Avaliação da caminhabilidade no eixo viário Rio Branco - Acampamento - Fernando Ferrari na cidade de Santa Maria-RS

Abstract

Walking is present in the routine of the entire population, to a greater or lesser extent, being the most natural and ancient form of displacement. Even with so much importance, it has been losing space for the car over the last decades, proof of this is that cities are being interactive with a focus on the car and no longer on people, causing urban spaces that would be for leisure, coexistence, end up giving way space for parking, impairing walkability, which is the ease with which walking is carried out. Engineering plays a key role in promoting walkability, promoting adequate infrastructure and a pleasant built environment. In this sense, it is extremely important to know and evaluate the attributes that make a place more or less walkable, in order to focus efforts and resources on actions that will have a positive impact on walkability. Therefore, the objective of this work is to analyze the walkability of the urban stretch that comprises the streets Avenida Rio Branco, Avenida Fernando Ferrari and Rua Acampamento, located in the urban perimeter of Santa Maria/RS. For this, eight attributes were measured: Connectivity, Topography, Sidewalk surface, Number of arrests, Number of shops and services, Attractiveness, Risk of accidents and Sidewalk width. Afterwards, the weights of each attribute are defined, in order to carry out a weighted sum in order to obtain the indices by side of each block, by block and finally by each of the four stretches. With the results, it was possible to propose an engineering measure that can make the stretches more attractive for walking.