[nfbmi-talk] Slightly Off Topic Pedestrians

[Fred Wurtzel]

hello,

 

 

More or less, we, as blind people, fall into the category of pedestrians
more often than our sighted peers.  For my part, I do recognize the bias
toward cars and away from pedestrians.  With our obesity epidemic and high
gas prices, you would think walking would be more valued.  Just shows the
hypocrisy of our culture.  

 

Just consider the Executive order and the obnoxious position of the MCBVI,
clearly mitigates against good travel training and freedom and independence
for blind people in the form of the freedom to walk about independently and
safely.  We need 9 months of training at MCBTC.  After the EO supported by
those uncle toms we will be lucky to get 9 days of travel training.

 

Warmest Regards,

 

Fred

 

 

America's pedestrian problem.

The Crisis in American Walking

How we got off the pedestrian path.

By

Tom  Vanderbilt

|

Posted Tuesday, April 10, 2012, at 6:28 AM ET

Crisis in American Walking

Sidewalk Science

A few years ago, at a highway safety conference in Savannah, Ga., I drifted
into

a conference room where a sign told me a "Pedestrian Safety" panel was being
held.

The speaker was Michael Ronkin, a French-born, Swiss-raised, Oregon-based
transportation

planner whose firm, as his website notes, "specializes in creating walkable
and bikeable

streets." Ronkin began with a simple observation that has stayed with me
since. Taking

stock of the event-one of the few focused on walking, which gets scant
attention

at traffic safety conferences-he wondered about that inescapable word:

pedestrian

. If we were to find ourselves out hiking on a forest trail and spied
someone approaching

at a distance, he wanted to know, would we think to ourselves, "Here comes a
pedestrian"?

Of course we wouldn't. That approaching figure would simply be a person.
Pedestrian

is a word born from opposition to other modes of travel; the Latin

pedester,

on foot, gained currency by its semantic tension with

equester, on horse.

But there is an implied-indeed, synonymous-pejorative. This dates from
Ancient Greece.

As the

Oxford English Dictionary

notes, the Greekπεζός

meant "prosaic, plain, commonplace, uninspired (sometimes contrasted with
the winged

flight of Pegasus)." Or, in the Latin,

pedester

could refer to foot soldiers (e.g,

peons), "rather than cavalry."

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In other words, not to be on a horse, flying or otherwise, was to be utterly
unremarkable

and mundane. To this day, Ronkin was intimating, the word

pedestrian

bears not only that slightly alien whiff, but the scars of condescension.
This became

clear as we walked later that evening through the historic center of
Savannah. As

we moved through the squares, our rambling trajectory matched by our
expansive conversation,

we were simply people doing that most human of things, walking. But every
once in

a while, we would encounter a busy thoroughfare, and we became pedestrians.
We lurked

under ridiculously large retroreflective signs, built not at our scale, but
to be

seen by those moving at a distance and at speed. Other signs reinforced the
message,

starkly announcing: "Stop for Pedestrians." I thought, "Wait, who's a
pedestrian?

Is that me?"

Walking

Pedestrian in Nashville, Tenn. in 2010

Photograph by Peter van Agtmael/Magnum Photos.

Simply by going out for a walk, I had become a strange being, studied by
engineers,

inhabiting environments whose physical features are determined by a
rulebook-enshrined

average 3 foot-per-second walking speed, my rights codified by signs. (Why
not just

write: "Stop for People"?) On those same signs in Savannah were often
attached

additional

signs, advising drivers not to give to panhandlers (and to call 911 if
physically

intimidated), subtly equating walking with being exposed to an urban
menace-or perhaps

being

the menace. Having taken all this information in, we would gingerly step
into the

marked crosswalk, that declaration of rights in paint, and try to gauge
whether approaching

vehicles would yield. They typically did not. Even in one of America's most
"pedestrian-friendly"

cities-a seemingly innocent phrase that itself suddenly seemed strange to
me-one

was always in danger of being relegated to a footnote.

Which is what walking in America has become: An act dwelling in the margins,
an almost

hidden narrative running beneath the main vehicular text. Indeed, the
semantics of

the term

pedestrian

would be a mere curiosity, but for one fact: America is a country that has
forgotten

how to walk. Witness, for example, the existence of "

Everybody Walk!

," the "Campaign to Get America Walking" (one of a number of such
initiatives). While

its aims are entirely legitimate, its motives no doubt earnest, the idea
that that

we, this species that first hoisted itself into the world of bipedalism
nearly 4

million years ago-for reasons that are still debated-should now need
"walking tips,"

have to make "walking plans" or use a "mobile app" to "discover" walking
trails near

us or build our "walking histories," strikes me as a world-historical
tragedy.

