2023-06-10 13:10:22
There is no doubt that walking is the means of displacement more sustainable daily commute for short distances. It causes virtually no noise or air pollution and consumes far fewer non-renewable resources than any mode of motorized transportation. The energy required to walk is provided directly by the traveler, and the use of that energy offers valuable cardiovascular exercise. In fact, walking provides not only physical, but also psychological and social health benefits for people of most ages and abilities.
Walking requires only a fraction of the space needed to drive and park cars. Also, walking from the point of view neuroeconomic, it costs much less than the private car and public transport, both in terms of direct user outlays and investments in public infrastructure. Walking is affordable for virtually everyone and is therefore the most socially equitable of all modes of transport as well as the oldest and most natural form of human travel.
- 1- Steps towards better designs
- 2- Steps towards better land use
- 3- Steps towards better driving habits
- 4- Steps towards better transportation education
- 5- Steps that ordinary citizens must take
Along the streets, as human beings and not just vehicles, pedestrians contribute to the attractiveness, vitality and social interaction of urban areas. Therefore, most urban designers, planners, and geographers in recent years have supported compact, mixed-use development that facilitates walking and reduces automobile dependency, while opposing automobile-oriented sprawl, of low population density. These designers argue that cities should be designed for people, not cars.
Walking provides not only physical, but also psychological and social health benefits for people of most ages and abilities.
Walking is a feasible way of doing some journeys in their entirety, from origins to final destinations, provided the journey is short enough, which is often the case in parts of towns and cities where development is compact and in use. mixed. Walking also provides crucial access to other modes. For example, the vast majority of public transport passengers arrive on foot to their bus and train stops, and even transfers between different public transport lines (for example, within a metro system) would be almost impossible without walking. Walking is also essential to access cars, whether they are parked in driveways, on the street, in surface or underground parking lots. In short, the transportation system could hardly function without walking.
Walking as a research topic has experienced a boom in the last three decades. A Web of Science search reveals an 80-fold increase in the average annual number of published peer-reviewed articles on the topic of walking from 1990 to 2022. Extensive scientific evidence now confirms the key role of walking in transportation systems sustainable, livable cities and healthy people.
A recently published article (2023) in the journal Sustainability updates the findings of previous works published in Transport ReviewsAmerican Journal of Public Health y TRNews. The findings show that, overall, Americans walk less than people in many other countries, while also having a higher walking death rate per mile walked.
The researchers used a variety of government statistics, including travel surveys, national censuses, and traffic survey databases, throughout their research. Their study also examines a variety of measures to increase pedestrian safety and the impact of those measures on walk rates.
Americans walk less than people in many other countries.
According to the study, Americans make less than half the trips on foot per day compared to the British, but are about six times more likely to die while walking per mile traveled. Those disparities remain relatively consistent on both fronts when the United States is compared with several other European nations, including Germany, Denmark, and the Netherlands.
All 11 countries studied between 1990 and 2020 saw per capita pedestrian fatalities decline over that span, but the numbers declined substantially less in the US. Americans had a 26% decline compared to 78% in the UK , For example.
More worrisome is that while other countries continued to improve pedestrian safety between 2010 and 20, the United States was the only country to see an increase, of up to 25%, in pedestrian safety. pedestrian fatalities. Other study findings include that walking rates are higher for short trips, women have a higher walking rate than men, and walking rates generally decline as income levels increase.
The United States is also a outliner in this last category. Americans are the only group where the highest income group walked more than the middle class. The researchers say this is likely due to the gentrification (Process of urban and social rehabilitation of a depressed or deteriorated urban area) of many central areas of cities since the year 2000, where walking is safe and convenient. The United States has a long history of creating policies that promote driving while restricting pedestrians.
The story is really fascinating because in the late 1890s and early 1900s, pedestrians were everywhere on the streets, but cars needed that space, so they drive pedestrians off the streets with all these campaigns. And they succeeded, of course, because no one today would say that the street is a safe place for pedestrians. And that mindset has guided much of the country’s infrastructure planning as it has grown over the past century.
Along with more pedestrian-friendly street designs, thought needs to be given to creating more walkable communities.
Based on the successes of other countries, the magazine study Sustainabilityled by Ralph Buehler (Office of Urban Affairs and Planning, Virginia Tech, Arlington, United States) and John Pucher (School of Planning and Public Policy, Rutgers University, New Brunswick), suggests steps governments could take to take measures that promote a safe walk:
1- Steps towards better designs
A cultural shift is needed that places pedestrians more first in the road planning process. This could include incorporating clearly marked and well-lit sidewalk and crosswalk networks and safety islands built at intersection corners and medians, as well as rethinking road layouts and de-emphasizing design for speed.
2- Steps towards better land use
Along with more pedestrian-friendly street designs, thought needs to be given to creating more walkable communities, which should include revamping zoning laws and regulations to allow for mixed-use spaces.
If you continue to define neighborhoods as places without corner stores, day care centers, doctor’s offices and daily necessities, you are forcing people to drive because the distance will be long and there really will be no other option.
3- Steps towards better driving habits
Lower speed limits, enforced by both police and traffic cameras, as well as stricter laws related to drunk and distracted driving could greatly benefit the safety of both drivers and walkers. It is also necessary to review the laws and their application to place more responsibility on drivers.
4- Steps towards better transportation education
It is obviously potentially dangerous, even living close to schools, for children to walk safely to their teaching place. As a result, parents decide to take them and pick them up by car and therefore there are more cars circulating near those schools. Many countries with safer walking rates also have more restrictive regulations in this field. Similar efforts, combined with more proactive educational programs related to walking and driving for youth, could greatly increase the overall safety of both activities. Thus, many school districts in the Netherlands (NL), Denmark (DK) and Germany (GER) and the United Kingdom (UK) offer driver education as part of their regular curriculum. By third or fourth grade, most children have received classroom instruction and hands-on training in safe walking and bicycling skills, which is important because children in those countries walk or bike for a large part of their lives. of their trips (NL: 64%, DK: 51%, GER: 43%, UK 34%). By comparison, few American schools offer that kind of traffic safety training for young children, perhaps because such a small percentage of American children walk or bike to school—in fact, only 10% do. In safety, these training courses in schools ensure that all children are accustomed to walking and bicycling to school by the third or fourth grade of primary school.
Citizen awareness of taking care of their environment and expressing their complaints to the closest institutions is a basic element to improve the environment.
In stark contrast, most American schools offer free or inexpensive high school driver’s training classes that prepare drivers to get a driver’s license as soon as they reach the minimum age in their state, which ranges from 16 to 18. years. The Netherlands, Denmark, Germany, and the United Kingdom require much stricter and much more expensive motorist training and licensing than in the United States. In addition, the training and testing of motorists in these four European countries includes a specific approach to avoiding the danger of pedestrians and cyclists, especially children and the elderly.
In Spain we have not found similar data
5- Steps that ordinary citizens must take
Naturally as the weather warms walking becomes more attractive, and it also provides an opportunity to promote a critical role in making communities safer for travel on foot. People who go out and walk every day, know about dangerous situations, know about the deficiencies of the sidewalks or traffic signals that do not work, among others. These folks need to go to their local politicians, because what you find time and time again is that those people in the front office really don’t always know what’s out there outside their offices.
In other words, citizen awareness of caring for their environment and expressing their complaints to the closest institutions, either individually or associatively, is a basic element to improve the environment and therefore the safety of the citizen who walks through it.
Finally, share this provocative reflection of the American writer Helen Keller: “Safety is more than anything a superstition. Life is a daring adventure or it is nothing.
#Steps #walk #safely