Resumen
Most city centers are compacted with heavy pedestrian flows. Despite with sufficient sidewalks, pedestrians use carriageways creating life threats and disturbing the smooth traffic flow. Since pedestrian group is heterogeneous, primary objective of this research is to develop an unbiased methodology to evaluate the most vital attributes influencing to evade the sidewalks. Current research exemplifies the effectiveness of Conjoint Analysis (CA) in evaluating the most influencing attributes. CA is a multivariate technique used to understand how respondents develop preference for products or services. Results of the CA interpret relative importance of each selected attribute. The accuracy of the CA is expected by selecting the most appropriate attributes and mutually independent levels for those attributes. Width of sidewalks, availability of obstacles, opposing pedestrian flow rate, availability of safety rails are few of the sidewalk attributes which mainly influence the usage of carriageways. With mutually independent attribute factor levels, nine hypothetical profiles were developed to evaluate the pedestrians? reluctance to use the sidewalks. A sample of pedestrians completed the stated-preference survey by ranking the nine profiles. The results indicate ?availability of obstacles? is the most influencing factors while ?opposing pedestrian flow rate? becomes second. ?Availability of safety rails? is the least influencing factor. Total Utility Value (TUV) is calculated for selected sidewalks by assigning the appropriate attribute levels and substituting the part worth utility values obtained from conjoint results. To increase the usability of CA, results were related to pedestrians? actual willingness to use the sidewalks. Thereby, a Pedestrian Preference Score (PPS) is defined for each sidewalk. A low PPS value and a low TUV were observed for the least using pedestrian sidewalks and higher values of PPS and TUV were observed for the sidewalks with a high pedestrian flow. This linear relation between PPS and TUV indicates CA is a better methodology to cluster the sidewalks based on pedestrians? preference and sidewalk characteristics. This confirms that TUV can be used as an index to cluster the sidewalks. Based on the selected threshold values for this index, the sidewalks are graphically presentable with mapping tools available with ArcGIS. This index, which is defined as ?Pedestrian Sidewalk Index? under this study, represents a reliable information source using the qualitative judgments of the pedestrians.