Public online lecture “Modeling Pedestrian Activity in Cities”

The lecture series “Mobility analysis and planning for human-scale cities“ arranged by the Mobility Lab, University of Tartu, features experts and leading scholars in the field of mobility and transport from Estonia and beyond. The lecture series seeks to answer the question of how to promote human-scale, sustainable, and just cities through mobility analysis and transport planning. 

Image

To listen to the lecture, register here

The fourth lecture of our series is a lecture, “Modeling Pedestrian Activity in Cities”, by Assoc. Prof. Andres Sevtšuk (Massachusetts Institute of Technology). 
Andres Sevtsuk is Head of the City Design and Development Group and the Charles and Ann Spaulding Career Development Associate Professor of Urban Science and Planning at the Department of Urban Studies and Planning, where he also leads the City Form Lab. His research focuses on public qualities of cities, and on making urban environments more walkable, sustainable and equitable, bridging the fields of urban design, spatial analytics and mobility research. Andres is the author of the Urban Network Analysis toolbox and has published 2 books. Andres has collaborated with a number of city governments, international organizations, planning practices and developers on urban designs, plans and policies in both developed and rapidly developing urban environments from across the globe. He has led various international research projects, published in planning, transportation and urban design journals, and received numerous awards for his work. He holds a PhD from the Department of Urban Studies and Planning and an SMArchs in Architecture and Urbanism from MIT.

As city governments continue to promote active mobility to reduce carbon emissions associated with the transportation sector, data and models for representing foot-traffic distribution are needed. We present a first city-wide pedestrian network dataset for all of NYC and use it to construct a model of pedestrian flows between different land use pairs to describe both the distribution of specific trip types, and the combined foot-traffic volumes on all segments in New York City for AM, lunch and PM peak periods. We calibrate the model with observed 2018-2019 pedestrian counts collected from over a thousand locations on weekdays and over 450 locations on weekends. Our model explains pedestrian volumes at counted locations with over 90% accuracy and extends foot-traffic estimates to all pedestrian segments in the city. Estimated pedestrian volumes can informing public investments into the pedestrian realm and constitute a denominator for pedestrian-related hazard data, such as automobile crashes.