Why I'm Not a Pedestrian
The following article is adapted from a speech Scott Ogilvie gave earlier this month at the Trailnet Movers & Shakers 2019 Gala in St. Louis. Trailnet works in St. Louis and throughout Missouri to improve walking and biking networks that attract and retain talent, strengthen the economy, and connect people to the places they love. Ogilvie, who works with the Planning and Urban Design Agency for the City of St. Louis, is also a former city alderman. He notes: “In the next few paragraphs, I am going to use the word ‘walking’ quite a few times. If you are a person who uses a wheelchair or another way to travel, know that I also mean you when I say walking.”
Twenty years ago, I took my first ride on the Riverfront Trail, which Trailnet was instrumental in getting built. After thousands of other rides, I still remember that ride. Partially because I didn't bring any water and was very thirsty—but also because seeing something for the first time is memorable. The bicycle is one of the best ways to visit the place you live. It is fast enough to take you places, but slow enough to help you understand where you are.
Something I love about bike culture right now in St. Louis right is the emphasis on fun. We've got the Monday night Southside Ride, the Monthly Cycle, the Trailnet Community rides, and the ride that happens every full moon, the Ghost Ride. While each has their own vibe, these rides all share an inclusive, happy, rolling social club atmosphere. The point is not the bike ride as athletic pursuit—the point is the bike ride as a gathering of friends. There's kind of an old idea here—the idea that streets are not just for transportation. The idea is that streets are public space.
St. Louis Riverfront Trail. Image via Trailnet on Flickr.
This was once a perfectly obvious idea. All kinds of life happened on the street that had little to do with transportation. The desire for a bustling street isn't just nostalgia, because the truth is great cities, great places to visit, are always still great places to walk. There's a shortage of great public spaces in this country, and it's often been observed that we'll travel to visit somewhere that is a great place to walk, but we don't always understand how to build those places where we already live.
A thousand years ago, the whole world was your sidewalk. But since the introduction of the car, the space we allow people to walk has narrowed, and narrowed, and narrowed. Walking used to be natural, and essential everywhere—but we invented new rules and customs that moved people out of the way so cars could move faster. We’ve put walking in a smaller and smaller box. We call it “alternative transportation” we “accommodate bikes and peds” In short, we put walking on the margins, rather than at the center of what we do.
Even the word pedestrian—which is a common word, one I use a lot, but am trying to use less. Where does that word come from? Before anyone used that word to describe someone walking, pedestrian meant dull, lacking wit and imagination, ordinary. No one used the word pedestrian to mean a person traveling until the emergence of a related word, equestrian. To go by horse. And then along came the word pedestrian, to go by foot, as its counterpart. But who went by horse in cities? The wealthy and powerful went by horse, while the rest of us, the pedestrians, went by foot. The equestrian was pulled by an expensive four-legged vehicle that needed to be fueled and stored and maintained, while the pedestrian made due with their feet. Sounds a little familiar doesn't it?
So perhaps we should retire the word pedestrian if we want to elevate our ideas about walking. Pedestrian is one of those words that conceals what's it's talking about. No one of us ever says, “Look at those small pedestrians trick or treating.” Of course we use normal words like children, walk the dog, walk to the park, and so on. Yet in transportation-speak, you walk out your door, and you've suddenly been transformed into a pedestrian.
On a monthly basis, this country tracks and reports a precise estimate of the total miles travelled by car. Every year we survey how people get to work, which we call mode share. In most cities in the United States, most people drive to work. After that is transit, then walking, then riding a bike. But what percentage of total trips are trips to and from work? Any guesses? The real number is only 15%. That's it—almost all of our data on non-auto travel is on only 15% of trips. We don't keep regular national data on the other 85%. But outside of work, 100% of people walk, at least a little bit. But almost all these trips are officially invisible.
In the stats, when you walk the dog, it doesn't count. Go for a run? Doesn't count. Child walks to a friend's house? Doesn't count. Walk to the bus stop? Doesn't count. Walk in the park? Nope. Walk from dinner to a movie? No. Get off the train and walk to work? No. That trip is invisible. All the miles I ride every year for fun. Where do those miles show up in our official transportation paradigm? They don't.
