A conference here this week aimed to turn around a half-century of car-driven urban planning, Oct 06, 2007 04:30 AM
The sidewalks are wide. They're lined with flowers and trees. There's a bus stop, a bench, maybe even a small park. There's room for bikes and cars, but children and seniors don't have to worry about being run over.
That's the street everybody wants to live on, shop on, work on and walk on.
The planners and engineers know how to build it.
So, why are so many of us trapped in labyrinthine suburbs where, even if we want to walk, we imperil our lives doing so on the gravel shoulders of arterial roads?
There are significant challenges to altering more than half a century of automobile-centred urban design, not the least of which is political inertia, according to the experts at an international walking conference here this week.
But there's also a growing movement of pedestrians and cyclists ready to turn the transportation hierarchy on its head – to put people ahead of cars.
New developments can be made walkable, according to Dutch traffic engineer Hans Monderman, considered a maverick for his designs that rely more on human behaviour and less on road signs – eliminating elements like traffic lights, stop signs and lane markers altogether – to encourage civil traffic patterns.
"If you want people to behave like they're in a village, you have to build a village," he said.
Put car windows at a level closer to curb height so motorists see pedestrians differently. Vary paving materials and landscaping according to space use. People will instinctively know what to do, says Monderman.
The British conference chair of Walk21, Jim Walker, says he's seen "lots of disgusting places, but they can be sorted."
Other cities that have hosted the event wanted to show off their pedestrian-friendly strides.
Toronto was different, Walker said, because it chose the conference as the launch date for its new pedestrian strategy, part of a sustainable transportation plan to reduce reliance on the car.
The revolution is already under way in places like Kensington Market, now closed to cars on Sunday. St. George St. south of Bloor St. is another example.
"Ten years ago, (St. George) was a four-lane road with very narrow sidewalks and no landscaping and the very simple act of brilliance was to get rid of two traffic lanes, widen the sidewalks and landscaping. (Now) the sidewalks are full all the time and you have a beautiful street with trees that will eventually arch and meet in the middle," says Toronto's former planning chief, Paul Bedford, now a teacher and consultant.
Bedford can't resist adding that a hefty private donation helped embarrass the city and the University of Toronto into tackling the project.
But it doesn't work everywhere. In 1971, Yonge St. between and King and Gerrard Sts. was turned into a pedestrian mall.
"It was great for a (while), but even though there was no traffic, people migrated naturally to the sidewalks because they didn't feel like they should walk in the middle of the road," said Bedford.
Experts admit it's tougher to retrofit the worst of 1960s- and 1970s-style planning in the old suburbs of Toronto or places like Oakville and Pickering.
Perhaps we don't view walking as an integral part of our lives like Europeans, suggests Walk21's Daniel Egan, Toronto's manager of cycling and pedestrian infrastructure.
North Americans "spend thousands of dollars to go to those places (like Europe) and walk around and then you come back to your suburban bungalow and drive everywhere.
"I don't think it's necessarily political, I think it's part of the culture where that's something you go and enjoy but you don't actually live in it," he said.
"I don't know how you turn back the clock. All these places that are great are old. They were built at a time when walking was the way you got around."
Kensington Market in Toronto has pedestrian Sundays. One doesn't fully appreciate the joy of being in a carfree zone until experiencing it firsthand. "The streets echo to human sounds: footsteps, voices, whistling porters, street musicians. People dawdle without worrying about onrushing traffic. " Carfree Cities, J.H. Crawford.The stink, roar, and danger of car and truck traffic inhibit street life.
FEET FIRST
Five ways to make more walkable cities as heard at Walk21 conference:
1. Widen sidewalks to accommodate pedestrians and put curves in roads to slow traffic. Add planters as an alternative to repaving.
2. Get rid of signs that state the obvious. Street design and buildings will tell people where to go and how to behave.
3. Bring back benches, bathrooms and drinking fountains, as well as mixed-use development.
4. Safe streets are busy streets. One way to fight intimidation is to attract lots of people.
5. Subways are expensive. You could build enough bike and pedestrian infrastructure to serve the entire region for the same price as a few kilometres of subway.
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