Modeling pedestrians' shopping behavior in downtown areas

Modeling how pedestrians move through large downtown shopping areas and which outlets they visit enables planners and designers to assess the likely effects of their proposals to change or upgrade downtown shopping environments and surrounding infrastructure. Such a model was developed and tested for two downtown shopping areas in the Netherlands. The mod-el assumes that pedestrians visiting the downtown area are attracted by dif-ferent types of retail and services outlets. The attraction of outlets depends on the type and size of the outlets, the distance to the outlets, whether the outlets can be seen, have been passed or visited before, are located in in-door or outdoor areas, and proximity of similar types of outlets. Further-more, pedestrians' route choice depends on characteristics of the network of shopping streets and the history of selected segments while moving in the shopping area. The model may be estimated from observed or traced trajectories.