If we are what we eat, do we also design what we experience? / Photo: Mr. T in DC via Flickr

A few years back, I paid a visit to the headquarters of a state DOT, for the purpose of helping to plan its Safe Routes to School program. As DOTs went, this one had a reputation for being fairly amenable toward pedestrians, by which I mean that the department in question considered walking to be a legitimate form of transportation, which was eligible for spending federal transportation dollars. That, of course, doesn’t always seem to be the case.

Returning from lunch (in a car, because we certainly weren’t in a mixed use neighborhood) we encountered a pedestrian about to cross the DOT’s driveway apron. The driver, being both a human being and a law-abiding citizen, yielded to the pedestrian. But the ped stopped and waived us through. We insisted, and after a confused shrug, he proceeded along his right-of-way. Some might read this merely as a courteous interaction between two users of the transportation system. I saw something more sinister: a microcosmic reminder of the hierarchy at play on our nation’s roads, in which the convenience of the driver subordinates all other forms of transportation. I immediately cracked a joke that the yielding pedestrian was probably a traffic engineer. (As it turned out, he was.)

Entering the building I noticed, next to the front door (kudos!), what is to date the saddest, loneliest, and  rustiest specimen of a wheel-bender bike rack that I have ever seen. I was begged not to take a picture of it. (I did anyway, and framed it nicely with the DOT’s name placard above the front door. Sadly, I’ve lost track of the photo…it’s gone to the great digital beyond.) My final reward came at the end of the day when, upon exiting the building into the parking lot, I stepped out onto a raised, textured crosswalk. I joked: this is the only raised crosswalk in the state, and it’s in the DOT’s parking lot! My smirk turned into a grimace when I was informed there was a not-so-funny reason for that particular traffic calming feature being exactly where it was.

I had largely forgotten about this experience until I received a call recently from a reporter who was doing a story on a spate of pedestrian deaths where he lived. As one who aced the state capitals quiz in 7th grade Geography, I immediately recognized the city in question was also that state’s seat of government. After examining the corridor where the deaths occurred—a multi-lane, high-speed, no-median, state road lined with strip retail development—I located the state DOT’s headquarters, which happened to be a 10-second drive from the road in question, at the confluence of an expressway and a sea of parking.

I had to wonder: if we are what we eat, do we also design what we experience? It isn’t hard to imagine that, deep within the bowels of the state DOT, there are people who’ve never ridden transit, who’ve never walked to lunch, who live a suburban lifestyle, who cannot imagine their children walking to school, and who haven’t ridden a bike since they passed their driving test? Should it be a surprise to us that driving is the first thing the engineer or planner thinks about when he or she sits down to review a plan for a bridge, an intersection, a corridor, or a roadway “improvement”?

We decided to have some fun with Walkscore and state DOT headquarters. We found the address for each state headquarters office and found that the average walkability rating for state DOT headquarters offices is a paltry 67.4. As any high school student can tell you, that’s a barely-passing “D” grade. Below is a slideshow of the eight state DOT offices with Walkscores below 50, which the site categorizes as “Car-Dependent.” We’ve ranked them from best (or: least horrible of the worst) to worst. Take a look, and then let us know how well the built environment around a your state’s DOT correlates to its consideration for walking, bicycling, and transit.

UPDATE: You can also click here to download the list of all 50 DOT offices, ranked by Walkscore.

Industrial Rd & Millard Ave in Omaha, America’s worst intersection for pedestrians according to Streetsblog / Photo: Google

The Pedestrian Pandemic
In 2010, the last year the National Highway Safety Traffic Administration (NHSTA) published such figures, a startling 4,280 pedestrians were hit and killed in traffic and 70,000 were injured. For many states, this past year was one of the most deadly in a decade, ending a general decline in pedestrian fatalities. Even still, there is a disturbing cultural willingness to accept these deaths as a necessary evil. The public increasingly blames the victims. The police rarely prosecute, and if they do, the courts are often lenient. In 2012, 136 pedestrians were killed and another 11,621 were injured in New York City alone—and in all that time, only one sober, unacquainted driver was charged.

The Texas Transportation Institute (TTI) just released their annual Urban Mobility Report resulting in the usual public outcry to spend billions of taxpayer dollars to address congestion, because of what time stuck in traffic costs the American economy.  According to AAA, pedestrian deaths and injuries cost American society $300 billion in 2010, that is nearly three times the national cost of congestion as estimated by the Urban Mobility Report.  Where is the public outcry to improve safety?

In the US, Common Law tradition has a clear provision for the right of access. Given that all forms of transportation begin and end with walking, this is essentially a right to be a pedestrian—a right severely restricted by expensive and counterproductive high-speed roads that we’ve built. A key problem in defending this right is that very few laws motivate law enforcement to consider killing a pedestrian as a crime. Involuntary Vehicular Manslaughter is a potential charge, but it’s hard to prove constructive manslaughter since a little speeding is rarely seen as a crime, and the threshold for recklessness is hard to meet. Anecdotally, drivers who kill a pedestrian are better off waiting for the police to arrive, because hit and runs really are about the only time the police reliably pursue these drivers with any prejudice. New laws specifically dealing with pedestrian-vehicle crashes are needed.

Blaming the Victim
In my opinion, our local media outlets are exacerbating the problem. Their stories discount the human loss and reinforce widely held misconceptions. First and foremost, underlying all of the poor media coverage is what I call the “Accident Axiom.” This is the widely-held (but almost never-question) belief that accidents are an unavoidable and innocent consequence of modern motorized society. The assumption here is that crashes not involving excessive speed, alcohol, or gross negligence are presumably the fault of no one, but an unfortunate systemic fluke.

This axiom has two corollaries: the Inherent Risk Corollary and the Reckless Driver Corollary. The former states that in this world of unavoidable accidents, pedestrians and cyclists are senselessly putting themselves in harm’s way by traversing concrete and asphalt. If they get hit, it is a deserved consequence of their poor decision making. And the latter states that those rare instances when a driver is at fault, it is the result of that driver being a reckless and careless individual, a deviant member of society. All blame is attributed to the individuals involved. The road network and driving culture are given immunity.

