A User Perception-Based Prioritization of Determinants of Walkability of Pedestrian Infrastructure Based on Multi-attribute Decision Making (MADM) Approach: An Indian Experience

To plan the pedestrian infrastructure facilities, it is imperative to understand the pedestrian perception towards key critical attributes influencing sidewalk and crosswalk. However, a review of existing research literature suggests that evaluation of walkability of pedestrian infrastructure remain unexplored in a typical Indian setting. This paper addresses this research gap with respect to pedestrian infrastructure evaluation in Hyderabad, the capital of Telangana, a premier IT hub and a focal point for educational institutions, where a significant proportion of population uses walking for their daily commute needs. This paper demonstrates a user perception-based approach, proposed to identify and analyse the important factors of the urban environment that support or detract pedestrians from walking. In this study, initially, a brief literature review is taken up to identify a key set of parameters influencing the walkability of pedestrian infrastructure in typically Indian context. Then, user perceptions on these attributes are collected in a suitable five-point Likert scale. The collected data are then analysed based on grey relational analysis (GRA), a suitable multi-attribute decision making (MADM) technique to identify and prioritize the most important variables related to pedestrian walkability. Results indicate that safety and security are perceived as the most important parameters influencing pedestrian walkability.