Effect of Various Parameters on Pedestrians’ Characteristics in Hilly Urban Area

Pedestrian flow characteristics are location based phenomenon and various researchers have studied the pedestrian flow characteristics of several locations locally but mainly in plain region. However, in hilly areas only few studies have been done. Pedestrians in hilly urban areas are forced to walk on the carriageway along with vehicular traffic due to the lack of pedestrian facilities in these areas. Also a pedestrian has to require more effort when climbing uphill and require caution in coming downhill. Again, walking speed of pedestrian is fundamental to any roadway and traffic control design. Therefore, this study focuses on the effect of various factors such as gradient, age, gender and handling baggage on pedestrians speed. Then the relation between speed-density is examined using regression analysis with the help of software SPSSv21. It was found that the mean speed of pedestrians is more in downhill direction as compared to uphill direction and the difference between mean walking speed in uphill and downhill direction reduces with decrease in the value of gradient. The male pedestrians were found to be comparatively faster than the females. When considering the effect of age, young pedestrian are found to be the fastest and pedestrians’ with the age above 55 i.e. elderly pedestrians were the slowest. When considering the effect of baggage, it was found that, in mixed traffic condition a pedestrian with heavy baggage tends to walk comparatively at low speed to avoid the collision with vehicles. At last it was found that there is no or very weak correlation exist between speed and density.