Pedestrian power to shape future cities

By Alissa Walker

Modern city growth has been led by the car. But new walking apps and maps

that help journeys seem more walkable may lead to healthier, happier urban

environments.

The most striking change to one of the largest cities on the planet can be seen

easily from the air. All its freeways have been turned into public spaces,

their multiple lanes of traffic replaced with extensive linear parks. Down the

centre of each of these parks run wide bus boulevards, protected cycling lanes

and excellent walking paths. This network of urban trails connects each of the

neighbourhoods so it s possible to get nearly anywhere in the city on dedicated

foot or bike infrastructure although the comprehensive rail system is usually

faster.

The transformation transcends the physical environment. A cultural shift has

occurred and residents in general choose to live near where they work.

Education has improved as well, with children walking or biking to quality

schools close to where they live. Health has improved dramatically and people

are living longer. Most people don t own cars, and those who do usually only

drive them as a hobby, since they re relics of a bygone era.

This is the Los Angeles of the future.

It's certainly not the Los Angeles of today, the land of 20-lane interchanges

and parking lots the size of football stadiums and mind-bending, soul-crushing,

life-altering traffic. LA's seemingly brilliant plan half-a-century ago to

re-engineer its urban environment for cars has become a global affliction.

There are now 60 million new cars being added to the planet every year, and

with those vehicles come more smog, toxic emissions and dependency on rapidly

depleting resources. As we embrace the car, our cultures become more sedentary

and rates of obesity and heart disease increase. Cars not only make our cities

unhealthy, they also make our cities dangerous: 270,000 pedestrians are killed

by cars every year.

To undo these decades of suburban propaganda is to essentially unravel the

American Dream; one which has since travelled around the world. But there is a

new dream. Walkable City author Jeff Speck said it best in his recent

TEDCity2.0 talk: "Sustainability which includes both health and wealth may

not be a function of our ecological footprint, but the two are deeply

interrelated. If we pollute so much because we are throwing away our time,

money, and lives on the highway, then both problems would seem to share a

single solution, and that solution is to make our cities more walkable."

Virtual beginnings

Walking is the simplest, most cost-efficient way to improve a city's economic

and environmental viability, and it creates healthier, happier residents.

Choosing walking can help designers build more inviting streets, and allow

cities to prioritise their people over cars.

The campaign to make our cities more walkable begins in the virtual world.

There are apps such as Walk Score, a tool which measures the distance to

amenities such as restaurants, stores, and public transport, and tells you how

walkable your location is. Walk Score has been gaining serious traction in

the US real estate market by promoting walkability as a factor in choosing

where to live. The site recently started featuring apartment rentals with Walk

Scores prominently displayed a different way to place value on what we pay in

rent.

Car-free neighbourhoods are already a reality in places like Vauban, Germany,

where the cars are banned and a tram to nearby Freiburg runs through the town.

The Great City, planned for Chengdu, China, is even more ambitious, intended to

house 80,000 people in a completely car-free centre with regional mass transit

connections. Architects Adrian Smith and Gordon Gill estimate that residents

will be able to walk anywhere in the city within 15 minutes.

Knowing how long a walk will take makes all the difference. Walk Score features

travel time maps, which allow you to see how far you'll be able to walk, bike,

drive or take public transport in a certain amount of time. Google Maps

addition of walking, biking and transport options to its directions has been

the greatest game-changer for increasing walking. With a click of a button,

what was planned as a journey in a car becomes a possibility on foot.

Reroute.it allows you to compare your journey for several modes of

transportation at once across many different factors: price, time, calories

burned, and the amount of CO2 emissions your trip will generate. Suddenly a

walk becomes more appealing when calculate other benefits: even though it will

take twice as long, for example, you'll spend no money and could burn up to 500

calories. Even more fascinating is another app named Re:Route, which rewards

Londoners who choose foot or bike transit with points that can be exchanged for

discounts from a wide range of partners. That s extra motivation to get

walking.

Minutes, not miles

This is only the beginning. With Google Glass and other augmented reality

devices, the route information we receive on our smartphones will be displayed

in the urban environment, in real time. This month, transit directions have

been added to Glass, to complement the existing walking directions. Such

information could be tacked onto our Nike FuelBands and FitBits, which would

calculate how much walking we could add to our commute to achieve our daily

step goal maybe nudging us to get off the bus a stop early.

