This book provides, in 15 chapters and an introduction, a résumé of guidance on designing for pedestrians, mainly based on the UK design manual for roads and bridges. It is a challenging way to draft a book, on the basis that the design manual for roads and bridges is mainly focused on design standards for the strategic road network, and the approach absorbs the nuances implicit in these national standards with their explicit assumptions that provision is based around functionality and solving accident problems. The assumed ‘place’ of pedestrians is also implicit in the way that ‘home zones’ are described as ‘special’. There is recognition that there is a ‘need to pay much more attention to aesthetics’, but this aspect is not discussed in detail in the book.
The book repeats verbatim much of the guidance in the standards, and often this is done in a relatively uncritical manner. There are, however, some useful comments around, for example, the rather difficult and comprehensive tasks that a pedestrian needs to perform to stay safe within a highway environment: this is discussed in relation to the issue of intervisibility between pedestrians and vehicular road users. There is also a good critique of the design methodology specified in TD 42/95 and a critical discussion of the comments in guidance on pedestrian provision in relation to mini roundabouts.
UK guidance is light on references to research and there is some useful discussion of the need for further research, and also reference back to the early research undertaken in the USA on pedestrian flow, which is brought up to date with a brief summary of microsimulation modelling for pedestrians.
Overall, the book offers comprehensive overarching guidance to extant UK standards, and in this sense provides a helpful compendium of the engineering layout specifications for providing for pedestrians.
