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Entries tagged: Pedestrians

Last week, we hosted a trio of top-notch advocates and agency staff on our Safe Routes for Seniors Mutual Aid Call.

For years, many Alliance organizations have worked on Safe Routes to School programs that encourage more kids to walk and bike to school. In 2003, advocates with Transportation Alternatives in New York City applied that concept to the aging population, launching their Safe Routes for Seniors initiative. The effort was the first program of its kind to address the unique needs of elderly pedestrians and consider the role of street design in maintaining good cardiovascular health in old age.

How did TA fund and win their campaign? How has the New York City Department of Transportation implemented and advanced the program as its own? How have advocates and partners outside the city limits built on the successes of NYC?

Learn more by:

• Listening to the call recording
• Downloading the call Tip Sheet
• Reviewing the host of new resources in our online library, including a host of reports from TA’s campaign

Thanks again to our incredible panelists for sharing their time and insight: Noah Budnick, deputy director for Transportation Alternatives, Ann Marie Doherty from the New York City Department of Transportation and Will Stoner with the New York state AARP.

If you’re working on Safe Routes for Seniors in your community and have resources to share, send them my way: .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).

Just this week, America Walks kicked off its National Walking Survey to learn more about who walks and why we walk.

The survey will help walking advocates understand what motivates avid walkers and what keeps others from walking more. When the data is analyzed, America Walks will let us know they’ve learned and how we can use the results to promote walking in America.

Help the Alliance and America Walks by taking the National Walking Survey today. This survey will take just five minutes to complete. Results are anonymous and your feedback is vital in helping us shape future policies and campaigns for walking.

Help the survey go viral: Post it, forward it, Facebook it, Tweet it! Thanks in advance for your participation!

Blog contributed by Alliance intern Alex Boardman

Last month, I was lucky enough to travel to Ecuador with my International Environment and Development class. Our trip was intended to be a case study on the trade-off between development and the environment — a topic we’ve focused on over the course of the semester.

The trip wasn’t exactly a vacation, and I was certainly grateful to be back in the United States for Thanksgiving! Luckily, despite all the time off from my internship, the past month gave me some interesting, international insight into bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure.

Ecuador was a perfect place to investigate the intersection of development and conservation, because of its constant conflict between preserving such a biologically diverse environment, while simultaneously trying to develop both socially and economically. For example, Yasuni National Park — the world’s most bio-diverse rainforest — has nearly one billion barrels of crude oil buried underneath it, amounting to more than $10 billion in potential revenue for the country. Over the course of three weeks, our trips included stops in Quito, Coca, the rainforest, the Galapagos Islands, and the Otavalo region.

Unfortunately, our first destination, Quito, which is the capital of Ecuador, was not particularly bike-friendly (picture below). Car ownership in Quito has risen more than 45 percent between 2002 and 2008 alone, and it continues to grow at an average rate of 30,000 more cars a year. With this significant increase in cars on the road, even something as simple as crossing the streets in the city is incredibly dangerous. To add further difficulty to bicycling and walking, the city streets are narrow, steep, and incredibly windy. There were virtually no bicyclists or pedestrians throughout the entire city. Our class had to take taxis to even travel three blocks from our hotel. Quito is also built in a valley, surrounded by the Andes Mountains, and suffers from severe air pollution and smog, especially as more and more cars occupy the road.

While Quito, and the rainforest (our second destination), weren’t particularly bike and ped friendly, I was more than impressed by the advanced biking and pedestrian infrastructure in the Puerta Ayora, the main “city” on Santa Cruz, in the Galapagos Islands. Residents and tourists of this small community enjoy streets with broad sidewalks and wide bike lanes. Included along the main road, Avenida Charles Darwin, bicyclists and pedestrians took advantage of two-way bike lanes. Cars seemed largely unnecessary in the town, where nearly everything is in walking distance of the few hotels in town. Residents in Puerta Ayora walked and bicycled everywhere—in fact, the only cars we saw were the white pick-up truck taxis intended for tourists.

In a country where car ownership is on the rise and such a unique environment is increasingly threatened by economic development, bicycle and pedestrian advocacy would be a great asset in Ecuador. In light of the recent holiday, we can certainly be thankful for the amazing groups we already have in place here and can only hope that in the future other countries around the world, like Ecuador will be able to further their bicycling and pedestrian accessibility efforts the way that we have been able to. I’ve certainly seen hope for this in the Galapagos.