But even with Google Glass at the ready to tell us our favourite bar is a

400-calorie walk away, we still need physical reminders our city is walkable.

Intelligent signage can help. Legible London, a city-wide system, is one of the

best examples out there, and New York City recently implemented WalkNYC.

The signs, in a sense, convert the invisible app data into a kind of value

proposition for the walker. Landmarks are pointed out, of course, but the most

powerful part of this signage is that it doesn't express distances in miles or

metres it measures in minutes. This is a small but important detail. If you

tell someone a coffee shop is two miles away, it feels far. But if you say it's

a 40-minute walk, suddenly this starts to sound far more accessible.

You might physically be able to walk to a grocery store, but buckled pavements

or poor street lighting might make the walk less than pleasant meaning you

may be less likely to do it again. A site called Walkonomics takes into

consideration eight additional factors ranging from safety to beauty when

ranking walkability. Instead of scoring an address, streets are ranked green,

yellow and red based on how good they are for walking.

But only a human can stand on a street and get a feeling for how it feels to

walk there and what could be improved, a process that planners call walkability

audits. According to Walkability Asia's 2011 study, improving pedestrian

infrastructure is the lowest priority for transportation in Asian cities; 67%

of people surveyed in those cities said walking was so bad they would rather

drive or ride motorbikes. The group developed an app so anyone can gather

information ranging from sidewalk quality to the speed of cars in 23 Asian

cities. The work of this organisation is especially valuable because it's

helping these cities to develop more locally relevant pedestrian features which

serve the needs of Asian cultures accounting for street markets and vendors,

auto rickshaws and motorcycles rather than "one-size-fits-all" Western street

design.

Perhaps the biggest deterrent for walkers is the perception that it's unsafe,

which can mean anything from the poor street lighting to badly marked

crosswalks to high crime. But walking is the only option for a large percentage

of the world's population that cannot afford a car, which puts the planet's

most vulnerable citizens at risk even by 2020, it's estimated that 78% of the

households in China will still not have a car.

In emerging megacities Mumbai in India, narrow roads and paths designed for

walking have now become overrun by vehicles. Some 40% of people walk to work,

and an astounding 57% of all people killed in traffic accidents are

pedestrians. In Chennai, a local newspaper launched a movement called Right to

Walk which encouraged residents to photograph poor walking conditions in an

effort to hold government leaders more responsible. It would appear that this

advocacy is working: one of Chennai's densest neighbourhoods is planning a

pedestrian zone.

Reclaiming the streets

In the near future, the proliferation of self-driving cars like General Motors

EN-V could help prevent collisions with pedestrians (and other automobiles),

and reduce the amount of urban space devoted to cars. These smart cars would

act more like a fleet of shared, self-driving taxis.

But another safety concern is our quickly aging population, which can't

navigate the city as efficiently on foot. Transport planners are now

redesigning cities for elderly walkers using a special suit developed by

researchers at MIT called AGNES (Age Gain Now Empathy System) which mimics the

speed, strength and dexterity of a person in their 70s. Using the suit,

everything from crossing signals to kerb heights can be adjusted.

Redesigning for accessibility, or universal design, will be perhaps the biggest

changes we'll begin to see in our cities in the upcoming years: ramps instead

of stairs, larger type on signage, benches on more corners. In Thailand, the

Chaing Mai province is investing in retirement communities, including making

improvements to its urban space that will help make its cities more welcoming

to pedestrians.

There has been perhaps no better advertisement for walking than the open-street

festivals modelled after the ciclov as, common in Colombian cities. On Sundays,

Bogota and Medellin close up to 80 miles (130km) of streets to cars. Cities

have seen the value of turning tarmac over to walkers and bikers, if only for a

few hours. Removing people from their cars creates a sense of social

connectedness and allows citizens to interact with people from different

backgrounds. It's a win-win situation.

In Los Angeles, CicLAvia is held three times a year and has grown to become the

largest open-street event in the US with over 100,000 people in the streets per

event. It goes against every known stereotype about LA. But something

interesting happened after the first few events: the city began to install

permanent bike lanes and parklets along the routes where the festival happens.

Walkers have now literally gained ground in the city as they have around the

world with the addition of plazas and other car-free zones.

Now, one of the city's main thoroughfares, Broadway, is being converted into a

pedestrian-friendly street. That vision of the Los Angeles of the future might

be coming true faster than we think.