Dr. Rofe’s work, funded by a national authority in
Israel, aims to identify the variables explaining pedestrian volumes in Israeli
cities, with a particular emphasis on understanding the movements of children
and elderly people. Dr. Rofe’s team
conducted pedestrian counts on a representative sample of streets, and then
performed a regression analysis to explain pedestrian volumes. His team
constructed both city-scale models and neighborhood-scale models, and found
that the neighborhood-scale models had greater explanatory power. His team
modeled total pedestrian volumes, as well as volumes of children and elderly
walking, and found more success modeling total numbers of pedestrians.
Dr. Rofe finds that the models are moderately
successful: they can predict pedestrian movements relatively well in some types
of cities and neighborhoods (R^2 > 80%), and much less well in other cases,
such as when focusing only on children or the elderly, or when predicting movements
in outer neighborhoods (e.g. not in city centers). In addition, the models did
not perform well when they were validated on cities and neighborhoods other
than those used to construct the model. A couple of possibilities exist in
terms of the prognosis for further research. It’s possible that more extensive
data, observations, and model development may need to be done to create a
unified model for pedestrian movements. It may also be the case that
variability among neighborhoods in Israeli cities is too large to be modeled
with a single unified model.
Dr. Rofe’s talk was
jointly sponsored by the Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies, the
Institute of Transportation Studies, and the Younes & Soraya Nazarian
Center for Israel Studies at UCLA.