For walkingis

the ultimate "mobile app." Here are just some of the benefits, physical,
cognitive

and otherwise, that it bestows: Walking six miles a week

was associated with

a lower risk of Alzheimer's (and I'm not just talking about walking in the
"Walk

to End Alzheimers"); walking can

help improve

your child's academic performance; make

you smarter

;

reduce depression

;

lower blood pressure

; even

raise one's self-esteem

." And, most important, though perhaps least appreciated in the modern age,
walking

is the only travel mode that gets you from Point A to Point B on your own
steam,

with no additional equipment or fuel required, from the wobbly threshold of
toddlerhood

to the wobbly cusp of senility.

Despite these upsides, in an America enraptured by the cultural prosthesis
that is

the automobile, walking has become a lost mode, perceived as not a
legitimate way

to travel but a necessary adjunct to one's car journey, a hobby, or
something that

people without cars-those pitiable "vulnerable road users," as they are
called with

charitable condescension-do. To decry these facts-to examine, as I will in
this series,

how Americans might start walking more again- may seem like a hopelessly
retrograde,

romantic exercise: nostalgia for Thoreau's woodland ambles. But the need is
urgent.

The decline of walking has become a full-blown public health nightmare.

***

The United States walks the least of any industrialized nation.

Studies employing pedometers

have found that where the average Australian takes 9,695 steps per day (just
a few

shy of the supposedly ideal "10,000 steps" plateau, itself the product,
ironically,

of a Japanese pedometer company's

campaign in the 1960s

), the average Japanese 7,168, and the average Swiss 9,650, the average
American

manages only 5,117 steps. Where a child in Britain, according to one study,
takes

12,000 to 16,000 steps per day, a similar U.S. study found a range between
11,000

and 13,000.

Why do we walk so comparatively little? The first answer is one that applies
virtually

everywhere in the modern world: As with many forms of physical activity,
walking

has been engineered out of existence. With an eye toward the proverbial
grandfather

who regales us with tales of walking five miles to school in the snow, this
makes

instinctive sense. But how do we know how much people used to walk? There
were no

18

th-century pedometer studies.

There are, however, proxies. One could, for example, study a group "whose
lifestyle

has not changed markedly in the last 150 years," which is precisely what
David Bassett

and colleagues did, in a study published in

Medicine & Science in Sports and Exercise

. Equipping a Canadian group of Old Order Amish-who work in labor-intensive
farming-with

pedometers, the researchers found walking levels on the order of 18,000
steps per

day (not to mention comparatively low obesity rates). And a study by Gary
Egger,

et al., in

The Medical Journal of Australia

compared the walking habits people who worked as actors portraying
Australian settlers

at a historical theme park near Sydney to those of a group of office
workers. The

re-enactors were 1.6 to 2.3 times more active than the cubicle dwellers. To
your

pitchforks!

walk drive

Carlin Robinson, 12, walks from her grandmother's car to the school bus in
Manchester,

Ky. Her house can be seen in the background. A study published in 2010,
investigating

high obesity rates in the town found that residents used cars to minimize
walking

distance, to the detriment of their health.

Photograph by Linda Davidson / The Washington Post via Getty Images.

If walking is a casualty of modern life the world over-the historian Joe
Moran estimates,

for instance, that in the last quarter century in the U.K., the amount of
walking

has declined by 25 percent-why then do Americans walk even less than people
in other

countries? Here we need to look not at pedometers, but at the odometer: We
drive

more than anyone else in the world. (Hence a joke: In America a pedestrian
is someone

who has just parked their car.) Statistics on walking are more elusive than
those

on driving, but from the latter one might infer the former: The National
Household

Travel Survey shows that the number of vehicle trips a person took and the
miles

they traveled per day rose from 2.32 trips and 20.64 miles in 1969 to 3.35
and 32.73

in 2001. More time spent driving means less time spent on other activities,
including

walking. And part of the reason we are driving more is that we are living
farther

from the places we need to go; to take just one measure, in1969, roughly
half of

all children lived a mile or more from their school; by 2001 three out of
four did.

During that same period, unsurprisingly, the rates of children walking to
school

dropped from roughly half to approximately 13 percent.

And since our uncommon commitment to the car is at least in part to blame
for the

new American inability to put one foot in front of the other, the
transportation

engineering profession's historical disdain for the pedestrian is all that
much more

pernicious. In modern traffic engineering the word has become
institutionalized,

by engineers who shorten pedestrian to the somehow even more condescending
"peds";

who for years have peppered their literature with phrases like "pedestrian
impedance"

(meaning people getting in the way of vehicle flow). In early versions of
traffic

modeling software, pedestrians were not included as a default, and even
today, as

one report

notes, modeling software tends to treat them not as actual actors, but as a
mere

"statistical distribution", or as implicit "vehicular delay." At traffic
conferences

like the one in Savannah, meanwhile, people doing "ped projects" tend to be
a small

and insular, if well meaning, clique.

Another problem: Almost everyone walks. In this ubiquity, paradoxically,
lies a weakness:

The very act is so common that we tend to forget about it, to remember that
it is

something that needs to be nurtured, protected, encouraged. Save for charity
drives

and recreational enthusiasts, there are few organized groups of
self-identified walkers.

