The Role and Importance of a Footbridge Suspended over a Highway in the Opinion of Its Users—Trabzon (Turkey)

Abstract

In the urban landscape, footbridges appeared along with the development of urbanization through the implementation of more complex spatial structures. The introduction of transport transit to cities or sometimes urban gravity towards the important communication routes imposed their construction in order to ensure pedestrians’ safety and smooth flow of traffic. The aim of the study is to determine how an overpass in the city of Trabzon is used by people of different ages, the security and motivation problem, the possibility of a footbridge, and how an overpass is perceived as a crossing over a highway. The study addresses the problem of safety and motivation related to the use of an overpass by people of different ages and is focused on the perception of an overpass as a crossing over a highway. The overpass connects the northern part of the city with the parking lot and the seaside boulevards in Trabzon. It has been constructed over the road no. D010, also known as the Black Sea Coastal Highway. In total, 124 members of the urban population who used the overpass participated in a questionnaire, which included multiple-choice and open-ended questions. The ‘Semantic Differential Scale’ was also used to evaluate the results. The research revealed that the respondents who chose the road through the overpass for safety in most cases used it relatively rarely (59%). People who used the footbridge every day or frequently marked safety as the reason in 39% of cases only. This means that as pedestrians use the overpass more often, they begin to notice other functional features of the footbridge. The results of the study showed that the overpass was most frequently used for the purpose of going down to the coast (76.0%), although 51.2% reported rarely using the overpass, which showed it was used very little by pedestrians.