Pedestrian self-reports of factors influencing the use of pedestrian bridges

Abstract

The study was designed to find out factors that influence use/non-use of pedestrian bridges. The use rate of five pedestrian bridges was observed in the central business district (CBD) of Ankara. After the observations, a survey was conducted among pedestrians using those bridges and crossing contrary to safe practice under them at street level (n = 408). In the present data, the use rate of pedestrian bridges varied from 6 to 63%. The frequent use of the bridge when crossing the road concerned, and seeing bridge use as time saving and safe in general were positively related to respondents' bridge use. Frequent visits to CBD decreased the likelihood of using the bridge. Other factors accounted only for a small proportion of variance in bridge use. The study suggests that bridge use or non-use is a habit and not coincidental behaviour. For increasing the pedestrians' bridge use, escalators seem to be a good solution, but traffic signals under a bridge may deteriorate the use rate. In addition, increasing the number of legs leading to the bridge may not increase the use rate. The use rate is likely to improve, if the safety benefits and convenience of using the bridge without considerable time loss are clearly visible to pedestrians. (c) 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.