The Significance of Safety and Security Factors for Urban Commercial Streets in a User Friendly Environment
Abstract
Safe and secure urban street possesses a crucial impact on the interaction activities because safe streets minimize threats, antisocial behaviour, and crime opportunities and make people comfortable to walk, stay longer and socialize in a safe and secure environment. Understanding the safety and security of urban user-friendly commercial streets requires assessing the various threats and unsafe acts that might exist in streets such as traffic accidents, crimes, and dark or shaded areas. The safety and security factors in the urban commercial street declined due to the poor environments in its local context. A non-user-friendly environment on the commercial streets is partially attributed to an over-presence of traffic lights. This would represent the problem statement of this research, which is trying to study the safety and security factors in a local context and their effect on its environment. The objective of this paper is to determine the significant of the safety and security factors in the commercial street as user friendly environment. This study focuses on Mawlawi Street as one of the major commercial streets in Sulaymaniyah city centre. This paper used a quantitative methodology via a survey of users (n = 330). The data were analysed using frequency, mean value, percentage and RII statistics. The safety and security factors are the most important for the street users, physical safety factors are the most important for street users, followed by social interaction qualities, and the qualities of fear of crime ranked third, additionally, the qualities of fear of traffic and pedestrian accidents ranked fourth, while the qualities of fear of darkness ranked fifth and last in terms of the importance of safety and security as important characteristics of Mawlawi Street users. The research gives a good overview on the significance factors of safety and security which are encouraging high street usage, and which factors need to be improved or added.