidents. With regard to the Directive 2008/96/EC of the European Parliament on road infrastructure safety management this new instrument base on developments on Road Safety Inspections and Audits (e.g. PIARC RSA and RSI guidelines) and especially Pedestrian Audits, which, concerning the methods, are available in several countries like Germany, USA or New Zealand. But it goes further on and it can be seen as a management tool that can be implemented as part of an overall quality management process. Its aim is to identify potential problems so countermeasures can be applied to increase quality, safety and security and therefore to increase pedestrians performance and demand. It contains in addition to existing inspection and audit instruments many other aspects especially in terms of the traffic flow and the quality and climate of walking. Three orders of requirements were carried over to the structure of a walkability checklist It concerns possible deficiencies of the design of roadside environment as first order requirements, traffic rules and traffic flow as second order requirements and aspects of road-users behaviour as third order requirement. The walkability checklist allows a quick and rough check of the quality of the whole pedestrian system in order to proof whether general requirements are fulfilled. The next step is to go into detail and to check the pedestrian quality needs. For this checklists were developed which contain more than 300 questions. The process of checking the pedestrian quality can involve small sections of the road with repeated check lists or several runs along the whole road or a whole area. The checklists are quite detailed and consequently there should be a systematic collection of the deficiencies that were found. The filled in checklists themselves need not be added to a final report and an investigation form. With implementing the new instrument an improvement of the situation for pedestrians and a new design of roads with high qualities for walking are expected. (Author/publisher)
Samenvatting