Consideraţii urbanistice cu privire la creşterea confortului şi siguranţei deplasărilor pietonale, în oraşele româneşti
Urban planning considerations on ingreasing the comfort and safety of pedestrian travels in the Romanian cities

Author(s): Mihaela Hermina NEGULESCU
Subject(s): Human Geography, Applied Geography
Published by: INCD URBAN-INCERC
Keywords: urban planning; mobility; pedestrian travels
Summary/Abstract: The unconditional and undifferentiated adaptation of Romanian cities to the functional and spatial requirements of a growing automobility lead to the conversion of the majority of public spaces into a road framework for traffic and parking, drained of their communitarian substance and landscape attributes. The (re)allocation and the (re)design of urban space as well as the regulations for their use, for the travels they contain, was often done in a discriminatory manner, resulting in deterioration of the functional and environmental quality of the pedestrians’ infrastructure and of the accessibility for people with reduced mobility - topics of current concern within the Sustainable Urban Mobility Plans, strategic planning studies recommended by the European Commission. The pedestrian oriented reshape of urban zones relies on a contextualized planning of an appropriate balance between the two main vocations of the public realm: a. infrastructure for travels and b. places with social and aesthetical substance that (should) provide a safe and healthy environment for urban living. Starting from this prerequisite, the paper deals with two categories of inter-related themes, in an urban planning perspective: 1. sets of measures to encourage and boost safe and comfortable walking, on different tiers - road network (hierarchy, classification, connectivity, configuration), morphology of urban space (sharing of land resources, configuration-design), use of urban space (traffic corridors, priorities, speed); 2. criteria and models of (re)organization of public spaces with priority to pedestrians: pedestrian areas or shared-space schemes. The study outlines a theoretical framework for a spatial planning and design, integrated to a related (re)shape of mobility, more attentive to pedestrians’ needs, with a main focus on travel safety concerns. The paper partially presents results of the author’s research undertaken within the project SAFENET - Research on estimation and enhancement of intrinsic safety performances for urban traffic networks, PN-II-PT-PCC A-2011-3.2-1439 conducted through the “Partnership in priority areas” program - PNII, PCCA Tip 2, implemented with the support of ANCSI CNDI – UEFISCDI, between 2012-2016.

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