“Sidewalk” as a Realm of Users’ Interactions: simulating pedestrians’ densities at a commercial street in Cairo City

During the last four decades, researchers have developed many tools in order to investigate pedestrians’ behavior at sidewalks. Those tools tried to study sidewalks by investigating two main components: built environment and pedestrians’ movement. This paper presents a simulation for the pedestrians’ movement at a commercial street in Cairo, using an agent-based model. The model was designed in a way by which we could examine: pedestrians’ densities, the influence of types of uses on densities, the influence of flow-generators and destinations. In addition, we categorized the uses along the selected case of study by type of service and time spent by customer. The method which we utilized for this work could be divided into two main phases: The first phase, included site video-based survey at different times and days, by which we could calculate flow rates at each generator point, and test the influence of uses on the density along the sidewalk. The second phase was to develop the model. In parallel, we focused on the uses’ types and how it affects controls pedestrians’ densities. Our results referred to a strong relation between use’s type and densities’ distribution along the street.