Recently the focus has been on the bad behaviors of pedestrians: texting, wearing earphones, jaywalking, drunk walking, etc. While there is clearly a personal responsibility to remain aware of your environment, we should not rush to judgement. Freakonomics ran a particularly illogical analysis of drunk walking back in 2011, claiming that it was eight-times safer to drive under the influence. Safer for whom?

As the mounting death toll makes the issue of pedestrian safety harder to ignore, the Reckless Driver Corollary has expanded to include distracted driving, a legitimate problem just like drunk driving. But in the age of TV screens, internet radio, and GPS navigation systems in dashboards, can we really claim distracted driving to be the isolated acts of a few negligent operators? Driving at high speeds with all of these modern additions is a pervasive indiscretion, a transgression a plurality of society idly commits on a daily basis.

I’m from Nebraska, one of the “safest” states for pedestrians, though that statistic is largely a function of our rural population and lack of pedestrians in cities.  Even in the Cornhusker State, 2012 was a 250% increase in pedestrian fatalities over 2011 as reported by AAA. The Omaha World Herald, is particularly fond of stating pedestrians “were not in a crosswalk” when they were hit. But this is often not even true! Victims were often not in a marked crosswalk. By law, crosswalks do not have to be marked; in a city where road salt strips the paint every year, few crosswalks even are. In September, when the World Herald reported on the increase in fatalities, I decided that enough was enough, and I responded by challenging the misconceptions so flagrantly repeated in their reporting. It took mere minutes of research to refute their presumptions.

The state’s traffic laws, Chapter 60 of the Nebraska Revised Statutes, lays out that a crosswalk exists whenever sidewalks are present on both sides of an intersection, regardless of whether there are white lines painted or not.  It goes on to explain a pedestrian can step into an unmarked crosswalk even if an approaching car is in view, so long as the driver has time to stop and there isn’t a Don’t Walk signal.  And most importantly if references a case Vanek v. Prohaska that states, “Violation of a statute is not negligence per se, but is merely evidence of negligence.”  In other words, just because a pedestrian violated these laws, doesn’t mean they should be considered the party at fault.  Given the inadequacy of the infrastructure, it might have been perfectly reasonable to cross in such a way.  Though the original post has since been deleted, you can read the full text of my comment here.

In the early 1900s, cars and their drivers were depicted in editorials, cartoons and accident reports as reckless murderers / Photo: via Peter Norton

The Rise of Motordom—and the Future of the Message
This wasn’t always the media’s modus operandi. In the early 1900s, cars and their drivers were depicted in editorials, cartoons and accident reports as reckless murderers, as grim reapers spreading death across cities and as pagan gods appeased by the sacrificing of children. What changed, mid-century, was that the highway lobby essentially took over the reporting of pedestrian and cyclists harmed by drivers; unsurprisingly, they changed the voice of coverage to presume the innocence of drivers.

Fortunately, there are signs that the narrative might be starting to change. While stories highlighting the injustice inherent in the way we treat pedestrian fatalities are usually the purview of urbanism-friendly publications (think Streetsblog, The Atlantic Cities, et. al.) NPR ran a story last month profiling the impossible task that police face in tracking down hit-and-run drivers involved in vehicle-pedestrian crashes. Brian Williams also covered the topic recently on NBC’s Rock Center, and the segment starts off promisingly enough. Unfortunately, about twenty minutes in, it becomes clear that the story is being framed using the Reckless Driver Corollary, focusing on the fact that drivers involved in the crashes being discussed were on their phones, rather than the fact that pedestrians died.

Solutions
There are many things that can be done to keep pushing the message back to a place that values human life first, and speed and efficient movement of automobiles second. On the policy side, get a Vulnerable Users Law introduced into your state legislature. Vulnerable Users Laws shift the burden of evidence onto the more dangerous individual. Drivers are responsible for cyclists, cyclists for pedestrians. I’m a huge fan of these laws, because pedestrians are put on a pedestal. They’ve been popular in Europe and are catching on in the United States.

You can also pursue other policies like Vision Zero, famously applied in Sweden and currently being campaigned for by Transportation Alternatives in NYC. Essentially, Vision Zero is a directive to eliminate all pedestrian and cyclists fatalities in quick order. The central premise being, “that no loss of life is acceptable.” Concerning law and order, you can find local lawyers to represent and advocate for justice on the behalf of pedestrians and cyclists injured or killed by drivers.

You can work to lower the speed of traffic. More specifically, advocate to decrease the range of speeds driven over a segment of road.  A fundamental belief in traffic engineering is that differences in operating speed causes higher risks of crashes. Spread can be reduced by lowering speed limits and using roundabouts instead of signalized intersections. The end result is travel times remain the same but maximum operating speed and the range of speeds are significantly lowered. Other geometric changes include narrower lanes, pedestrian refuge islands, neck-downs and Rightsizing.

However, only so much will be accomplished until our local papers and the nightly news starts putting pressure on state DOTs and public works departments to keep our citizens safe on foot. So, first and foremost, pay closer attention to the way that pedestrian deaths are portrayed by the local media in your area, and don’t be afraid to put pressure your local news outlets when you see improper coverage that blames the victim. It is easy to find language in your State Statutes that debunk published misconceptions about crosswalks and jaywalking. We all have the right to walk—and like most rights, it’s one that must be defended.

