Exploring the social acceptance of transforming urban arterials to multimodal corridors. The case of Panepistimiou Avenue in Athens

Urban communities should now build in specific measures, addressing multimodality and fair distribution of public space. The transformation of arterials into multimodal corridors can be a key strategy that will shape new futures. The social acceptance of “push” measure that aim to modify road space allocation have never been examined following quantitative research methods. This study aspires to fill this gap now, as it is inspired by the great debate opened in Athens, Greece about “pop-up” interventions implemented in Panepistimiou Avenue. To explore the social acceptance factors, a rating experiment is designed by developing hypothetical scenarios, which are evaluated by different road users, daily car drivers, motorcycle riders, public transport (PT) users, cyclists, and walkers. A 5-point Likert Scale is utilized, and the collected observations are processed using ordinal logistic regression methods. The main findings suggest that the majority of the participants opted for solutions that ensured a rather equal or balanced space distribution, regardless of their preferred transport mode. Car users were willing to exchange their space, and consequently experience higher travel times for the greater benefit of the city, while public transport users, daily cyclists and walkers recognize the importance to maintain a good level of service for car users too. A surprising finding from this study case is that any increase in a pedestrian area, which is already sufficiently wide, influences negatively social acceptance, while the installation of a cycle lane reports considerably high probability to be accepted from all user groups.