Walkability maps

Amsterdam Voetganger Plusnet - Amsterdam pedestrian network

PROJECT METADATA

Period Nov 2017 - March 2018

Client City of Amsterdam – Transport and Public Space department - Verkeer en Openbareruimte [V&OR]

Presented at

The "Nationaal Voetgangers Congres". Amsterdam (NL) in September 2018) by Johan Olsthoorn

The Annual Polis Conference on "Transport innovation for sustainable cities and regions". Manchester (UK) in November 2018 by Eric Kievit

This project was commissioned by the Transport and Public Space department of the City of Amsterdam (Verkeer en Openbare Ruimte [V&OR] - Gemeente Amsterdam). It was conducted from November 2017 to March 2018.

The applied method was first tested and validated in a pilot area. If you are interested in knowing more about the methodology and the data that is used to build the maps, please refer to this other project: walkability maps – prototype.

The objective of this study is to scale up the aforementioned methodology to the “Amsterdam Pedestrian Network” (Amsterdam Voetganger Plusnet). The City of Amsterdam seeks to prioritize pedestrians, among other transport modes, in the streets that belong to this network. Therefore, is was mandatory to upscale the walkability maps.

SpaceTraces was responsible of supervising this process and of including some minor improvements of the initial method.The most relevant modifications in regard with the prototype are:

Automatizing the generation of the pedestrian street network from the Basisregistratie Grootschalige Topografie (BGT), which is an open dataset, using SQL.

Excluding the analyses ran using SpaceSyntax software due to the results being too sensitive to how the pedestrian network had been generated, especially in short sidewalks.

Adding an extra dataset which included the tram stops and the volume of people in those stops.

Including a new analysis to calculate the pedestrian traffic volume around those new added tram stops.

The maps are now used to further develop or complement other urban policies such as the public terraces policy or the bicycle parking policy. They are now published at the Data portal of the City of Amsterdam "walkability"