MIT Study Counts Pedestrians to Guide Urban Planning

A new study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) estimates foot traffic in cities in an effort to help city planners and developers study not only vehicle movement, but the flow of people more accurately.

Andres Sevtsuk, an MIT Associate Professor of Urban Science and Planning as well as the director of the Institute's City Form Lab, published his study in the Journal of the American Planning Association. In the report titled "Estimating Pedestrian Flows on Street Networks," Sevtsuk offers a new numerical model in estimating foot traffic in a city.

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Counting Pedestrians to Make Pedestrians Count

Sevtsuk got the inspiration from the nearby Kendall Square, a busy area in East Cambridge in Massachusetts - a huge portion of which overlaps with an equally busy part of the MIT campus.

In the Kendall Square area, MIT students, local residents, and employees from various tech startups move around in between classes, meals, and appointments. Tackling the question of whether this daily movement of foot traffic can ever be understood, Sevtsuk used the location as the basis for his new study on modeling pedestrian movement.

In Sevtsuk's model, he places emphasis on the functionality of a specific neighborhood's elements beyond its physical form to create a model that could adopt a variety of real-world situations, starting from Cambridge's Kendall Square to other locations, like Cape Town in South Africa.

"This model allows us to estimate how many pedestrian journeys are likely to occur," Andres Sevtsuk said in an MIT news release. He adds that his model forecasts trip distribution, which is directly influenced by the options available for these pedestrians and the volume of destinations accessible to them by traveling on foot.

His new numerical model for estimating foot traffic could have profound implications in urban planning. In new developments, such as real estate establishment, a common requirement is a traffic impact assessment (TIA) - which offers an insight to the existing traffic conditions and more importantly, the effect of the new development toward automobile traffic surrounding the site. Currently, there is no equivalent for foot traffic, although closure and blockage due to development would also affect passers-by and traveling pedestrians.

With Sevtsuk's new model, city officials and project planners who are usually involved in these processes can have a new set of data for a more accurate assessment and more informed decision-making.

Generating the Foot Traffic Model

To formulate the new numerical model for estimating pedestrian volume, Andres Sevtsuk considered pedestrian trips as functional journeys between two points, an origin and a destination, which included homes, officers, subways, restaurants, and other facilities and amenities.

He then identified a "maximum radius" that covers most foot trips, plus a "detour ratio" of 15 percent maximum - which allows pedestrian travels in his model to travel farther than the shortest possible path to get to their destinations.

He then gathered property-level data from the city of Cambridge and enlisted observers to count pedestrians on about 60 street segments around Kendall Square for calibrating his model. The study was done before the pandemic, with measurements taken during midday (from 12 to 2 PM) and the evening rush hour (4 to 8 PM).

Sevtsuk and his team discovered that the average foot traffic in Kendall Square had 872 pedestrians during midday and 1,171 during the evening rush hour. Furthermore, the Main Street - which includes several MIT buildings, officers for tech giants Google and Amazon and more, and a subway station - averaged 11,311 pedestrian trips during the evening period.

Having real-world data, they were able to fine-tune the model, with the data gathered putting them "into a ballpark of accurate estimates on all streets." Sevtsuk also adds that the model is applicable to "almost any urban setting," aside from locations physically similar to Kendall Square.