Nodes and Streets: Exploring the Pedestrian Mobility Pattern in the Intersection of the Streets in Dhaka City

Abstract

A viable pedestrian movement has always been a challenging for the urban planners and designers. The modern perception is to create a mobility towards pedestrian environment and at the same time limiting the dependency on vehicular movement. Pedestrians plays an important key role on reshaping nodes and the streets. The mental mapping of a pedestrian guides him to mobilize from one point to another and creates a pattern of an individual. When hundreds of points are created by the pedestrians a new order of network has created and different functions are intervened often to support them. These changes are responsible for the urban fabric to create a certain dimension and a vibrant network of movement.

Dhaka, the capital city of Bangladesh is thriving on vehicular dependency movement but majority of the population are still pedestrians and depends only on public transports. Pedestrian population is dramatically increased due to constant migration of labor incentive market, better employment and fast moving lifestyle. But although the pedestrians are responsible for the vibrant environment due to their mobility pattern, a major upheaval also occur for the unplanned and haphazard street functions on nodal points to serve the pedestrians. In this paper, evaluates the causes of pedestrian movement pattern, illustrate the problems and ineffective functions that creates a node. And finally on the basis of analysis, an outcome of urban node principle has been proposed, serving more effective movements and holistic kind of functional urbanism.