Evaluation of Urban Spaces Through the Integration of Universal Design and Microsimulation: The Case Study of the Marina District in Cagliari (Italy)

Ensuring safe, functional, and integrated urban environments requires the identification and organisation of qualitative and quantitative analyses to assess the quality of urban spaces, the perceived well-being and by safety the city users, and the interactions between traffic components (e.g., pedestrians and vehicles). Many techniques based on quantitative and qualitative indicators of urban space and transport mobility are offered in literature and this paper provides a methodological approach to perform a comprehensive evaluation of urban spaces and mobility interactions by calculating an Index of Integrated Road Spaces (IIRS) composed of two indicators: the Universal Design Indicator (IUD) and the Service Level Indicator (ISL).This provides the evaluation of Perceived Road Quality (e.g. crossing; visibility; speed limit; road pavement; services), as well as the measurement of network efficiency (e.g. level of service; queue length; number of stops; delay) and environmental impact (e.g. pollutant emissions). The authors applied the merging of the two theoretical approaches of Universal Design and Transport Microsimulation by considering a real case study coinciding with the Marina district in Cagliari (Italy). Future developments of the research will be characterised by a more in-depth analysis, both in terms of spatial extension and number of indicators, useful for performing scenario analysis. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.