Fostering urban soft mobility by means of pedestrian areas: tentative criteria for evaluation of impacts on traffic

The increased use of cars has replaced pedestrian activity in urban areas, but in the last decades, great attention has been paid to pedestrian spaces, to shift the modal split to active and sustainable mobility. Several cities in different countries have adopted pedestrian areas with benefits in terms of tourism development, job creation incentives to small and medium-sized businesses, and reduced levels of environmental and acoustic pollution within this space. However, in the literature, there are few evidences of what happens in the surrounding areas. This paper aims to see the opportunity for pedestrianization in a wider way, especially in the surrounding areas of cities, while avoiding the birth of environmental and traffic congestion problems in new zones of the cities. Within this framework, the purpose is to provide road managers and designers with a method to select and evaluate the performance of design solutions after the adoption of the pedestrian areas, to avoid the aforementioned issues and increase the levels of liveability not only in the pedestrian zone but in the whole city.