Craig Tackaberry, the associate director of public works in Marin County
told me

that when the county received a federal grant specifically designed to boost
the

number of people walking and cycling, they sought to partner with local
advocacy

groups. "It was difficult to find any pedestrian advocacy groups," he says.
Cyclists

have elaborate equipment, they have passion, they have group rides and
races-and

they have political organizations. As Scott Bricker, director of the
nonprofit organization

America Walks told me, without a trace of irony in his voice, "Walking's not
something

that people rally around - it's very pedestrian."

Perhaps as a result, walking is a pastime that's not well studied. Walking
in America

is a bit like sex: Everybody's doing it, but nobody knows how much. Bricker,
of America

Walks, adds that the "collection of information around walking is quite poor
and

inconsistent." There are the problems of self-reporting-who can really
remember,

sans

pedometer, how much one has walked, and who wants to admit on a survey that
they

never walk? There's also little agreement, he says, on what, statistically,
constitutes

a walking trip. "Is walking down the hall to the bathroom a walking trip? Do
you

have to leave the house? Is walking to the park with your dog a walking
trip? Is

walking to and from the bus a walking trip? None of those things are
counted." The

most accurate source of information we have comes from the U.S. Census, in
the so-called

"Journey to Work" questions. But these only inquire about commuting trips.
What's

more,

as researchers have noted

, because the Census emphasizes the mode of transportation taken most often,
and

for the longest part of the total journey, any number of walking trips may
be obscured.

People who take train transit, for example, have been shown in pedometer
studies

to walk much more than those who drive.

This focus on work trips rather misses the point in a country where very few
people

could walk to work, even if they wanted. Commuting (by any method) accounts
for less

than 15 percent of all trips. What's more at stake is so-called
"discretionary travel,"

the trips to the grocery store, to soccer practice, to the bank, and these
are where

we logged our greatest increases in driving. "It's not just about how many
people

walk to work," says Bricker. "It's how many are willing to walk out the
front door

for any reason." Where walking has been lost is in these short trips of a
mile or

less-28 percent of all trips in America-the majority of which are now taken
in a

car. "Let's take that stroll," says Bricker. "It's missing from the cultural
mindset."

***

In her book

Wanderlust: A History of Walking

, Rebecca Solnit writes, "walking still covers the ground between cars and
buildings

and the short distances within the latter, but walking as a cultural
activity, as

a pleasure, as travel, as a way of getting around, is fading, and with it
goes an

ancient and profound relationship between body, world, and imagination."
There is

at once a loss, and a hunger. Look on online travelers forums and you'll see
one

of the most common threads is people on the verge of visiting Europe (or New
York

City), embarking on a panicked quest for "walking shoes"-as if they were
taking up

some exotic new sport, procuring strange equipment. For these people, one
must assume,

walking is as foreign as the place they are visiting. (N.B.: I have lived in
New

York City, the most-walked city in the U.S., for more than two decades and
have never

owned a pair of Merrells.)

Walking Club Real

Blaine walking club, 1910

Photograph courtesy Bain News Service/Library of Congress.

Walking has become a boutique pastime: There is frantic weekend
power-walking (making

up for the week's lack of locomotion); there is the ostentatiously lo-fi
commute

(

observes Geoff Manaugh

: "people now think the very act of walking around makes them a kind of
psychogeographic

avant-garde"); there is walking-centric

conceptual art

; and there are stylized, idealized, walkable "lifestyle centers" which

themselves must be driven to

(if you're lucky, you'll find one with an indoor "

panoramic walking track

"), where walking itself is as vaguely antique as the iron lamp-posts and
cobble-stones.

The writer Will Self, a dedicated walker, well captured the sense that the
pedestrian

life is one so removed from daily consciousness that to participate in it
implies

some higher purpose. "Whenever I tell people I'm going to walk somewhere
utilitarian-like

an airport; or even a long distance walk that seems quite prosaic to me,
they always

ask: 'Is it for charity?' "

This question-what is

walkingfor-

is one of the many I will be exploring this week. There is a dual
pedagogical imperative

here: I aim to explore not only how people on foot behave as a class, but
also how

America lost its knack for walking, only now taking some stumbling steps in
the right

direction. The newspapers have been filled of late, from coast to coast,
from

suburban Arizona

to

the Midwest

to

rural Mississippi

, with a strikingly uniform narrative, couched in words like
"sustainability" and

"accessibility" but revolving around a simple appeal: Residents asking that
their

towns be made more walkable. The almost

Onion-

worthy headline of

one story

, "Columbus residents see potential benefits of sidewalks," with that
poisonous modifier

"potential," hints at how far off the trail of common sense America has
wandered

in its headlong pursuit of the automotive life.

Along the way, I will walk the streets of New York City with pedestrian
experts,

explore the curious patterns of mass pedestrian behavior, travel to the
Seattle offices

of "Walk Score," a Web startup that is quantifying "walkability," and then
look at

what happened to walking in America-and how we can put our right foot
forward.

More from this series: What scientists learn

when they study pedestrians

; how Walk Score has put a number on walkability; how America can get people
walking

again.

\