Bridging active mobilities: pedestrian-cyclist interactions and urban public space – Co-Move

Co-Move project aims to explore methods for collecting and evaluating sensitive walkability, sensitive bikeability and cohabitation between pedestrians and cyclists in urban public space. These dimensions are still largely identified in a non-spatialised way or without taking into account the feelings of pedestrians and cyclists. However, the convenience, quality and comfort of an urban public space cannot be fully identified without considering a very micro geographical scale, and without placing users at the center of the research protocol. Several methodologies are being explored, all of which involve associative, operational and scientific partners, from the joint design of the research protocol to the construction and processing of innovative data. The first step aims to identify and question the spatial variations between morphological and sensitive bikeability, using unprecedented data on cyclists’ perceptions of the urban environment; this morpho-sensitive bikeability can be refined according to the cyclists' profiles to identify the environmental dimension while exploring the underlying social factors. Pedestrians are then asked to express their feelings about areas with a particularly good or poor level of bikeability, in order to explore how the spatial perceptions of each user group match up and whether there is spatial compatibility between good bikeability and good walkability. Mixed methods centered on a focus group including pedestrians and cyclists will enable to identify the factors leading to poor cohabitation or conflicts in the urban public space. This questioning will be supplemented by a WP focusing on wheelchair users in order to explore their relationship to public space, and in particular to the irregularities and obstacles they encounter, as well as their interactions with other users. A final question tackles various ways of designing and redeveloping urban public space (oriented towards functionalism or mixed-use) and the reactions they generate among cyclists and pedestrians, by turning specific areas undergoing work in the near future into an ‘in vivo’ laboratory. Experimental methods (crossed intercept surveys and countings) will be used to gather as close as possible to reality (spatially and temporally) the feelings of users of active mobility space. Associations of cyclists and pedestrians are fully integrated into the project as partners or members of its scientific committee. In each section of the project, the emphasis will be on reaching out to the general public as far as possible, and at the very least to gather the views and expertise of their representatives, at each stage of the construction and deployment of the research protocol. The aim of the project is to collectively identify the most appropriate methodologies for deploying an integrated, co-constructed procedure for analysing the feelings of users of active mobility in urban public space on the scale of several French or European cities. Ultimately, the ambition of Co-Move is to stimulate dialogue between users around a common objective, to design urban-scale operations that contribute to shared living and make urban mobility more inclusive (and pacified).