HOW TO MAKE CITIES PEDESTRIAN FRIENDLY

The New Scientist, 21/28 December 2019, No 3261/62, was an interesting read. It was the Christmas & New Year Special issue, so it gathered together a variety of different, even quirky subjects for enjoyably informative reading: the centrepiece was Appealing peels, citrus peel art, three pieces all made to look wonderful with computer graphics – a Christmas tree, an Octopus, and a Stegosaurus. Another article intrigued: it was titled, How to make cities pedestrian friendly and reduce car use – page 10. One’s attention was stimulated. How? is indeed the question that has been thought about by many, without much success. What might the science say about this?

The report started by telling us that Street layouts have a major influence on people’s decisions to drive or travel by foot. The research had been carried out by Christopher Burlington-Leigh at McGill University in Canada and Adam Millard-Ball at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Do all names of academics have to be hyphenated? Connectivity seemed to be the issue, both in names and streets.

The results show that cities with grid-like street patterns, such as Buenos Aires, Osaka, Alexandria and Taipei, have the best connectivity. Old European cities like Paris and Vienna also score well – despite their intersections tending to be irregularly spaced and three-way instead of four-way – because they still form highly connected networks.

The researchers found that the problems are cul-de-sacs and crescents, like those in cities such as Bangkok, Raleigh in North Carolina, and Manchester.

Cul-de-sacs caught on in the 20^th century in the US and UK when cars enabled people to spread out and planners tried to create safe havens for kids to “play street hockey or run over to their neighbours”, says Barrington-Leigh. But research shows that people are actually more likely to be run over and killed in cul-de-sacs than on grid-like streets, possibly because pedestrians are less cautious and the curvy roads make them less visible to drivers.

So it seems the answer is for planners and architects to avoid cul-de-sacs and crescents, and use gridded layouts. It is an interesting study that seems to get a little engrossed in itself and its methodology, as it does not really address possibilities beyond some casual observations and mathematical calculations: they tallied the numbers of intersections, streets radiating off each intersection, dead end loops, and measured the straightness of the routes between each intersection . . . for all 46 million kilometres of the world’s mapped roads.

One can be disappointed with the promise in the title, as making cities more pedestrian friendly and reducing car use seem to involve much more that directness and distance, which appears to be the initial assumption for the solution that the researchers set out to discover. There seems to be something circular in this work. Surely the quality and character of place and space in a city or town will determine its desirability for pedestrians and/or vehicles? The irony is that design can exclude vehicles in an effort to improve areas for pedestrians. Just what is involved in making these vehicle-free zones attractive would make for a much more useful study, as it is not clear, or easy. There have been many attempts, and many failures.

The point is that we need to know more about matters than numbers and their count. Once these more complex issues are understood, then the challenge will be to apply them to our cities and towns along with good design for vehicles. Everyone already knows that cul-de-sacs and crescents are a confusing difficulty, a baffling nuisance for ordinary circulation through an area, be this pedestrian or vehicular, and that the old cities like Paris are indeed a pleasure to stroll through. That gridded cites might be equally pleasurable remains another matter to be considered: more is involved than the clarity of the grid and quantities.

So, if one has to respond with a ‘fact check’ proven or not proven, the answer has to be not proven; but the little study is of general interest, if only to stimulate discussion on the issue that plagues nearly every settlement in the world today, both large and small. The core of the problem lies not only in understanding human nature, but also in trying to accommodate the human spirit, to embrace it, and to care for it. It is a strange fact that cul-de-sacs and crescents were all thought be be a good beginning for this friendly consideration, but apparently not. At least the study confirmed this glitch in our general assumptions; as well as those gut feelings about civic mazes.