Evaluating the Effect of Walkable Street on Traffic Volumes of Periphery Routes (Case Study: 15th Khordad WalKable Street in Tehran)

Walkable streets are considered as one of the most important contemporary urban spaces that there are still unknown dimensions of them due to not so long record in our country. This research seeks to discover the connection between closing the street on cars and the change in the traffic volume of automobiles in peripheral routes over time.

This applied research has been done by collecting theoretical information through documentary studies and local investigations using observation and interview method and is a descriptive-analytic research. The case study is 15th Khordad walkable street in Tehran.

 By evaluating differences in traffic volumes in 2011, 2014 and 2016 with SPSS software and based on One- Way Analysis of Variance (ANOVA), there was a significant difference in the average traffic volume of the vehicles in the study area and rejects the hypothesis of increasing the traffic volume of motor vehicles in the periphery area of 15th Khordad. Numerical calculations show that 15.7% of traffic jams over a three-year period, and 20.7% over a five-year period in the surrounding routes disappeared after creating 15th Khordad walkable street because of changing in citizens direction and travel time and using of multi-modal trips by business-men.

Therefore, it seems that a paradigm shift among urban managers about traffic effects transmission of creating walkable street to periphery areas is necessary.