Missouri Bicycle News

The Washington Post has an article by a reporter who walked 50 miles through Washington, D.C., and its suburbs:

Disappearing sidewalks, impassable crosswalks, unstoppable traffic, malevolent driving. Does it have to be such a jungle out there? . . .

I can remember when -- in a suburban Washington childhood in the '60s and '70s -- walking was common, routine even. We walked to the shopping center, walked to school. I can even remember walking on the Beltway in suburban Maryland the night before the roadway opened.

But somewhere between then and now, walking as an option in suburban America seems to have virtually disappeared. The facts bear this out. Between 1980 and today, the number of children walking to school has fallen from 70 percent to less than 10 nationwide. Walking as a means of getting from here to there is 36 times more dangerous than driving, according to the Surface Transportation Policy Project, a research and advocacy group. Nationally, only 5 percent of all trips are made on foot, but pedestrians account for more than 13 percent of all traffic fatalities.

The article ends with a section about Hwy 50 in Virginia, which officials had originally envisioned as a high-speed four-lane expressway, with $50 million interchanges by8passing several small towns in its path. When local citizens heard about this plan, they took action:

The Route 50 coalition was born and began asking questions, which led its members to the leaders of the new urbanism, and "traffic calming" and a federally funded pilot project that its backers say could be a model for the rest of the region, and the country, too. The project proceeded in stages -- years of "charrettes," or design meetings, where everyone from local storekeepers to fire and rescue workers and state highway officials was invited to come and draw on the blueprints. The central notion was that if you want people to drive at 25 mph, you don't build a road that looks like it's designed for 60 mph. Instead, you design it so it looks like you should drive 25, and then, as it turns out, people do. You build in some curves, some raised crosswalks (which reduce pedestrian accidents by a factor of 10, according to the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments), you use brick and other varied paving materials to let drivers know they've left the highway and there are humans afoot.

The full article is quite long but well worth reading in its entirety. permanent link to article: "Dreadful state of pedestrian accommodations in U.S. documented in 50-mile walk"
posted by Brent Hugh at 1/17/2004 11:17:36 AM |comment on this article