Orientation and Social Bonding: Place identity dimensions for a comprehensible highway

Abstract

Experiential road trips with slow down intentions are the need of the hour. Lowering the speed creates
a canvas for innovative design, creating opportunities for more unique and memorable places. Safety
and capacity considerations are the heralds as the paramount considerations in highway design.
Responsibility for safe driving resides with the individual driver and slowed-down travellers.
Appreciating this supports the opportunity for placemaking along highway corridors. Highway design
can incorporate qualitative choices, which have great potential to affect the place through which the
roads traverse. Travellers on major highways often focus on getting to their destination. However, they
may be missing a rich experience of heritage architecture, beautiful scenery, unique events, and
culturally diverse groups. A questionnaire survey conducted among people travelling the three main
highways connecting major cities of a culturally rich state in India reflects the traveller’s influence of
these dimensions on their sense of place. The seven dimensions categorise aspects of travellers
experience, with significant overlaps and links between the dimensions which strengthen the place
identity along a travel route. A Structural Model Diagram establishes the relationships between the
aspects as the outcome of the research. The research shows that orientation and social bonding
largely determines a sense of place identity