Assessing pedestrian crossing environments for sustainable urban mobility: The POWERS framework

Walking is central to urban mobility, supporting public health, environmental sustainability, accessibility, and urban livability. As cities promote active and low-carbon transportation, understanding how pedestrian environments support safe, continuous movement is increasingly important, particularly at road crossings, where pedestrian-vehicle interactions are concentrated. Existing walkability measures often operate at broader neighborhood or street-network scales and may overlook the micro-environmental conditions that shape pedestrian movement and safety at crossings. To address this gap, this study developed the Professionals Online Walkability Evaluation and Rating Survey (POWERS), an expert-informed framework for assessing pedestrian crossing environments within urban mobility planning. POWERS uses 38 micro-environmental crossing-related features, incorporates a multidisciplinary expert sample, organizes features into planning-relevant domains, and combines normalized perceived-influence coefficients with directionality assignments for crossing site-level scoring. A total of 145 professionals from urban planning, transport planning, engineering, public health, geography and environment, and architecture and design evaluated the perceived influence of environmental features on pedestrian behavior near crossings. Professional-group rankings showed strong cross-disciplinary consistency, indicating broad agreement in the relative salience assigned to POWERS features. POWERS site-level scores were compared with localized crossing walkability (CWI) scores across nine crossing locations as an exploratory analysis. The two approaches showed substantial agreement in overall site ordering and identified the same lowest-scoring locations. However, they differed in the ordering of several higher- and intermediate-scoring sites, indicating that the broader POWERS feature set captures localized variation differently from the more concise CWI. Subject to future external validation, POWERS can provide an initial basis for characterizing pedestrian crossing environments and identifying potential infrastructure needs and context-sensitive interventions.