Exploring pedestrian permeability in urban sidewalk networks

Understanding and characterizing pedestrian mobility is essential for designing more sustainable urban environments. While many studies have examined pedestrian mobility and navigation from diverse perspectives, the analysis of how geospatial features and city organization facilitate or hinder pedestrian movement has been relatively limited. This gap underscores the need for theoretical and analytical approaches. To this end, we explore pedestrian mobility through the lens of discrete vector fields, leveraging random walk models to analyze the impact of sidewalk network structures on pedestrian dynamics. The comparison of discrete-time and continuous-time random walks confirms that the latter provides a suitable framework, as it allows to incorporates edge lengths and pedestrian speeds. Findings highlight that areas with shorter edge links and more intricate network structures exhibit higher pedestrian permeability, supporting urban theories on walkability and accessibility, as described by Jacobs. These results cannot be directly obtained with discrete-time random walks. Testing on sidewalk networks from Barcelona, Paris, and Boston demonstrates how local geometric features and street layouts shape pedestrian permeability. This framework offers a novel quantitative approach to urban mobility, reinforcing theoretical perspectives on urban permeability and providing insights for fostering pedestrian-friendly city designs.