Who Walks?

 So when we talk about walkability, a basic question we need to consider: who walks? That is, who actually is going to be walking on the sidewalks, or paths, or whatever we put out there (or fail to put out there--people will walk where they're not supposed to too)? 

In answering that question, there are a few different angles we can take on it, each of which will produce a somewhat different result in terms of how we should design our streetscapes.

1. Everyone Walks

This is my favorite, though admittedly not the only way to think about this. At some level, everyone walks: even people taking other forms of transit, from the train to the car, rarely go all the way into their destination without taking at least a few steps somewhere along the way (cars ramming fast food joints excepted).

So in a sense, everyone walks. 

That's true in a more robust sense as well: almost everyone has some trips they make by foot, whether to the corner store, a park, a neighbor's house, or a child walking to school. They may not make all, many, or most trips by foot, but there's usually at least some places you can and do walk to.

They may not always walk in the middle of the street, like in this Vancouver shot, but they walk somewhere.

If everyone walks, that means we need to at some level accommodate everyone: we can't have sidewalks that don't function for strollers or wheelchairs, we can't have steps as a required part of the route, and we need to have sidewalks wide enough to accommodate a potentially large number of people.

Again, maybe not the whole street, but something bigger than one person wide.

2. Marginalized People Walk

Another way of thinking about it is that, at least in many US contexts, only the poor and marginalized walk. People with no access to other options, whether because of cost (a car isn't cheap, and depending on how good it is and how much money you have, neither is public transit in many places), age (kids can't drive, and sometimes neither can the elderly), or other disability or difficulty, will fall back on non-transit options, i.e. walking (and the other activities we typically classify with it, like rolling a wheelchair).

Narrow sidewalks, like this one in the Netherlands, can discourage this--but still, people can get pushed to walking in any conditions.

Now, this can be used as an excuse not to invest in walking infrastructure: it's rarely a political winner to install things that only the marginalized members of the community are seen as using. 

But from a more empathetic perspective, this should remind us to invest in walking infrastructure precisely because it's a last resort. Anyone can end up disabled or poor; everyone should still have the right to get around.

Also, if you don't like having homeless people camped out on the street, stop trying to pretend that making the sidewalk worse will somehow produce housing for them.

3. The Powerful Walk

The flip side of #2 is that when people have money and power, one of the first things they do with it is to make it more pleasant and easier for them to walk places.

Colleges (here Buena Vista University in Storm Lake, IA) are famous for good walking paths and frequent foot traffic. They spend their endowments and donor money on making it easier for their students and community members to walk places.

Beautified spaces (here the University of Washington campus in Seattle, WA) are often walkable spaces.

Tourist spaces (here near Pike Place Market, also in Seattle) are often walkable as well.

This aerial view of Seattle can give us a similar thought: the parks and green spaces are often the most walkable, and they aren't in the poorer neighborhoods.

So while the poor and marginalized walk by necessity, the rich make it more pleasant to walk on purpose.

This should teach us that walking is not just a last resort--it's also, in some cases, a luxury.

So in the end, I lied above: I think all of these examples teach us the same lesson. That lesson is that walking is something we need to invest in: whether because we all do it, or because some people have to, or because once they have options people choose to. Walking is a critical amenity at all levels.