Jeffrey Zupan and Jeff Ferzoco

Plight of pedestrians.

by Jeffrey Zupan, Senior Fellow, and Jeff Ferzoco, Creative and Technology Director, Regional Plan Association, Mar 21, 11.

Tagged with transportation, health, pedestrians, walkable urbanism

“Pedestrians should be loved; they are the better part of humanity.” (Ilf and Petrov, 1931).

Every morning most of us on foot take to the streets, or rather, to that thin ribbon of pavement called sidewalks. We join with our fellow urban denizens to create a flow of humanity, traveling in sync from home to work to market to home, carrying our day’s belongings. We are the pedestrians, the walkers, the one-foot-in-front-of-the-other commuter.

However, looming while we walk is a multi-ton piece of machinery, the motorized vehicle. We have redesigned our cities to meet its demands. Traffic has been speeded up with one-way raceways, making crossing a suicide mission. Roads have been widened to squeeze pedestrians onto ever-narrowed tape-widths of sidewalks where we have been forced to share limited space with a growing clutter of street “furniture”—traffic poles and parking meters, vendors and subway stairways, fire hydrants and newsstands, and dozens of other obstructions to unfettered walking.

With less space, we pedestrians must deke and dodge, alter direction and pace, slow when we want to walk faster, eyeballs moving rapidly to detect imminent collisions in acts of self-preservation. We are forced into the gutter in extreme situations, and perhaps most grievously, unable to walk in pairs or threesomes as we make our way down the street, thwarting conversation. We are reduced to single file, like sheep in Chaplin’s Modern Times. Livable cities? Hardly…

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Source: Regional Plan Association, March 15, 2011

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