Sustainable Rehabilitation of Urban City: A New Design Method for Pedestrian Areas

One of the great pillars of sustainable mobility is to create new ways to travel without compromising the integrity of the environment. Cities, small or large, are the main actors of the new changes in this sense. In the past thirty years, as a measure to apply sustainable mobility, administrations are creating pedestrian areas in historic centers or in particularly strategic areas of urban centers. The aim is not only to reduce the main forms of pollution but also of guaranteeing high level of safety for vulnerable users. This type of measure, which completely inhibits the transit of vehicles, has strong impacts on local traffic conditions, which obviously cannot be foreseen a priori. The proposed method offers the possibility of understanding how the new vehicular traffic flows will be distributed in the ex-post scenario. This, therefore, provide a decision-making tool in the planning and management of urban area, with great application potential for different context and different types of intervention, bearing in mind safety issues.