Helpful Resources

• Peter Norton’s excellent presentation on the history of media depictions and societal opinions on pedestrian-vehcile crashes
• AAA report on the societal costs of pedestrian-vehicle crashes
• World Health Organization pamphlet on the risk of pedestrian fatality as a function of traffic speed
• AAA report on the risk of pedestrian fatality as a function of traffic speed
• Transportation for America’s Dangerous by Design, interactive pedestrian-vehicle crash data
• National Highway Transportation Safety Administration pedestrian data
• America Walks, the best starting point for resources, tools and links

Click to purchase from Powell’s

Jeff Speck’s new book, Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time, is worth a read for its acerbic wit, alone. The author fits a remarkable collection of data and anecdotal evidence from his long career in urban design (which included a four-year stint at the helm of the National Endowment for the Arts’ design department) into a mere 260 pages while maintaining a tone that is both punchy and urgent. It’s not often that I’ve found people who can make the discussion of parking minimums entertaining, but Speck has a way with words.

Walkable City begins with Speck’s General Theory of Walkability, before proceeding on to an overview of the challenges facing our built environment today. The author’s deep understanding of the topic at hand thus becomes clear early on, and by the time the book launches into its meatiest section—a detailed breakdown of the Ten Steps of Walkability—the author-reader bond is already established. Barely a fifth of the way through the book, it is hard not to already feel engaged, like a comrade-in-arms.

But this is not the next great book on American cities; Speck says so himself in the prologue, arguing that “That book is not needed. An intellectual revolution is no longer necessary.” This struck me as odd, and it nagged at the back of my mind throughout what was otherwise a mostly enjoyable read. For, as Speck explains a mere paragraph after the line quoted above, “We’ve known for three decades how to make livable cities—after forgetting for four—yet we’ve somehow not been able to pull it off.”

That “we’ve” is instructive; the book is seemingly intended for a mass audience, but I got the sense that I was part of a choir, being preached to with the church doors thrown open. While it is a very accessible book, Walkable City comes off feeling a bit more specific than it seems the author himself had hoped. There is a preoccupation with the physical cityscape that suggests the underlying assumption that the reader has some knowledge of and access to the proper channels to act on the information that’s being presented. But many (or even most, if the book is intended for a mass market) won’t.

Indeed, for a book about walkability, Walkable City seems much more concerned with cars and buildings than with people. “America will be finally ushered into ‘the urban century’ not by its few exceptions,” writes Speck, in wrapping up the prologue, “but by a collective movement among its everyday cities to do once again what cities do best, which is to bring people together—on foot.” Yet at the outset of the section titled The Useful Walk, he writes that “Cars are the lifeblood of the American city.” Are we to understand, then, that it is a collective movement among our cars that will create more walkable cities?

Of course not.  People are the lifeblood of cities, and if we’re going to pull off the feat of ushering America into the urban century, we have to show those people not only why walkability is important, but how their own actions and decisions can help to create more of it. [Of note, via PPS's transportation director Gary Toth: even AASHTO included the following line in the 1984 edition of the Green Book: “…it is extremely difficult to make adequate provisions for pedestrians.  Yet, this must be done, because pedestrians are the lifeblood of our urban areas…”]

“Specialists,” Speck writes in no uncertain terms, “are the enemy of the city, which is by definition a general enterprise.” Yet the urban designer seems not to heed his own advice. If he had, we may have seen a fifth category in the book’s General Theory of Walkability; alongside The Useful Walk, The Safe Walk, The Comfortable Walk, and The Interesting Walk, perhaps a section on The Considered Walk.

If we’re going to create more popular support for walkability in the US, we need people in auto-centric places to start thinking differently about the benefits of getting around on foot instead of by car: improved health, more time to spend with families, lower transportation costs, more unplanned social encounters, better sense of purpose and community. If you’ve lived your whole life in a landscape dominated by cars (as most Americans have), walkability may be far from the front of your mind. The idea that an intellectual revolution is no longer necessary assumes that everyone is already on the same page. They’re not.

For those of us who are already advocating for more walkable urban fabric, Walkable City offers a wealth of facts and figures with which we can load our cannons. But it also serves as a reminder that we have to keep working on how we present that information to broader constituencies. We’re getting there, but we’re still en route.

A colorful crosswalk scene / Photo: Alex E. Proimos via Flickr

For more, check out Brendan’s conversation on Walkable City with Next American City’s Brady Dale, part of the #NextCityBooks online book club series.

Bicyclists fill a street during a Critical Mass ride in Vancouver / Photo: David Pritchard via Flickr

In 1980, the very first Pro Bike conference was convened in Asheville, North Carolina. At the time, the movement to carve out more space for bicycling on North American streets was young, and the first conference was attended by around 100 people. Thirty-two years later, the Pro Walk/Pro Bike: Pro Place is expected to draw a thousand active transportation advocates to Long Beach, California. The expanded conference title reflects the dramatic transformation of bicycling advocacy into today’s active transportation movement, as more and more people have begun to realize the importance of thinking of streets as places that tie communities together.

Recently, PPS’s Gary Toth and Brendan Crain had the opportunity to chat, informally, with Dan Burden, Andy Clarke, and Charlie Gandy, three friends and advocates who have played very active roles in this transformation. The following is a transcript of that conversation, looking back over the past three decades and reflect on lessons learned thus far.

Brendan: Can you each start out by talking about how you got involved in advocating for active transportation?

Dan: I started with advocacy around 1962, by promoting some biking events. Then very quickly folks like Charlie Gandy and I started working through the American Youth Hostels to put on even bigger events. Charlie, I don’t know what time you entered the scene, probably the mid or late 1960s?

Andy: Are you kidding? He wasn’t even born in 1960! [Laughter]

Charlie: Geez you old coot, what are you talking about? I showed up, and you and I met, in about ’85 or ’86, through Youth Hostels.

Dan: Back then, it really was the AYH playing a huge role. It was a concurrent evolution. The League of American Bicyclists had started up just about that time in the early 1960s, although the real advocacy started with recreation. The active transportation side, the health side, and the bike commuter side probably didn’t get a good launch until the early 1970s.

