A pedestrian perspective.
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RETROFITTING THE SUBURBS FOR WALKING
It’s the challenge of our times.
Researchers have spilled much ink debating the feasibility of alternatives to car travel, but have focused less on how suburbs built for the car might be transformed to accommodate other modes. Seven years ago, communities
in the South Bay area of Los Angeles County decided to focus on this question.
This study in California details the findings. Mainly:
Our results show that the number of businesses per acre is the single most robust indicator of whether people are likely to walk in their neighborhood. We find that people living in neighborhoods with more business establishments per acre conduct more of their travel within their neighborhood and are more likely to travel by walking.
This suggests that walkable neighborhoods are often places where there are many nearby destinations. Measures that might correlate with large establishments—retail employment or sales—did not predict walking travel nearly as reliably as the number of businesses per acre, suggesting that the key is not simply sales but a large number and variety of businesses in a relatively small area.
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ENVIRONMENTAL ISOLATION
More walkers with headphones getting clobbered,a study suggests:
One thing that was clear from the data is that the majority of pedestrians struck are male (68 percent) and under age 30 (67 percent). More than half the accidents involved a train, and in nearly a third (29 percent), a horn or other warning was sounded before the crash occurred.
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THE WISDOM OF CROWDS
How do people walk in crowds? At a certain point it depends on your nationality. From The Economist:
Trying to capture every element of pedestrian movement in an equation is horribly complex, however. One problem is allowing for cultural biases, such as whether people step to the left or the right, or their willingness to get close to fellow pedestrians. An experiment in 2009 tested the walking speeds of Germans and Indians by getting volunteers in each country to walk in single file around an elliptical, makeshift corridor of ropes and chairs.
At low densities the speeds of each nationality are similar; but once the numbers increase, Indians walk faster than Germans. This won’t be news to anyone familiar with Munich and Mumbai, but Indians are just less bothered about bumping into other people.
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Interesting reading the article in The Economist. With the large Asian community in Vancouver, I have intuitly learned to move left when I see an asian student on Robson st. Plus, most North Americans walk on the right side of the sidewalk – just like driving, where as most asians walk on the left. This leads to lots of confusion on Vancouver sidewalks!