Attitudes and Expectations Towards Erzincan City Center Pedestrianization Project

The rapid growth of private car ownership in today's cities brings with it much negativity. Various precautions have been taken in the city centers in order to eliminate the social, economic and environmental problems caused by this transportation. The most important one of these measures is undoubtedly the pedestrianization projects which ensure the safety and the comfortable circulation of the pedestrians in the urban space. It is also a fact that pedestrianization projects cannot always be easily adopted. As a matter of fact, the pedestrianization projects also affect "commercial enterprises" as well as "pedestrians", if one of these two groups does not embrace and support the project, the city planners and local administrations are prevented from implementing the project in accordance with the public benefit principle. For this reason, Erzincan city center pedestrianization project is being searched through two angles to answer the question "How to implement the project most efficiently". For this purpose, in the first place the density was determined by the pedestrian counting work on 15 streets which maintains the business area and the demographic structure of the users, the transportation behaviors and the expectations about the pedestrianization were established. Secondly, the opinions of commercial enterprises regarding the pedestrianization were evaluated. These surveys were conducted through personal observation and questionnaire (269 pedestrian and 131 commercial enterprises were surveyed in the study). Thus, various proposals have been developed in the study by presenting the problems of users (pedestrians and enterprises) with the place, the tendency to pedestrianization, and the expectations of users.