At the first Pro Walk/Pro Bike—actually, back then it was just Pro Bike—we honored Bob Cleckner. Bob was the first full-time paid professional in America to go around and really try to drum up interest in this stuff, starting with bike lanes; he was my inspiration. He was getting paid to go around the country and get adults to stop thinking of bicycling as something that was just for children. He worked for what was then called the Bicycle Manufacturers Association. We shared offices with them back in those early years when we started the Bicycle Federation of America [which later became the National Center for Bicycling and Walking].

Andy: As Dan said, the League was re-formed back in the mid-60s. They’d been absent for about ten years, and it was because of the support of Schwinn and the bike industry that the League got back on its feet. By the early 1970s, we started to work more on advocacy issues. The oil crisis in 1973 was a defining moment. One is always bitten in the ass by history because you think you’re doing something for the first time and it never turns out that you are. But I would be so bold as to say that the renaissance we’ve seen in the last 4-5 years in bicycling is probably the biggest boost we’ve seen since that oil crisis and the explosion of interest in cycling . Communities realized again that perhaps we shouldn’t have completely thrown cycling away.

When I moved here from the UK in 1985, the state of bike advocacy was such that we were able to convince the Immigration and Nationalization Service that letting me in here to be the League’s government relations director would not be taking a job from anyone else who was an American in the country. In 1988 there literally wasn’t anyone doing that. I think the Rails to Trails Conservancy was probably three years old? There was no America Bikes, no Bikes Belong. A lot of the groups that we work with now weren’t around yet. In the intervening 25 years we’ve seen things come a long way.

It’s very interesting—you can chart the progress of where the inspiration for advocacy was coming from and where groups were formed, particularly at the state and local level, by just looking at their names. In the 1970s the League was the only show in town, and we were doing a lot of advocacy on getting the legal status of cyclists straight. Groups that were formed in the wake of that are groups like the League of Illinois Bicyclists. Then in the 80s the Bicycle Federation took over and groups that formed became Federations. Charlie Gandy led the way in the 90s and started the Coalition movement with the Texas Bicycle Coalition (TBC). In the 2000s, groups started using declarative titles like Georgia Bikes! or Bike Delaware. Now folks are forming Alliances, and many are formally adding walking to their names as well. It’s uncanny how that catches on, and you can tell when a group was established by the title they give themselves.

Charlie: Going to Copenhagen back in ’76 and riding a bike really opened my eyes to the notion of a bicycle being a respected and valuable tool in an urban place. That stayed latent for me until about 1990, when I formed the TBC with a bunch of other interested cyclists that were looking for political respect and power. That put me in contact with Dan Burden, who was one of the first bike professionals within a state agency, at the DOT in Florida. He came to Austin, and I put him up as an expert in this field in front of our state DOT leadership. Our tactic was to get bike coordinators at the state and local level within the DOT—this was ahead of ISTEA mandating it—and Dan convinced them that it would be smarter to fold their hand and just do that, rather than take us on. It was really a powerful lesson for me as a political organizer to see Dan’s ability, as the guy from out of town, to be effective at moving an agency to do something very tangible.

That started my learning about how we could turn the crank at the state and local levels and improve conditions for cyclists, organizing to give them a cohesive voice. I started attending Pro Bike in the early 90s as the Executive Director of the TBC. Then in ’94 I went to work for Bill Wilkinson at the Bicycle Federation, with Andy and Dan. Andy and I were protégés of Dan’s, and Wilkinson was pulling the strings. I remember going to my first Pro Bike and thinking what an incredible learning institution and networking opportunity this thing was.

Gary: I think we should get Charlie talking about how he did the first Walk Audits for FHWA in the mid-90s.

Charlie: In about ’96, Wilkinson comes out with his hand up in the air barely holding onto this piece of a proposal and he says “I’ve got something here related to walking, does somebody want to take this?” At that time, both Burden and Clarke turned their heads and walked away. [Laughter] Nobody wanted to do walking stuff. But I was working on my first million frequent flyer miles, and I jumped at the opportunity to go around to Grand Rapids, and the Bronx, and Snowmass, and a bunch of other places. “Pedestrian Roadshows,” is what they called them.

Dan: Actually, walk audits really started in the 80s. When I came back from Australia after doing some work on bicycling there, I realized that the real answer to reactivating and re-energizing cities was in the walkability side. So starting around 1981, at the Florida DOT, we changed my job title instantly. And that was the origin of the first ped-bike coordinator! I was having trouble with my engineers, when they would design intersections; they were getting them completely wrong. So I said we need to go out and walk around them and understand. It was later, when Bill saw what I was doing, that he realized that there was funding that could be secured for this, and later developed the Pedestrian Roadshows.

Charlie: That was back when they were referring to the sidewalks as “auto recovery zones,” right?

Gary: So the pedestrians were impact attenuators?  [Laughter]

Dan Burden leads a walk audit in Linden, Michigan / Photo: Michigan Municipal League via Flickr

Dan: But looking even further back, there are a few people that I’d be remiss in not bringing up, who were critical to the formation of the bikeped movement as we know it now. These people did things that nobody was doing. The first is Dr. Paul Dudley White, who was the heart surgeon for Eisenhower that really launched biking as an adult activity. He got the attention of the press, and he did it by pushing the idea that people needed exercise. Way before the modern health movement got going, he realized that benefit. He was probably doing his work starting around 1959, but he really was starting to command serious press until 61. This was around when I was starting to realize this is what I wanted to do with my life, so Dr. White was a hero of mine.

Another name that should not be lost to history is Dr. Clifford Graves, a surgeon in San Diego who started the International Bicycle Touring Society and got big-name adults to go on bicycle tours in Europe and the US. He also started bicycle clubs for teenagers in the California area, and all of those preceded anything going on with the League. Fred DeLong was an engineer that worked for one of the big battery manufacturers out of Philadelphia, and his work preceded John Forester‘s Effective Cycling program, by about four years. DeLong helped raise awareness about the technical side of adult bicycling—how to brake, how to turn, how to set up your bike—he really put the science into it.

