Institute of Transportation, MOTC

Yi-Jie Chou, 2008.06
Institute of Traffic and Transportation National Chiao Tung University

　　An official estimation of the Council of Economic Planning and Development indicates that the percentage of elderly citizens, aged over 65 years old, will exceed 14% by 2011, indicating that Taiwan will become an aged society in near future.   Undoubtedly, it is imperative for the government to provide a user-friendly transportation environment for aged citizens so as to enhance the independence and safety in their daily activities. Thus, this study aims to investigate the characteristics of their daily trips as well as their physiology and psychology conditions and then, based on these, to plan a high quality transportation system for aged citizens.

 　　According to the questionnaire survey conducted by this study, the daily trips of the aged citizens in Taiwan are usually much shorter than ordinary citizens due to the rapid decline in their physiology and psychology conditions. The trip purposes of them are mainly to go for the medical treatment, work-out, shopping and friend visit. Walking is the most frequently used transportation mode for conducting these trips. Based on this, this study dedicates to planning high-quality sidewalk system for aged people.

 　　This study proposes an integrated model to evaluate the level-of-service of a sidewalk network system in terms of three planning goals: safety, comfort and convenience and which can be respectively measured and expressed by the indices of degree of mix usage, degree of length, and degree of interference. A comprehensive performance index of the whole sidewalk network is then determined by aggregating the performances of all-pairs shortest paths determined by Floyd-Warshall algorithm. At last, the heavily used links with low level-of-service would then be identified for improvement. Corresponding traffic engineering or management improvement strategies for these links are also proposed.