Street experiences in a car-dominant city

Abstract

There are basically two kinds of city centres: historic and modern. Historic city centres, built in an era when no cars existed, tend to be very walkable environments. Modern cities, however, are much more car-dominated, leading to a less attractive walking environment. Rotterdam is one of the four main cities in the Netherlands and its historic city centre was destroyed during the Second World War. The post-war reconstruction mainly caters to cars, like many other cities throughout the world, resulting in a somewhat pedestrianunfriendly walking environment. We set out to analyse this environment and its users, and hopefully with our results, make recommendations for car-dominated cities worldwide. We wanted to find out which paths people really took and to gain insight about personal preferences in a modern, cardominated city. We wanted to extract lessons for improving the city centre based on both real experiences and objectively measured behaviour.