Planning pedestrian environments requires assumptions about how pedestrians will respond to characteristics of the environment as they formulate and enact their walking itineraries. By observing the movement of patterns researchers can relate them to the designed environment. This research shows the extent to which pedestrian behaviour (i..e. walking speed) can be used when considering design interventions.
Levine, in his article, compared the pace of life in large cities from 31 countries around the world. Three indicators of pace of life were observed: average walking speed in downtown locations, the speed with which postal clerks completed a simple request (work speed), and the accuracy of public clocks. The pace was significantly faster in colder climates, economically productive countries, and in individualistic cultures. Our research question builds further on this study and examines whether walking pace is defined by the personality of a place and does it diff between unique districts of a city?
This article compares two different methods of mapping pedestrian behaviour, questionnaires and observations. The author argues while each method has its advantages they can also be flawed: questionnaire can be inaccurate and observation methods can be time consuming. This research is important in understanding problems that we may encounter while observing pedestrians and ways of addressing these issues.
The pace of life in big cities is faster than in small towns. Experiments and observations of over 1300 pedestrians were conducted to compare if walking speeds varied with city size in this article. Our approach is similar to the one used in this research.
Associations between heat and pedestrian speed were examined in this research paper and the experiments conducted revealed that pedestrians walked faster in warm settings compared to cool settings. This is relevant to our study as it shows that many external factors (ie. temperature) which we do not have control over may affect our data.