With more than 160 member organizations, the Alliance is propelled by creative and visionary leaders in communities across North America. In the past few weeks, a handful of new faces have joined our ranks and we know you’d like to learn a little more about them. This week, meet Elizabeth Stampe, the first executive director of Walk San Francisco. 

Where are you from and how did you end up in San Francisco?

I’m originally from Hawai’i, but I moved to San Francisco after college in Santa Cruz. I’ve lived here, on and off, for almost 15 years.

Previous to WalkSF you worked for the Greenbelt Alliance. What inspired your interest in environmental conservation and how does walkability tie into that ethic?

I’ve worked on environmental conservation for my entire career. I actually have a master’s degree in plant ecology. Before getting that degree, I did environmental and political advocacy, and afterwards, I just had to plunge back into advocacy because I was impatient to make change. At Greenbelt Alliance, which advocates for smart growth, I found that cities and environmentalism can go together. City living offers a very green way to live, consuming less and sharing more. And walking, of course, is the most sustainable form of transportation!

An article in the Bay Guardian cited your having traveled the world; where did you go and did that give you any inspiration for ways to improve walkability in SF?

I didn’t go to the usual places! (Copenhagen, Amsterdam…) I was in India, Southeast Asia, and South America. And I noticed that, even though the streets in many big cities in Asia and South America might seem a lot more frenetic, people are paying much closer attention there. As a driver, you’re dealing with ditches, rickshaws, scooters, bikes, dogs, maybe cows, and, of course, lots of pedestrians. It can seem scary for a visitor, but you realize it works — it works because people are paying attention, and often driving more slowly than they are here. There aren’t many places we visited where drivers can assume that they can just floor it and go for miles like on our freeways, and unfortunately, like on many of our local roads. Another thing I noticed was the feeling of life. In places like Bangkok and La Paz, there’s so much living going on in the streets — buying and selling and eating and talking. I think the street food movement here in San Francisco is bringing some of that life to our streets, and at every Park(ing) Day and Sunday Streets we also get a sense of what could be.

What’s your biggest priority or campaign right now at Walk SF? What goals do you have for the remainder of 2010 and 2011?

Right now, I’m still in the listening and planning stages of Walk SF’s work for the coming year, but we’re looking at a combination of tackling citywide policies (reducing speeds, creating school zones, and lowering the cost of street improvements) and working with neighborhood groups on improvements in specific spots around the city. For example, on Walk to School Day (October 6), we got together with parents and kids in the Sunnyside neighborhood, where a big arterial road slices through a residential area, and drew attention to the need for change. We released a report on current conditions, with recommendations including a reduced speed limit, so that more kids can walk to school safely. This is a big issue as obesity is on the rise — and kids want to do it! Walking is fun, and they know it! They had a great time out there on the 6th. We want them to be able to do that every day.

One of the things a lot of pedestrian organizations struggle with is, while everyone walks, very few people consider themselves pedestrians or walkability advocates. How do you change that mindset and boost your membership?

We remind folks that everyone walks, whether you’re walking to the parking garage, going for a run with your dog, or getting a pint of milk at the corner store. There is a movement nationally now around reclaiming streets as shared public space, and that is exciting, especially with the various experiments with parklets and what here is called Sunday Streets, where streets are opened up for pedestrians and bikes every month. Those have been a huge success, and are changing people’s perceptions of what streets are for and who pedestrians are. We have a huge and impressive bike coalition here that’s helped to transform our streets; but not everyone who wants better streets rides a bike. Walk SF offers even more people a place and a space to speak up.

With the lifting of the Bicycle Plan injunction, your colleagues over at the SFBC have been touting their goal of making SF the most bike-friendly city in the nation. Do you see SF becoming the most pedestrian-friendly city in the nation, as well? If so, how do you get there?

That’s our goal, to make SF the most walkable city in the US! Some magazines and polls have already given SF that title, but there are a lot of exciting things going on in New York and Portland and Seattle that are definitely beyond what we’ve got here. And unfortunately, San Francisco has very high rates of pedestrian collisions and injuries, which the city has got to address. San Francisco has good land use and lots of destinations within walking distance of many people, but we’ve still got a lot of work to do on basic safety and on improving the experience of walking.

Where’s your favorite place to walk in San Fran?

