The pedestrian's perspective: How do illuminance variations affect reassurance?

The Economist Intelligence Unit Safe Cities Index summarizes the primary issues of Safety as being digital security, health security, infrastructure safety and personal safety. The biggest challenge for cities is to identify all the issues that actually impact on public safety and comprehend the real perceptions - or misconceptions - that citizens may have. Reassurance describes the confidence a pedestrian might gain from road lighting (and other factors) to walk along a footpath or road after dark, and is intended to describe both perceived safety and fear of crime. Past studies have demonstrated that the presence, level and quality of lighting affect human perception of safety. This article describes a field survey of reassurance carried out in Rome to investigate methods for measuring how changes in illuminance affect reassurance. These results confirm that the reassurance of participants can be put in relation with street lighting since changes in illuminance levels were highly perceived by test participants. It was also found that reassurance is more related to the mean horizontal illuminance than to the minimum illuminance or minimum/average uniformity.