Making a Truly Walkable City

Walking is by far the main mode of travel for short local journeys in the UK, with 83% of journeys under one mile being walked, and that’s about a quarter of all thr trips that we make. Overall walking makes up nearly a third of our journeys that are less than five miles.

Earlier this year Oxford City Council had an agenda item on Making Oxford a Truly Walkable City. Unfortunately, the item never got discussed at the time, but was on the agenda for a meeting earlier this week. There were also a variety of other interesting and progressive things raised.

Walking is the main thing of interest to us at the moment though, and that is because so many people walk. If cycling were more inclusive, rather than being restricted by the conditions to only the bravest and fittest members of society, people might cycle some of those journeys but there are always going to be a lot of short journeys where walking is the most convenient option.

Most people walk, so any changes that councils make to improve conditions for walking directly benefit lots of people. Continuous pavements can make a real difference to the experience of people walking or wheeling, by removing the seemingly never ending ups and downs at driveways and side roads. Individually there are scarecly noticeable, but ultimately they just make getting around harder especially as the distances get further.

The Oxford motion suggested that the City Council could require residential dropped kerbs to be “Dutch style” entry kerbs. That is the kind of thing that would only affect new work though, so wouldn’t make much different is the short term.

Something that can be done in the short term is to reduce waiting times at traffic light controlled pedestrian crossings. We are at the time of year when people not only are the conditons for being outside much worse because it is darker, colder and more likely to be raining, there are also more people out shopping, meeting people, and celebrating.

Reducing the maximum waiting times at pedestrian crossings is the kind of thing that benefits an awful lot of people (even though a few of them might be too drunk to either notice or remember) by reducing the time that they are left standing in the wind and rain whilst drivers, who aren’t even visiting in the city, are hurried through in their warm dry cars.