​Pedestrian Facilities

provides detailed guidance on the design of pedestrian facilities to encourage the safety, comfort and convenience of pedestrians and other road users. The emphasis throughout is on numerical, functional aspects of designing footways, crossings along roads and junctions, roundabouts, and other spaces where pedestrian and vehicular traffic interact.

Drawing together a broad range of topics presented across numerous reports and documents, the book also covers design principles which can foster improvements to this guidance and will also provide assistance where unique design solutions are needed. This second edition includes

• updated governmental guidance on pedestrian facilities design 
• evolution of design for shared space and ‘sojourning’ 
• developments in simulation and multi-modal level-of-service quantification
• joint pedestrian and bicycle traffic 
• implications of the Equality Act.

Pedestrian Facilities

is intended for use by practitioners and students engaged in civil engineering design for highways and public spaces. It brings together guidance that will also assist urban planners, architects and the broad range of people involved with pedestrian facilities within the public realm.

In his blog, better feet forward - designing for pedestrians John Schoon, author of Pedestrian Facilities, shares some of the challenges of designing for pedestrians and gives insights into solutions.

Book Review

As clearly stated by the title, this book focuses on engineering the geometric design of facilities to improve the safety and mobility of pedestrians. The relevance of such a focus is tremendously growing with the expected increase in non-motorised users together with controversial opinions about how to handle it. The author John G Schoon CEng MICE, Emeritus Professor at Northeastern University, Boston has a tremendous consulting experience in multimodal transportation planning and the merit of this book is to offer systematic approaches of analysis, design and planning of pedestrian infrastructure. After reviewing the codes of conduct and the users’ characteristics (drivers, pedestrians, disabled pedestrians), the author systematically examines the crossings, including the roundabouts. The book also reviews the methods to assess the pedestrian flows and the simulation methods for pedestrian facilities. Finally, the book very clearly details 5 real-life case-studies. This book is definitely useful for urban planners or designers or any person concerned by transport infrastructure and mobility. It could also inspire work managers when temporary works are diverting the traffic and the soft users like pedestrians and cyclists are too often disregarded. It is only regrettable that the interactions between pedestrians and cyclists is only shortly considered whereas the number of conflicts between both has clearly become an issue.

Philippe Bouillard FICE, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium