Colin Speakman
The views expressed in this post are those of the contributor and do not necessarily represent the views of all members of the Gritstone co-operative.
The pandemic has forced many people to look at new lifestyle choices, including different ways of travelling. If air travel has suffered a massive (temporary) decline, so has public transport usage. Car travel on the other hand, is almost back to normal – lower in city centres as people abandon the daily commute but maybe even above normal levels in rural areas and country towns.
People are, however, cycling and walking more frequently – at least while the weather is fine and days are long.
In terms of walking there is at last recognition that the last 60 years of almost total dominance of the private car have left many urban and suburban areas now very difficult places for to walk through and between, at least outside relatively small pedestrianised areas. Until recently many local authorities were even regularly closing urban walkways and paths as potential crime scenes – notwithstanding the fact that most criminals are welded to their cars for most of their activities.
A new study by the New York based Institute for Transportation and Development Policy provides us with a major piece of research that proves what we already know – that very few cities in the world give pedestrians priority; most are dominated by cars and car-based urban and peri-urban sprawl. Nearly 230,000 pedestrians worldwide are expected to be killed in road crashes in 2020.
In the study cities in the USA score worst of all in terms of walkability, with Bogota (Columbia) Hong Kong, Moscow, Paris and London – with their excellent public transport networks – scoring among the highest.
It would be interesting to see which UK towns and cities score high for walkability defined by the ease of access to key facilities such as parks, pedestrianised streets and squares, health facilities, shops and schools. Cities with relatively unspoiled medieval or even 18th and 19th century centres such as York, Cambridge, Edinburgh that have not been ravaged by the bulldozer might score highly. Even Victorian Leeds outside its ghastly inner ring roads and loops has some excellent walking corridors such as the Meanwood Valley, Leeds-Liverpool Canal and Trans Pennine Trail plus new walking and cycling paths being developed through outer suburbs.
This also chimes in with research by Dan Raven-Ellison, self-styled Guerrilla Geographer and Creative Explorer (www.ravenellison.com/portfolio/slow-ways.) who with a network of 700 volunteers has mapped out a network of 110,00kms of public paths and quiet byways on 7,500 routes, known as Slow Ways, linking every town and city in the UK.
Dan is of course just reinventing the wheel. My local Ramblers groups were connecting Leeds and Bradford by walking routes back in the 1960s. In 1970 I led a public walk between Leeds and York. The Dales Way links central Bradford, Leeds and Harrogate with the Lake District. During Lockdown, when use of public transport was cut to the minimum or only available for essential work journeys, as we don’t have a car, my wife and I frequently walked 3 kms on footpaths to our nearest town Otley to visit the local market or indeed to 6 kms to nearby Ilkley.
Great as the Slow Ways concept is, it needs a reality check. In what state are these Ways in? How many are badly neglected, unsigned or exist besides kilometres of car polluted concrete and tarmac, or worst of all have to negotiate crash barriers, car parking lots, and dangerous crossings, or avoid long cul-de-sac suburban roads built purely for cars without any pedestrian exits? Secondly if your travel is limited to the distance you can cover even at a vigorous walking place, you are thrust back into the pre-railway age, where life for most people was restricted to literally their walking distance from home – say 15-20 kms at most. Part of the Slow Ways equation has got to be decent networks of urban and rural transport which contrary to popular mythology largely perpetuated by car drivers, still exists in most – but no means all – areas of Britain, usually on weekdays at least, with an hourly or two-hourly bus or even train service between the towns you can walk to or between.
I have chosen to live in a former West Yorkshire industrial, now commuter village, Burley-in-Wharfedale, which is maybe a model of what a Slow Ways community should be. It has lots of green spaces in the centre, shops, community facilities, library, surgery, dentist, pubs, bus stops, schools all within 10 minutes’ walk from anywhere in the village. Lovely walkways, many following traditional Yorkshire ginnels between houses and gardens, join a network of footpaths leading not only to nearby Ilkley and Otley, but onwards to the centres of Leeds and Bradford 12 or 14 miles away. But there are also frequent buses and train to get the walker home again.
So to create an environmentally sustainable future, in terms of civic design and development, we must re-create pre-industrial urban and suburban walking networks, linked to public transport, putting people on foot at the very heart of all new development schemes. We must even take the bulldozer to blockages in existing development that prevent easy access on foot rather than wheels.
By at least raising awareness of our anti-pedestrian urban policies and attitudes, Dan Raven-Ellison has lit a beacon.
Image: Dales Way link © Colin Speakman
