Tag: Walking
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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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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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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…
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Pedestrian Pride
The Pedestrian Pride Project is based in Columbus, Missouri, USA, a city with a population around 130,000. “Founded by community advocate and walking commuter McKenzie Ortiz, Pedestrian Pride is rooted in the belief that the stories of those who walk and roll daily should be at the forefront of urban advocacy. ” Most of the…
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Robert Macfarlane
Robert Macfarlane has walked in places I never will and his books about his journeys – most of which take place on foot – have been some of my favourites over the past decade or so; he’s a wonderful writer. Macfarlane described his third book The Old Ways (2012) as being about, “the relationship between…
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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…
Project Pedestrian 