🦶 Best Foot Forward - MM#622
Good day my good friend.
Transport is not just my day job, but a big part of my job as a town councillor. Apparently, knowing stuff about transport means that everything to do with highways and buses comes to me. This means spending endless hours poring over plans and consultation documents, knowing full well that its futile because even when engagement is done properly (my local council doesn’t do it very well), the formal public consultation is at best an opportunity to capture anything missed. And too often, its a box-ticking exercise.
In the last 6 months, my notable victories have been in getting a planned toucan crossing moved closer to a junction so pedestrians, cyclists, and wheelers don’t have to move more than 200 metres way from the desire line. And getting community transport services exempt from a bus gate so they can drop off and pick up passengers at the local station. This is through a mix of responding to consultations and meeting with council officers. Its tiring work, and the subject of today’s newsletter is borne from a recent consultation which I am helping respond to.
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James
🚲 Local cycling, not walking, investment plans
A key part of the UK Government’s strategy for getting more people walking and cycling is the development of Local Cycling and Walking Investment Plans, or LCWIPs. The logic is simple - it you set out what network you want to deliver, you need a plan for it. Plans get you funding - especially from Active Travel England. And so everywhere should have a plan so it is delivered. Which makes a lot of sense.
I have had the pleasure of reviewing many-an LCWIP as part of my day job and in a voluntary capacity. Many are good documents, such as the Manchester Active Travel Strategy that does a good job of setting an ambition, deliverable goals, and actually sets out a plan for doing it. There is a small problem with the majority of them, though.
There is little, if any, mention of walking.
Walking is the Cinderella mode of transport. The National Travel Survey shows that it is the second-most popular mode of travel other that the car, ignoring the fact that the overwhelming majority of trips start and end with a walk. This is a trend that has been consistent for a long time. But it is almost never thought of as a mode of transport.
The silly thing is that nobody quite understands why we don’t give that much of a focus on pedestrians. There have been many theories as to why. My personal favourite is that it comes naturally to so many of us that without the restrictions of law or physical possibility, most of us can walk anywhere. It is as natural as breathing and eating to most of us, and so we just forget it. It is then the responsibility of other modes, like cycling (under the grouping of ‘active travel’) and providing access for people with limited mobility, to pick up the slack and support walking.
Placemaking is a movement that has placed significant emphasis on walking over the last 10 years or so. Even within this, walking is often incidental to other activities. But maybe this is part of the point. The visionary Jan Gehl put this perfectly:
What we see now is a renaissance of the public space as a meeting place. The increase in the sidewalk-café culture worldwide is a very sure sign of people wanting to be in public spaces.
This quote here sets out why walking is such a special mode of transport. Other modes of transport are about the physical act of moving people and things from one place to another, often as quickly and directly as possible. Walking, by contrast, is not just about that. It is about interactions with others, conversations, chance meetings. It is about being human as much as it is about getting around.
Lets be honest, the interactions with other people that you have in your car is to tell them how much of an idiot they are for taking 0.023 seconds too long to pull out from the side road. On public transport, I’m English so anyone trying to start up some kind of conversation on public transport is treated with suspicion. For bikes is slightly better, but not exactly convenient to stop and chat. Such a challenge does not exist for people travelling at walking pace.
It is no shock that LCWIPs do not seem to articulate the needs of walking very well. In my local LCWIP, for example, a ninety-eight page document has two pages dedicated to walking. Even then, the approach being taken is essentially “we’ll think about the needs of pedestrians when we can.”
The result of this is that these are not really LCWIPs at all, they are LCIPs (Local Cycling Improvement Plans) with a bit of walking attached on the end. The result is that a lot of money is dedicated specifically to cycling infrastructure, and little is given to walking.
I should stress that it is not a bad thing that cycle networks are identified and built. They are a good thing, and the more short distance car trips that become bicycle trips the better. What I am saying here is that for the value of walking to be realised - including its economic potential, by the way - what is needed is Local Placemaking Plans (LPPs), where local transport authorities set out what they will do to make neighbourhoods better places to walk, and also cycle. These are plans where we start to ask daring questions about how we can improve the quality of our streets to maximise our opportunities to be human. And doing so means putting walking right at the top of the agenda.
Homosapiens have been around for around 300,000 years (give or take a few paleontological arguments), and since then walking has allowed us to be human, and to expand across the world. Humans didn’t even domesticate horses - our next transport revolution - until about 4000 years ago, well after we had walked our way to every single continent except Antarctica. So I find it amazing that not only do we continue to misunderstand the value of walking, but we continue to think of it as a mode of transport. Its not. Its a mode of being human, and the sooner we treat it as such, the better.
What you can do: Like it or not, the LCWIP process is what we have, and its not without its benefits. I recommend that you review the guidance so when you create one of your own, you know what you are doing.
There are some small things that you can do to make things better for pedestrians. Call for priority crossings at side roads and pedestrian crossings outside of major trip generators.
🎓 From academia
The clever clogs at our universities have published the following excellent research. Where you are unable to access the research, email the author - they may give you a copy of the research paper for free.
Electric cars as a path to sustainable travel behaviour: Insights from Nord-Jæren
TL:DR - Don’t rely on EVs to decarbonise everything, as people tend to like cars and reducing car use is also good.
Exploring autonomous bus users’ intention: Evidence from positive and negative effects
TL:DR - If people try autonomous buses they are more likely to use them.
TL:DR - Study confirms every other study that shows LTNs reduce traffic volumes, this time in Southwark.
Metro’s night travel offer on the weekend and its impact on house prices
TL:DR - Apparently having a night service on a metro increases house prices by an average of 22%. I’m skeptical.
✊ Awesome people doing awesome things
Well done to the residents of Castle & Priory in Dudley, who campaigned for years to get a pedestrian crossing between where they live and a local supermarket, community centre, and the rest of the residential estate where people live. And they finally got it. Alongside an average speed camera it needs adding. It may seem a small thing in the grand scheme of things, but campaigning for and winning a new pedestrian crossing will make all the difference to their lives.
📻 On The Wireless
The latest episode of the Talking Headways Podcast speaks to Ben Goldfarb, on his latest book about how roads are changing ecosystems. If you don’t have time to read the book, this interview covers most of the key points of the book. The podcast is available from wherever you get your podcasts.
📷 On The ‘Gram
I’ve been playing around with Instagram a little over the last few weeks. Propelbikes is one of the better accounts that I have found, and in this post they make the obvious point that lots of money is spent on roads, when a fraction spent on cycling and walking could do much more.
📚 Random things
These links are meant to make you think about the things that affect our world in transport, and not just think about transport itself. I hope that you enjoy them.
The US and China Should Push for an Ambitious Plastics Treaty (Common Dreams)
What today’s working class wants from political leaders (Brookings Institution)
Joe Biden’s top climate adviser on how climate change will shape the US economy (The Verge)
Exploring civic engagement dynamics during emergencies: an empirical study into key drivers (Policy & Policy Journal)
Just leaving trees to grow could store a third of our carbon emissions (New Scientist)
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