Modeling Barcelona sidewalks: A high resolution urban scale assessment of the geometric attributes of the walkable network.

Within the framework of urban pedestrian networks, this paper presents a method of modeling the street network from the perspective of foot traffic, beyond the vehicle-focused street centerline representation approach in transportation research. A scalable method to extract the centerlines of the complete walkable urban area from its polygon representation at a one-meter resolution is discussed, using open-source tools. To evaluate the betweenness centrality in a spatially directed graph, the process is applied to the study of the 'walkable Barcelona', focusing on three key parameters: 1) the street width, 2) the longitudinal slope, and 3) the crosswalks connecting the sidewalk platforms.