Assessing effective elements on walkability for sustained urban development (Case study: Bu-Ali Sina and Ekbatan Streets in Hamedan)

Because of continuous increase in urban population and subsequent increase in number of vehicles and dependency of urban lifestyle on them, having continuous development is one of the most important problems of urban areas. So, walkability with the goal of retaining and developing urban walkable areas and priority of the pedestrians as the most important element, is being more and more noticed. So the current study with the hypothesis of: Improving walkability is effective in sustained urban development, wants to assess effective elements on walkability on the study samples: Bu-Ali & Ekbatan streets in Hamedan. The study is a descriptive-analytic study and has been done by common library tools and field watching. The basic elements of a walkable street is extracted from literature and previous studies, then has assessed them by ANP model for comparing the two streets. The findings show that Bu-Ali street has a higher scale in compare with Ekbatan street, therefore, Bu-Ali street is the first priority in terms of converting to a pedestrian-oriented area. It is recommended as well to consider respective order of categories to make policies for improvements in movement-accessibility, socio-economic, activity-movement and physical-environmental criteria. So these can create a significant advancement increasing the ability to make a pedestrian-oriented area and then a sustained city development.