Brendan: The idea that just getting adults to ride bikes was seen as broadening the constituency is so radically different from how we think of bicycling now. Bikeped advocates have been very good, historically, at drawing new people and new groups in, and that’s clearly been important in terms of this going from something that was very informal, driven by zealous nuts, to creating a contemporary movement that’s very broad and formal, with so many people dedicating their careers to bicycling and pedestrian issues. Just thirty years ago, there were only two or three people doing this work full-time!

Andy: It’s been really interesting to see how the bike movement has provided the passion and fuel for the Safe Routes to Schools movement, which has taken us into uncharted territory in terms of constituencies that now care about Safe Routes and the issues around that. The same is true of Complete Streets. The walking movement is such a more prominent issue for the broader public today; it’s more marketable, immediate, and unimpeachable. But without bicyclists at the start of that, there wouldn’t be the walking movement or the active transportation movement or the Complete Streets or the Safe Routes movements that we have now. It’s important that we’ve been able to, in certain cases, sort of let go and let these branches grow off.

Charlie: I’d like to build on that because, as the bicycle movement has become more mainstream, it has made sense for us to broaden the perspective and to partner up and to see the value in the coalition with pedestrians and a realization that what we’ve been talking about is Placemaking—and I remember learning early on from Dan about how instilling that vision of the place puts bicycling in context. We self- identify as bicyclists and we’ve organized a political voice around that, and we’ve found through coalition that we have more of a mainstream voice. Today, it’s the health people and women bicyclists that are really emerging, at least in the US, as fresh voices within the movement.

Gary: It seems like a lot of this type of advocacy starts with biking first and then branches out to walking and related activities; why do you think that is? And why did the bicycling movement emerge so many decades ahead of the walking movement in the first place?

Dan: A bit of historic perspective on that: the pedestrian movement was actually occurring as bicycling was emerging, but cycling came out more strongly, I think, because it had technological side to it that adults could get into—where a lot of people, even to this day, think of walking as, well… pedestrian! That it’s something you try to get away from as an adult.

I think we should keep in mind that there was a pedestrian movement that was growing up simultaneously, and it wasn’t as though the bicyclists branched out and created the pedestrian movement, although many are reaching across the aisle now. There used to be a small annual pedestrian conference in Boulder, Colorado back in the 80s and 90s; it was the only place where people were really talking about these issues for a long time. Those went on for 12 -13 years before the city council finally stopped funding them. Even a few years before that, Donald Appleyard organized one of the first meetings to talk about traffic calming, in Seattle. Looking at these early strings, we can see where they finally stitched one another together.

Once they become good advocates for bicycling, an issue they care so much about, they begin to realize they’re not the only ones that are being overlooked. So they get into the pedestrian side, and eventually they start to realize, well, we need destinations and places to go for this stuff to work, and then it broadens out from there.

Andy: This is absolutely true of Complete Streets. For the longest time, we banged on about what was then called “Routine Accommodation,” and how we wanted bicyclists and pedestrians to be routinely accommodated in all projects. We almost got that principal written into the transportation bills in ’91 and ’98, but it just wasn’t resonating. Finally, in the early 2000s, Martha Roskowski of America Bikes convened a phone conference with bunch of smart marketing people, and that was where the phrase “Complete Streets” was coined, I think by David Goldberg, from Smart Growth America. Almost overnight, Complete Streets started to carry a tune. This was something we’d written about with different names for years! [Editor's Note: The term "complete streets" has been attributed to several people in different accounts, including Martha Roskowski.]

A Complete Street is a street where everyone feels comfortable, whether they're in a car, on a bike, or on their own two feet / Photo: Complete Streets Coalition via Flickr

Brendan: Looking back over the past few decades of advocacy, what are your thoughts on how the movement has evolved, broadly? Did you expect to be this far along, or think you would be even farther? And what impact would you say PWPB has had since the first conference in 1980?

Dan: I discovered recently, while having lunch with Richard Killingsworth, that it was a presentation at a PWPB conference that totally turned around his attitude toward his work at the CDC. He went back and said ‘Folks, it’s not about curing diseases anymore, it’s about preventing them.’ But no one would listen to him. And he worked for a year and finally got folks like Richard Jackson, Andy Dannenberg, and Howard Frumkin to take a different approach. Not long after, he got funding from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation in 2001 to leave the CDC and start Active Living by Design, and over time Frumkin and Dannenberg moved out to Washington, and Richard Jackson went to UCLA where he’s still advocating for Healthy Places. So if we stop to think about it now, there are billions of dollars now being focused on health through active living, and that started at a Pro Bike conference. There wouldn’t have been a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation putting money into this if it wasn’t for Richard Killingsworth realizing that there had to be a new approach for the CDC.

Andy: Looking at the movement, in terms of the numbers—specifically the number of people involved, the number of staff in advocacy groups and government—the movement has come an enormous way. It’s like night and day. It’s been extraordinary to see that and be a small part of it. But on the other hand, 30 years is a helluva long time. In terms of outcomes, it’s hard to be too optimistic about the impact that we’ve had because we’ve still seen 30 years of really awful community development in the majority of communities across the country. It’s a really big ship to turn. We really have to step up our game to make a much bigger change in outcomes—not in the next 30 years, but the next three years if we’re going to have a legacy we can all be proud of. We can’t wait 30 years to have another incremental step up in the number of people walking and biking.

Dan: There’s an enthusiasm that you don’t see in other professions and other trades that is a hallmark of what the walkability and the bicycling movements. If I were to project forward about what’s coming, we have to get the vast majority of people who come into the movement to realize that it’s the Placemaking—the creation of places for social exchange—that’s the missing piece. We’ve got to get away from just thinking of it as active transportation and think of it as rescuing our cities, redesigning our cities for people, and building the economy around the scale of the human foot. Until we do that walking can’t work, and bicycling can’t work.

