Nodes and streets: Exploring the pedestrian mobility pattern in the intersections of the streets in Dhaka City

Abstract

Viable pedestrian movement has always been a challenge for urban planners and designers. The modern tendency is to create mobility in pedestrian environments and, at the same time, limit the dependency on vehicular movement. Pedestrians play an important key role on reshaping nodes and streets. Mental mapping guides a pedestrian to mobilize from one point to another, creating an individual pattern. When hundreds of points are created by urban pedestrians, a new order of network emerges, and different functions are often disrupted in order to support them. These changes are responsible for the urban fabric; they create a certain dimension and a vibrant network of movement. Dhaka, the capital city of Bangladesh, thrives on vehicular dependent movement, but the majority of the population still comprises pedestrians and depends only on public transportation. The pedestrian population has dramatically increased due to constant migration brought about by labor market changes, better employment and fast moving lifestyles. Although the pedestrians are responsible for the vibrant environment, due to their mobility pattern, a major upheaval also results from unplanned and haphazard street functions at nodal points serving the pedestrians. This paper evaluates the causes of pedestrian movement patterns, and illustrates the problems with and identifies the ineffective functions that create a node. Finally, on the basis of analysis, an outcome of urban node principle has been proposed with the aim of enabling more effective movement and a holistic kind of functional urbanism.