I love connecting urban neighborhoods and parks, so I like to walk from my neighborhood, the Mission, to Bernal Hill. I go along Valencia with its cute shops and newly redone street with wide sidewalks and street trees and bike parking, through the vibrant Latino heart of the neighborhood where I can practice my South American Spanish, to the peak of Bernal, from which I can see the Bay, the Golden Gate Bridge, the East Bay hills, hawks flying overhead — and a lot of other happy walkers.

Being that you’re an Alliance leader now, you’re part of a little tradition. At our Leadership Retreat every two years, we have a Talent Show. So what’s one of your hidden talents?

Ha!  Hmmmm… Well, I taught yoga in Buenos Aires and am looking to start that up again in SF. Don’t know if that’s a show-worthy thing, but perhaps it would do people good to stretch and breathe in between being overwhelmed by everyone’s talents! Actually, another talent is conning my friends and family into taking much longer walks with me than they ever planned… of course, they might debate whether that’s a talent!

Keep track of Elizabeth’s efforts and progress in the Bay City on the Walk SF website.

The folks at CART were dusting off the chicken suit and making protest signs last week. But city officials heeded their clucking, even before they gathered on a dangerous street corner.

Since the start of 2010, the Coalition for the Advancement of Regional Transportation has been tracking a disturbing disappearance of sidewalks in Louisville, Kentucky. The first notable instance was back in January, when a developer started moving dirt on Bardstown Road, a major city artery, but failed to make accommodations for pedestrians during construction.

Advocates from CART recorded video of residents trying to traverse the area on foot, hugging the fencing as they walked precariously at the edge of the busy street.

“This is not an isolated incident,” CART president, David Morse, wrote on the group’s blog. “Nor is it an accident that Louisville is always ranked very poorly in walking safety. The city is constantly permitting crass sidewalk blockages… [and] the results speak for themselves: In 2009 we were ranked the 7th most dangerous city in Dangerous By Design, a study undertaken by the Surface Transportation Policy Partnership and Transportation for America.” So CART organized a protest, complete with a bright yellow chicken costume, calling attention to the issue on Bardstown Road.

And it worked.

Three days later, the fencing retreated several feet and the sidewalk reappeared.

Now, flash forward to July.

This month, Morse noted that new construction and redevelopment in downtown Louisville was taking sidewalks out of commission — sometimes on both sides of the heavily traversed streets. “Not only are the walkers here incredibly numerous, but they’re also the economic engine that keeps the state afloat,” Morse wrote last week. “The business deals, the bus stops, the remote parking lots, the lunch meetings — all these trips have a walking component. So you would think that we would take special measures to keep walking downtown safe and dignified — it’s just common sense.”

So the group prepared to suit up for a second protest last Friday. But the night before the demonstration City Hall took notice — 18 hours before the protest, officials erected a sidewalk diversion to ensure the safety of pedestrians.

So, on Friday, the bright yellow chicken and his flock of CART advocates had a different message, hoisting signs that said “Thank You!” and, more importantly, “Please, Sir, I Want Some More!”

Read more about CART’s continued campaign of “Sidewalk Defense” on their blog.

According to Chicago’s Active Transportation Alliance, “The Illinois General Assembly passed a monumental bill, HB43, clarifying the current law by requiring drivers to stop for pedestrians in all crosswalks – even those that don’t have a stop sign or traffic signal; and even those that aren’t marked with paint. Current law is vague and nearly impossible to enforce.

HB 43 is clear: come to a complete stop when pedestrians are present.

Active Trans worked with Sen. Heather Steans (Chicago) and Rep. Luis Arroyo (Chicago) to make Illinois a state that prioritizes and protects people, not cars. These two legislators were champions that deserve a lot of praise. If you are in their districts, please call them or write a handwritten thank you note letting them know their efforts were appreciated and congratulating them on their victory. The Illinois Association of Chiefs of Police, Metropolitan Planning Council and a particularly active group of students at Curie Metropolitan High School have played critical roles in this victory.

This will go into law as soon as Gov. Quinn signs the bill.

HB 43 will save lives and prevent serious injuries. More than 6,000 people are hit by cars every year in Illinois. That translates into 1,000 serious injuries and 150 fatalities.

This victory has been nearly two years in the making and we couldn’t have done it without the phone calls, support and momentum you provide. Thank you!”

For more information, visit http://www.activetrans.org/blog.