I agree with Andy: we can’t wait 30 years; three years may be all that we’ve got. We’re talking about a totally wrecked economy, one where we keep trying to go back to building things that cannot be sustainable, cannot even be maintained; if we keep doing things the way they were done in the past, the US is at risk of becoming a third-world nation. There’s more at stake here than just giving ourselves a nice place to ride a bike or to walk.

Charlie: One of the identifying characteristics of this group is its collaborative spirit. I’ve noticed in my travels that that’s a fairly unique thing. Throughout the past few decades, there’s been a whole lot of innovation and invention going on, and guys like Dan, Andy, Pete Lagerway, and so many others have been freely sharing these ideas. I think that’s true at PWPB as well as one on one, and I think that’s a unique element of our success.

Andy: I would absolutely echo that; that’s a really important thing to identify. You see, from one consulting firm to another, people just want to help each other get the right answer, and just want to get a good outcome. That is pretty remarkable, I think.

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You’ve read about the past thirty years of bikeped advocacy–if you want to become part of the next crucial three, join us in Long Beach this September 10-13 for Pro Walk/Pro Bike: Pro Place. Remember–standard registration ends at midnight on August 10th, at which point registration rates will rise, so click here to register for the conference today!

Brooklyn's Court Street is often bustling with pedestrian activity. / Photo: PPS

“Walking: It’s What You Do Once You’ve Parked Your Car…”

Or so lamented Traffic author Tom Vanderbilt, in his keynote address at last week’s Walking and the Life of the City Symposium, organized by the NYU Wagner School’s Rudin Center for Transportation Policy and Management. Vanderbilt set the morning’s theme by charting the history of walking from its criminalization with the first jaywalking laws in 1915, to its sharp fall from public favor in the 1970s following a spike in vehicle miles traveled (VMT), changes in land use (widened streets, trees removed between roads and sidewalks), and the popularization of our favorite modern conveniences, like drive-throughs and escalators.

“Walking is like sex” Vanderbilt postulated. “Everyone is doing it, but nobody knows how much.” Quipping that we haven’t yet had “the great Kinsey report of walking,” he proposed that much work needs to be done to define not just the quantitative indicators for walking, but also the qualitative indicators that can help us understand how to make truly complete streets. Together, the researchers’ presentations started to present a Kinsey-like breadth of information about the role that walking plays in contemporary culture. Full presentations will soon be available online here, and a publication of the day’s proceedings is in the offing. In the meantime, brief summaries of the presentations are coupled below with a big question raised by each researcher’s findings.

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  Pedestrian satisfaction is closely linked to motivation; vibrant walking streets like this one in Lisbon can encourage people to get out and enjoy traveling on two feet. / Photo: B G via Flickr

  McGill University’s Kevin Manaugh aims to fill the gap between behavioral psychology and the built environment. Arguing that there’s a difference between choosing to walk (the environmentalists), and having no choice but to walk (poorer populations), his research categorized types of walkers to understand who’s doing the walking and why they’re doing it. Manaugh’s research shows no relationship between the distance walked during a trip and the satisfaction experienced by the walker, illustrating how the enjoyment of walking relies heavily on one’s motivation. How can we motivate more people to start walking by choice?

• Picking up where Manaugh left off, Dick Ettema, of Utrecht University, explored how well-being has been defined by academic researchers. He suggested that urban design could be improved through deeper research into the relationship between sensory experience and behavior change, noting that “Physical experience is much more important when walking [than other modes of travel].” Ettema’s research into understanding optimal arousal for pedestrians raises an interesting question for anyone interested in the idea of re-thinking Streets as Places: What are the qualitative indicators that can help us understand how to make out streets truly complete?
  

• Columbia University’s David King looked at the relationship between transportation system funding and walkability, making a strong case for “person-oriented development” by highlighting key problem areas, such as fuel taxes driving transit investment decisions, wealthy areas enjoying the majority of bike and pedestrian investment, and a planning preference for increasing speed. With lawsuits against cities for decades of underinvestment in pedestrian infrastructure and non-ADA compliance becoming increasingly common, he asked “Are pedestrian environments something we should be engineering, the same way we engineer road environments?“

• The second panel of the day kicked off with the Rudin Center’s Andrew Mondschein, who discussed his research into how people cognitively map their streets and neighborhoods. Presenting different processes of spatial learning, he explained how we engage in ‘active learning’ when walking, noting that frequent pedestrians tend to have a better understanding of their streets and neighborhoods than transit riders. With this in mind, Mondschein raised the question: Might mobile apps, GPS, and other ICT platforms be chipping away at our ‘walking IQ’ by making us less reliant on our cognitive maps?

• Sarah Kaufman, also of the Rudin Center, also presented research on the impact that digital technology is having on walking. “Right now,” Kauffman explained, “we know that physical & augmented reality are separate; in future, we will feel more transported and immersed by AR apps…especially in areas such as navigation, tourism and translation.” Kauffman’s primary question, regarding the future of this field, is worth repeating verbatim: “Are we aiming to augment reality, or substitute it?“

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  Data on mid-block crossings is hard to come by, but important / Photo: Ian Muttoo via Flickr

  UC Berkeley’s Robert Schneider’s work aims to better quantify pedestrian activity by gathering more complete data. Explaining the need for different types of data that are currently lacking (middle-block crossings, trip generation, travel within activity centers and parking lots, and movement within multimodal trips key among them), his talk highlighted innovative forms of data collection which might make this process easier, such as video and GPS tracking using stationary cameras and smart phones. If we’re currently missing a great deal of data on shorter walking trips, how might collecting that data more efficiently change how we design for walking?

So what do you think? How can we get more people walking? Are digital apps the answer–or do they just raise even more troublesome questions? Is contemporary research on walking even asking the right questions, to begin with? Join the discussion commenting below!

