Pedestrian safety perception and urban street settings: a comment

Abstract

A recent paper in this journal (Park & García, 2019Park, Y., & García, M. (2019). Pedestrian safety perception and urban street settings. International Journal of Sustainable Transportation, 1–12. doi: 10.1080/15568318.2019.1641577
[Taylor & Francis Online] , [Google Scholar]
) studied the perceptions about safety by pedestrians in urban street settings, in an effort to help develop a good foundation for creating more livable and safer neighborhoods. To do this, they conducted an online survey obtaining information about the respondents’ characteristics, walking times and – most importantly – their levels of anxiety regarding certain street settings, based on daytime and night time photographs, using a 5-point Likert scale. Their results are partly obvious (i.e., proper street lighting is the main contributor to enhancing feelings of safety on streets) and partly very interesting (i.e., the morphologic complexity of streets comes second). They also found, quite expectedly again, that age and gender influenced these perceptions.