Sustainable transport planning highlights the importance of walking to low-carbon
and healthy urban transport systems. Studies have identified multiple ways in which
vehicle traffic can negatively impact pedestrians and inhibit walking intentions.
However, pedestrian-vehicle interactions are underrepresented in models of pedestrian
mobility. This omission limits the ability of transport simulations to support
pedestrian-centric street design. Pedestrian navigation decisions take place simultaneously
at multiple spatial scales. Yet most models of pedestrian behaviour focus
either on local physical interactions or optimisation of routes across a road network.
This thesis presents a novel hierarchical pedestrian route choice framework that
integrates dynamic, perceptual decisions at the street level with abstract, network
based decisions at the neighbourhood level. The framework is based on Construal
Level Theory which states that decision makers construe decisions based on their
psychological distance from the object of the decision. The route choice framework
is implemented in a spatial agent-based simulation in which pedestrian and vehicle
agents complete trips in an urban environment. Global sensitivity analysis is used to
explore the behaviour produced by the multi-scale pedestrian route choice model.
Finally, simulation experiments are used to explore the impacts of restrictions to
pedestrian movement. The results demonstrate the potential insights that can be
gained by linking street scale movement and interactions with neighbourhood level
mobility patterns.