Even in Red Deer's downtown area, pedestrians play second fiddle to automotive traffic / Photo: Gary Toth

Red Deer, Alberta, is a small city about halfway between Calgary and Edmonton. Once a sleepy agricultural outpost that provided a convenient stopover for travelers moving between the territory’s two larger cities, Red Deer has experienced substantial growth over the past three decades due to the growth of the oil industry, booming from 30,000 residents in 1975 to just over 90,000 in 2012. As might be expected given that time frame, virtually all of the new growth has taken the form of auto-oriented sprawl.

Today, the City Council is seeking to change that, and have developed a new civic vision that is outlined in the Strategic Direction 2012 – 2014 report. This vision included the creation of an Integrated Movement Study (IMS) with the following goal:

“Our deliberate decision to create viable alternatives to single occupant vehicle travel in our transportation network encourages healthy active lifestyles, environmental stewardship, supports safety for people of all ages, increases use of our public and green spaces, and integrates our sidewalks, trails, bike lanes, transit service, rail, and roads with our built environment.”

Red Deer began to retune their downtown streets even before the start of the Integrated Movement Study, as evidenced by the rightsizing of Gaetz Avenue. Note the deployment of chicanes. / Photo: Gary Toth

Earlier this month, PPS’s Gary Toth was invited by the City and 8-80 Cities, which is leading the IMS, to conduct several interactive sessions on the role that Complete Streets might play in moving Red Deer to a balanced and livable transportation network. While in Red Deer, Gary facilitated two interactive discussions on Complete Streets as part of a workshop called Building Better Blocks. The first discussion began with photos of several streets, some with designated bike and bus lanes and some with none. Participants were asked to discuss whether the streets were complete. Quite a few of the participants argued that the streets without bike lanes were not complete, but as the discussion unfolded, the group came to understand that Complete Streets policies do not require that designated space be provided for each mode, but rather that travel via all modes be safe, comfortable & convenient for everyone, regardless of age or ability.

This means that bike lanes are not only not required, but sometimes even discouraged. When street dimensions and adjacent land uses slow vehicular speeds to below 20 mph, for instance, it is actually preferred that bicyclists share the street with the cars. Sharing space forces everyone to be more cautious and observant, and creates safer driving conditions for the drivers and bikers, as well as nearby pedestrians.

Workshop participants quickly pointed out that while this Dublin Street was technically a “Complete Street”, its value to the community was limited due to lack of fostering the Street as a Place. / Photo: Gary Toth

Participants at the Red Deer workshop also quickly grasped the fact that allocating space for all modes doesn’t automatically generate pedestrian and bicycle traffic. With little prompting, participants recognized that streets such as the one from Dublin, pictured to the left, would benefit greatly from a Placemaking process that would engage residents in planning for how the street will be used, ensuring that the space would meet local needs and attract more people out to use the street. This idea is at the core of PPS’s Streets as Places initiative.

Armed with this new awareness of what it takes to complete a street, workshop participants went outside to test their ideas in a unique learning environment. Called Safety City, the space is a reduced-scale network of streets and buildings created to teach the children of Red Deer about how to safely navigate their city’s streets, both on foot and in cars. The adults in the workshop were provided with a range of props that they used to re-shape the small scale streets with bike lanes, medians, crosswalks and bulb-outs—and there was no lack of creativity in doing so!

The following day, Gary led a group of City officials—planners, engineers and others— advocates, and stakeholders through an exercise designed to foster mindfulness of the 20^th Century practice of planning streets solely for high-speed auto traffic. Starting with the dawn of the private car and accelerating after World War II, street planning policies have completely ignored the diverse uses of streets for generations, sacrificing communities to move automotive traffic as efficiently as possible. What is needed now in Red Deer (and around the world) is a return to the practice of creating a wide palette of street types that are sensitive to the community context. This range is known by planners as a “Street Typology,” and while the name may be cumbersome, Street Typologies are nimble tools that lead to streets that better serve their surroundings.

Street Typologies seek not to turn over every one of our streets to the bicycle and pedestrian at the expense of moving goods and vehicles, but instead aim for a balanced transportation system. Developing a range of context sensitive street types provides cities with the flexibility to design different streets in different ways, and fosters a civic mindset that leads to more people thinking about streets as places not just vessels for moving cars, but for tying the community together. Street Typologies also ease the resistance of transportation professionals to new ideas, since they reassure these professionals by making it clear that not all streets will need to be retrofitted to 20 mph Main Street-style corridors. Finally, these typologies convey to community, biking, and pedestrian advocates that the era of relegating all non-motorized street users to secondary and peripheral status is over.

A Red Deer City engineer explains how his group retuned the demonstration street to foster Placemaking as well as comfort for all modes. Median, landscaping, mid block crossings and even a roundabout were created. / Photo: Gary Toth

While each group of participants came up with a slightly different “toolkit” of streets, all agreed that there was room in Red Deer for a wider variety of street types: slower streets where bikes and pedestrians are the priority; destination streets where the primary purpose of the street is social and economic exchange; and wider, faster streets designed to move people and goods around town. As this booming city in the “Texas of the North” has shown, a lot can change in a few decades. Now, with a better understanding of how to create more complete streets, Red Deer is on the road to success.

Photo: Mark Plotz / National Center for Bicycling and Walking (NCBW)

Govern + Invest is a theme that will be explored at Pro Walk/Pro Bike® 2012: Pro Place. A question that will be examined is how bicycling and walking investments can add value to a community by creating economic activity, creating jobs, and improving quality of life.

Already we know that when it comes to jobs created per million dollars, bicycle facilities are one of the most efficient transportation investments. But once the paint dries and the asphalt cools, are there lasting economic effects? Can bicycle infrastructure build bicycle culture that will build a bicycle economy?

The answer seems to be yes — at least in the case of Long Beach, California. More than 20 new bicycle-related or bicycle-inspired businesses have opened at last count. I toured some of these business with Charlie Gandy and Melissa Balmer during a recent trip to Long Beach to meet these entrepreneurs, and prospect for locally-sourced goods and services for our conference. Twenty new businesses is a lot, especially in this economy, so you may be skeptical of these numbers (I was); but after meeting some impressive young people, I can assure you that it’s all real.

