Category: Notes
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30 km/h Town
A significant factor contributing to pedestrian deaths and serious injuries is the speed a vehicle is going when it hits them. A pedestrian hit by a vehicle moving at 30 km/h has a 9 in 10 chance of surviving the collision; a pedestrian hit by a vehicle moving at 50 km/h has a 2 in…
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Jane’s Walk
Jane’s Walk started in Toronto in 2006 and quickly began to spread around the world, with walks now taking place in more than 500 cities. Named after the influential writer and activist Jane Jacobs, Jane’s Walk are volunteer-led public walks that look at different aspects of the cities they take place in. Laura Pfeifer, who…
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Alan Patridge has a 360° camera
I may have to rethink this whole moving-image project on walking. How can I possibly compete with Alan Partridge?
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Desire Paths
Desire Paths (aka Desire Lines) are pathways carved out by pedestrians, which usually indicate the shortest or preferred route between two points, in spite of where planners have placed sidewalks and official pathways. Robert Macfarlane described them as “paths & tracks made over time by the wishes & feet of walkers, especially those paths that…
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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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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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Phone zombies, drifters, speed bumps
Lauren Elkin, whose book Flâneuse: Women Walk the City is profiled on the Resources page, contributed a radio essay to the BBC on the types of pedestrians one encounters on urban sidewalks: “Elkin reckons that the way people walk, their gait, is a signifier. It also tells us something about ourselves as we watch people…
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How walking changes the way we see the world
CBC Radio Saskatchewan’s Blue Sky devoted an episode to walking: “Ken Wilson spent days walking the car-centric bypass highway around Regina. He wrote about his experience in a new book Walking the Bypass: Notes on Place from the Side of the Road. Joely BigEagle-Kequahtooway of the Buffalo People Arts Institute did a ceremonial walk dragging…
Project Pedestrian 