Feasibility Study on Walkable City Through Implementation of Car-Free Zones in Georgetown, Penang Using GIS Network Analysis

Motorized vehicles have brought tremendous convenience to humans today. Although it provides comforts, but the excessive dependence on cars has caused vehicles to dominate on roads, leading to various issues for cities, including congestion, road safety, and environmental issues. The implementation of the walkable city would shift people's transportation mode, which sequentially helps reduce the number of cars on the roads. This research studies the feasibility of car-free zones in Georgetown, Penang, Malaysia. The walkability principle is presented as criteria in car-free spatial modeling and are consequently used in the spatial overlay process to produce a map showing preferred areas to be designed car-free. The result identified three (3) preferred areas as car-free zones. The spatial comparison was made between the proposed car-free zones and the superblock model, i.e., a case study from Barcelona's Superblock project. The percentage of pedestrianized streets in Georgetown is determined together with the assessment of the effect of car-free zones on travel route, distance and time. From the results, it is found that each localized traffic has a longer traveling distance. Yet, due to the roads that the traffic was diverted to allow a higher travel speed, the travel time is sometimes reduced. Overall, the increase in travel distance ranges from 12.88% to 174.92% while travel time ranges from 0.29% to 119.40%.