Page 169 - 360.revista de Alta Velocidad - Nº 6

Which way to the city centre? Pedestrian itineraries between High Speed Rail stations and historic
centres. Assessing urban quality and tourist behaviour through GPS tracks in Toledo.

2.3 Assessing urban design and walkability

In the mid-20th century the ideas of the Modernism entered in crisis and new ideas began
to emerge claiming the recovery of a public space of quality based on the traditional city
(Jacobs, 1961). In the 70s, these ideas were consolidated going beyond a mere critique of the
functionalist city. The design and maintenance of a good quality public space is synonymous
with ‘making city’ (Gehl, 1987) and that the correct design of the urban environment is a
necessary condition for the happening of activities. Specifically focused on the streets, Allan
Jacobs identified a number of key factors that make a street, a ‘great street’ (Jacobs, 1993).
These factors go from the physical configuration of public spaces (sidewalks, trees, etc.), to
the configuration and use of private spaces (facades, shops, accesses, etc.), and to other more
generic aspects such as the urban morphology or the location of the street in the city, to even
intangibles like the “magic” of the street. If the works of Jacobs and Gehl, among others,
were focused primarily on the use of public spaces, more recent studies have focused on the
“walkability”. The quality of public space is a key element of the “walkability” concept which
has been worked from the health sciences perspective, since walking is considered as part
of the “active living” (Ewing et al., 2006; Freeman et al., 2012), and from the transport and
sustainability perspective, since “walking” is the quintessential sustainable transport mode.

The concept of pedestrian Level Of Service (LOS), introduced by Fruin (1971) in the 70s, initially
considered just the capacity of sidewalks, but has recently been expanded to include aspects
such as the perceived quality of the urban environment (definition of the street, transparency,
obstacles and barriers, etc.) in relation to the movement of pedestrians (Jaskiewicz, 2000;
Tan, et al., 2007), or even the analysis of the influence of the characteristics of the built
environment on the willingness of citizens to walk or riding a bike (Cervero, et al., 2009).
The evaluation of the quality of a route is done by analyzing a number of factors, generally
qualitatively, and establishing a set of values and obtaining a final grade (level of service) that
allows comparison with other spaces (Clemente, et al., 2005; Gandolfi, 2010). Determining
which factors are most influential in the perception of quality from the point of view of the
pedestrian, and its weight in the final grade, is usually done through surveys. These sometimes
are of a general nature and are intended for residents of a city and focused on the factors that
matters the most to pedestrians (Borst, et al., 2008; Kelly, et al., 2011), and sometimes these
surveys are performed in areas of interest in situ, asking the reason for choosing a particular
route (Weinstein, et al., 2008).

3. Object and Methodology

The aims of the paper are (1) to assess the tourists’ behavior in the public spaces during their
visit to the historic center of Toledo, which is a walled city that can only be entered through a
reduced number of gates, and (2) to assess the different itineraries used when walking between
the edge-HSR station and the historic city center. The ideal scenario would be a direct and
legible path between the station and the city center in which the station would be the beginning
of the tourist experience. However, this is not the case in Toledo due to peripheral location of
the 19th century station that has been refurbished to be used by High Speed Trains. The station
was originally located in a peripheral setting due to the proximity of the Tagus River, and the
different bridges crossing the river have created different available itineraries that can be used
by the tourists that must find their way to the city center overcoming several difficulties such as
lack of orientation, narrow footpaths, inconvenient street crossings, unpleasant environment,
etc. which introduce some friction in this transport link.
The behavior of tourists entering the city center has been analyzed using wikiloc tracks shared
online by tourists. Wikiloc is a social network where users share tracks of their trips in the

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