The point is not that we should start tracking everyone's movements. But we need a transportation paradigm that accounts for the vast diversity of the ways people still use the public space we call streets. We have started to move the needle, but what we still have is a transportation system that largely prioritizes the speed of cars over the human, flesh and blood needs of people. We have inhumane streets by design.
There’s a common concept in civil engineering called the design vehicle. The design vehicle may be a car, a bus, a truck—but the problem is that the design vehicle is never the human body. The person—the individual standing on the street, that person with a beating heart, flesh and blood, is rarely the central figure in the design of our streets.
Walking is free. Walking is free, flexible, self-directed. You don't have to buy anything or pay anyone to walk. If we centered the experience of people walking, it would be safer, it would be easier, and we would certainly have more of it. Rebecca Solnit, who wrote the book, Wanderlust: A History of Walking, published in 2001, talks about the decline of walking in the United States this way, “As walking fades, with it goes an ancient and profound relationship between body, world, and imagination.”
In other words, not being able to walk shrinks the world available to us. And for children, the world shrinks the most. Kids who can walk in their neighborhood can draw a map of it. They have more positive associations with it. They know more about it. Kids who aren't allowed to walk don't have a sense of the distance between places. They know fewer details about they place they live. They use fewer words to describe it. The relationship between the body, the world, and the imagination requires sending your body out into the world under its own power.
Where are we today? Every year in the United States since 2009 drivers are killing more people who are walking. Reports call these, “pedestrian fatalities.” I might say it this way: drivers killed more people who were walking.
In the 1950s and 60s, Jane Jacobs started writing about the profound negative impact that new highways were having on people in cities. She was writing in a time when there was an exuberance about the ability of technology to fix problems. The technology of the day was concrete, steel, expressways, the car, and a heavy-handed impulse to make cities “orderly”. What Jacobs was able to see were the cultural and social impacts that unquestioned faith in technology was having.
What's the lesson for today? Today we've clearly developed an unexamined attachment to mobile devices. Just like in the 1950s and 60s, when most people in charge believed it was just the cost of doing business to displace communities with highway projects, today we've normalized looking away from the road, checking our phones, and frequently blame the victims of distracted driving for their own deaths. Missouri is just one of two remaining states that allows texting while driving, something we know is roughly as dangerous as driving while drunk.
So technology has created a new problem. Do we solve that problem with more technology, something now routinely hinted at by promoters of autonomous vehicles? Or should we solve it with a shift in cultural values aimed at putting the human being first in design—making our bodies the design vehicle.
So where does Trailnet come in to that mix? Next year the City of St. Louis will be breaking ground on what we're calling the Louisiana Calm Streets Project. Using aggressive traffic calming, landscaping, and a reallocation of space away from cars, this $1.2 million project will re-envision Louisiana Ave as a slow street— where people can be comfortable and safe using the street for more than just transportation. This project grew directly out of a trip Trailnet organized to Portland for elected officials, residents, and city staff in 2015. This type of street is a lot more common in Portland. Before we returned, there was a vision and a commitment to start building something similar here. This project can provide a lens for how we look at all of our streets.
In a recent meeting, I described my job this way: “My job is asking for more.” But I need that to be all of our jobs. We all need to ask for more space devoted to people in every transportation project than we do today.
Walking is essential—to engineer away our ability to walk is to steal away part of our humanity.
So when we ask for more, what do we ask for?
Slow down the cars. Slow down the cars! Say it with me. SLOW DOWN THE CARS.
Allocate more space for people.
Put things closer together. When things are close together, we decrease the need for transportation in the first place and make life a lot easier if you don't want to, or can't use a car.
That's a good start.
Top photo via Matthew Feeney.
About the Author
Scott Ogilvie works in the Planning and Urban Design Agency for the City of St. Louis. Prior to that he served on the St. Louis Board of Aldermen for eight years. While being a champion for active transportation, he passed a number of pieces of legislation to improve the city's non-motorized transportation amenities and policy. He also helped guide a number complete streets, traffic calming, and trail projects to completion. He partnered with Trailnet in stopping St. Louis County's South County Connector Highway project. Outside of the transportation realm, he passed legislation limiting campaign donations in local elections, and participated in reform to the City's tax incentive process. One of his proudest achievements was shepherding through the funding to resurface the badly deteriorated Penrose Park Velodrome, which reopened earlier this year. Connect with Scott on Twitter: @scottogilviestl