Street Configuration and Pedestrian Visual Attention Along an Elevated Metro Corridor in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia

Elevated metro viaducts reshape street cross-sections, but how pedestrians allocate visual attention to these structures relative to the surrounding street components remains unclear. This study examined three segments of Abi Jafar Al-Mansour Street in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, using mobile eye-tracking during field walking trials. Twelve adults completed six routes across two sites with elevated viaducts (A and B) and one with an at-grade median (C). In total, 5494 retained fixations were coded into four morphology-based areas of interest: street edge, pedestrian surface, roadway, and central element. Participant-level proportional dwell time quantified gaze allocation. The viaduct accounted for 42.86% of the retained fixation time at Site A and 9.25% at Site B, a paired difference of 33.60 percentage points (p < 0.001). Street-edge shares were 21.74% and 64.21%, respectively. At Site C, the roadway received the largest share (40.04%). These findings reveal contrasting distributions of pedestrian gaze between street configurations that both contain elevated infrastructure. Although the observational design cannot isolate the influence of individual design features, the results support evaluating viaducts together with adjacent frontages and ground-level spaces when assessing the visual environment of elevated-transit streets.