Photo: Mark Plotz / NCBW

Yellow 108
A year-old business that recently relocated to Long Beach after being inspired by the city’s funky bicycle culture, Yellow 108 is a headwear company that produces its hats and accessories from salvaged and recycled materials. I met with co-founder Lauren Lilly, who has grown her business to ten employees and is now branching into bicycle accessories. What Lauren has already accomplished is impressive enough; watch Charlie Gandy’s interview with her, and you’ll see she’s destined for more.

Photo: Mark Plotz / NCBW

Long Beach Pedaler Society
This pedicab upstart can be found plying the green sharrow lanes of Belmont Shores in search of fares. I spent part of a morning over coffee talking to Jesus Chavez and Joseph Bradley, co-founders of the Pedaler Society. These guys think big; they’re not afraid of risk; and they have clearly thrived thanks to the bike culture milieu in Long Beach. They are expanding into grocery delivery, and are even contemplating locally sourcing the manufacture of their vehicles as they expand their business. Building bikes in the United States? Sign me up. Look for the Pedalers when you make it to Long Beach.

Photo: Mark Plotz / NCBW

The Bicycle Stand
One of the newest businesses in Long Beach — and one of its friendliest — Evan Whitener’s shop specializes in refurbished vintage road bikes, and new city/commuter bikes. They were doing a very brisk bicycle restoration business when I stopped by. The Bicycle Stand is part bicycling museum, part fully functioning bike shop. If you worship lugged steel frames, you’ll like their Facebook page (linked above).

Photo: The Academy

The Academy
Have you ever tried to find affordable clothing that’s not made in a sweatshop? It’s nearly impossible; or at least I thought it was, until I walked into The Academy. They sell clothing designed to look good on the street and work well when you’re riding your bike. The Academy utilizes sustainable and reclaimed materials, and you can meet the person who sewed your clothes. If that’s not awesome enough, try the prices: shirts and kakis run about 43 bucks each. Stop by to meet Sam: he may lend you his bike for a roll around Long Beach.

And let’s not forget that Long Beach is also home to the original bicycle-related business: Bikestation!

There is hope and optimism in Long Beach; I hear it when talking to these brave, young entrepreneurs. Each cites Long Beach’s bicycling infrastructure investments, and its emergent bicycling culture as key to sparking, sustaining, and expanding their businesses.

Downtowns can be museums of economic development fads and crackpot schemes all designed to breathe economic life back into blighted areas. The pedestrian malls of the 70s; the aquariums of the 80s; the convention centers and stadiums of the 90s; the creative class coffee shops, wifi hot spots, and lifestyle centers of the 00s — these massive public/private expenditures may have provided an attraction, but they didn’t retain or attract the Laurens, the Jesuses, the Josephs, the Evans, and the Sams who will provide sustainable economic growth. There is a lesson in Long Beach. Let’s hope that walking, bicycling, and place become the new form of Economic Gardening.

See you in Long Beach!

Mark Plotz is the Conference Director for Pro Walk/Pro Bike® 2012: Pro Place. Registration for the conference is open now, and special rates apply until May 16, 11:59 pm Eastern. Large group discounts are available. Please contact Mark at (202) 223-3621 or mark@bikewalk.org for more info.

A sharrow points the way toward Long Beach's iconic Villa Riviera / Photo: waltarrrrr via Flickr

With so much attention focused on a certain conference in Long Beach last week, we want to make sure that complete streets advocates, placemakers, transportation wonks, and other walking and cycling enthusiasts don’t miss the news about another big event on the horizon in this sunny California city: early bird registration for the 17th Pro Walk / Pro Bike conference has just opened. The conference, which will focus on the theme “Pro Place” is scheduled for the week of September 10-13, 2012, and you can reserve your seat for a reduced rate up until Wednesday, May 16th.

Pro Walk / Pro Bike is a biennial event, founded in 1980 by the National Center for Bicycling & Walking, and serves as the premier venue for presenting work and meeting peers from the fields of transportation planning, engineering, health, advocacy, public policy, research, and more. The chair of this year’s host committee is Charlie Gandy, a cycling and pedestrian advocate with some serious cred. Currently the director of Livable Communities Inc. and a board member of the California Bicycle Coalition, Charlie previously served as the Director of Advocacy Programs for the Bicycle Federation of America, pioneered the concept of the Bicycle Friendly Business District as the Mobility Coordinator Long Beach’s Bike Long Beach program, and founded the Texas Bicycle Coalition (now Bike Texas).

To get a sense of Charlie’s approach to the subject at hand for September’s conference, one need look no further than his talk on Creating Charismatic Communities at last summer’s TEDxSoCal event. Charlie talks about encouraging the development of the personality of place, and explains how the city of Long Beach has spent the last few years “looking at basic urban design and health issues and coming up with some new and different ways to articulate them…and has been developing fans and followers.”

All of us here at PPS are excited for this opportunity to work with Charlie to bring together transportation reform advocates from around the country for a discussion of how placemaking can help create more equitable transportation networks in our cities. This conference is central to our effort to Build Communities Through Transportation, and we’re looking forward to meeting with other placemakers in September to talk about the latest and most cutting-edge case studies in building more walkable, bike-friendly, charismatic communities. We hope to see you there!

We’ll be bringing you more information in the next couple of months as the Pro Walk / Pro Bike host committee culls through the hundreds of event proposals received from across the country in response to an open call and begins to lay out the full schedule. In the meantime, you can stay up to date with the National Center for Bicycling & Walking (which officially became a program of PPS last June) by signing up for their bi-weekly Centerlines e-newsletter.

Bicyclist-friendly Long Beach's downtown boasts a crisp new Bike Station / Photo: waltarrrrr via Flickr