Author: Mark Wihak
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Right of Way?
Angie Schmitt’s Right of Way looks at the ways in which pedestrian deaths are not really accidents, but the result of ignoring pedestrian safety when we design our cities, roads and vehicles. Pedestrian fatalities in the U.S. increased a shocking 80% between 2009 – 2023! Jeff Speck, whose book Walkable City we’ve previously noted, wrote…
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Winter sidewalks
There’s an extra challenge for pedestrians living in cities with winter weather that lasts for months of below-zero temperatures and snow. While municipalities can’t prevent cold weather, their policies and actions on clearing sidewalks have a significant impact on our ability to walk safely in the winter. Regina, Saskatchewan where Project Pedestrian originates, finally passed…
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Pedestrian Dignity
Pedestrian Dignity seeks to raise awareness about issues related to being a pedestrian. Created by Jonathan Stalls, whose book WALK: Slow Down, Wake Up, and Connect at 1 – 3 Miles Per Hour was published in 2022, Pedestrian Dignity encourages collaborations and shares information about walking from all over the U.S. In addition to the…
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How wide is your sidewalk?
A city’s approach to sidewalks has a huge impact on the experiences of its pedestrians. The Federation of Canadian Municipalities and the National Research Council published Sidewalk Design, Construction and Maintenance, which “recommends a minimum Residential Street sidewalk width of 1.5 metres. When the sidewalk is located adjacent to the curb on major roadways, the…
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Useful, safe, comfortable, and interesting
Three books with similar titles that look at how urban planning impacts our experiences as pedestrians. Mary Soderstrom’s The Walkable City (2008) takes us through Paris, New York, Toronto, North Vancouver and Singapore, and examines how cities have changed the lives of ordinary citizens – in positive and negative ways. Soderstrom spoke with Pedestrian Space…
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Dickens’s night walks
In my late teens and early twenties I read a lot of Charles Dickens. In Peter Ackroyd’s (unabridged) biography Dickens (1990), I learned more about the man behind the writing. An aspect of his life that really fascinated me was the long nocturnal walks Dickens would take to try and deal with insomnia and the…
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Plodcast
When I go for a walk, it’s often to the soundtrack of a podcast. I realise having headphones on splits my attention between where I am and where the podcast takes me, and I miss out on the sounds of the environment I’m in and send signals to others not to approach. This is not…
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Writers On Walks
BBC Radio 3 has collected a series of its program The Essay into the audio book Writers on Walks. 22 contributors, “an array of novelists, poets, journalists and biographers chart the varied and inspiring walks they have taken around Britain and elsewhere”, gathered into categories like Dawnwalks & Night Walks, Springwalks & Winterwalks, and Strange…
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The Road Is How
In The Road Is How, Trevor Herriot writes about how while still recovering from an accident, he made a three day walk from his home in Regina to a cabin his family has at Cherry Lake. Trevor is a wonderful writer and attentive observer of the natural world; Daniel Baird in The Walrus called him…
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Iain Sinclair’s London
Iain Sinclair has spent decades roaming the British capital on foot and excavating the city’s psychogeography in books such as London Orbital, where he follows the route of the M25 motorway, and London Overground, where he walks alongside the city’s Overground rail network. Sinclair has said that 2017’s The Last London is his final book…
Project Pedestrian 