The Nearer, the Dearer: Reflections on 23 Years of Pedestrian Advocacy (2001)

The Nearer, the Dearer: Reflections on 23 Years of Pedestrian Advocacy
Chris Bradshaw, National Conference of Pedestrian Advocates
Oakland CA, August 17, 2001
[The following is a post-speech version edited by the speaker,
using a video of his presentation at the awards dinner of the
conference, at which he was presented with the “Golden Footprints Award.”]

Since this award is unexpected, my speech should not be
interpreted as a 25-minute acceptable speech.  This is very
special.  I would point out that, in accepting this, I want to
point out that the movement should also give consideration to
naming a “mother,” since, by living in Canada, I have been an
absentee father.  In fact, I think this movement has quite a ways
to grow, which might eventually make me a grandfather.  This
would be nice, since my daughters, both in their late-twenties,
don’t seem to be interested in making me a biological one.

I would also like to thank the many people who organized this
conference.  Many people who do activism don’t have what I call
luck, the ability to say, many years later, that, golly, this is
coming to something.  I also want to thank so many of you who are
not so much extending my early efforts, but simply acting on the
concerns you have heard voiced in your communities.

I want, tonight, to share my personal journey that includes a
commitment made over twenty years ago to promote walking and
pedestrian rights, including what I learned from even earlier
pioneers, people who put their insights into writing, people like
Jane Jacobs, William “Holly” White, Christopher Alexander (who
now hails from here in the San Francisco area), Australia’s David
Engwicht, and Meyer Hillman and other associates in the U.K.  I
don’t think I deserve to be called the father of the movement,
but I am happy to play a role in giving the movement a strong
history, since a future requires a distinct past.

I am the eldest of six from a large Canadian-American family.  We
moved a lot, first in Canada and after I was 9, around the U.S.,
until we settled in Denver when I was 12.  I thought I was
probably going to attend the University of Colorado, but at my
mother’s urging, applied to her alma mater, Oberlin College, near
Cleveland OH.  It made quite difference, attending a small
liberal arts college in a town of only 10,000 souls.  And Oberlin
had a much longer and unique history than any western U.S.
university.  More important, as it turned out was that Oberlin
was a very politically active place, and clearly to the left of
the average Coloradoan’s politics.

After graduation, I did two stints with General Motors Canada,
and then joined the Company of Young Canadians, the Canadian
version of VISTA.  I worked for two years with tenants and youths
in a poor neighbourhoods in Ottawa.  I then worked with a
national social policy group which led to me starting and heading
a national public-housing-tenants association.  In fact, the last
time I was in the Bay area was to attend the national conference
of the National Tenants Association in 1972.

In 1974, I made a major shift, switching to the local scene, as
community relations officer with the regional government’s
planning department.  This switch was from social policies to
land use policies, and from low-income tenants to middle class
homeowners.  Combined, the shift was toward spatial factors on
the local scale, specifically to the “intersection” of land-use
planning and transportation, and particularly their relationship
to spatial communities or neighbourhoods.

By 1978, my interest had settled down to looking at urban form
from the perspective of a pedestrian, whose world was much richer
thanks to the 3 mph speeds and the greater freedom of movement,
than a driver hurtling, single-mindedly, toward a destination.  I
decided that there needed to be a voice to speak for walking in
cities, primarily to ensure it didn’t disappear, and decided to
form a pedestrians association in Ottawa.  Related to that, two
years later I came up with the idea of a second organization to
bring the human scale back to cities, with the idea of forming
“car coops” for people to share cars, to give people a new
choice, a way to have access to a car without any inducements to
drive more than needed.  That second commitment was not realized
until last year when I and another “keener” formed Vrtucar, the
Ottawa car-sharing organization, or CSO.  It wouldn’t have
happened had not some prescient souls started, in the same year
Ottawalk was founded, the first CSO in Berlin.  I should point
out that both Ottawalk and Vrtucar could not have happened had I
not had been joined by an equally dedicated partner whose
strengths and weaknesses complimented my own, and helped fill in
the valleys of interest when energy waned and doubts and problems
surfaced.

In my work with regional planners, I saw the difference in scale
between regional/city planning and the planning that existed at
the smaller scales of neighbourhoods and blocks, and how the two
were rarely linked; in fact, often the two were in conflict.  The
planning for the regional scale was of course more formal,
because it was to accommodate the more formal, vehicularized
scale of cities, longer distances, faster speeds and “harder
bodies,” in contrast to the softer, smaller, more informal scale
of neighbourhoods and streets, where people walked and
socialized.  The regional staff often belittled the latter, and
with their right to impose their vision and values, they
systematically crushed the human scale, overseeing the
privatization of public space.

I came to realize that these scales could and should be
complementary.  Great cities, I reasoned, required equally
strong, self-sufficient neighbourhoods, each with a common centre
and tight links at the block scale.  In fact, I realized that the
individual and family scales of life are both dependent on the
proper functioning, integrity, if you will, of the other scales,
especially those adjacent in the “scalar hierarchy.”  This is no
different than the idea that strong nations require strong
cities.  More recently, I have formalized all this into the
Scalar Hierarchy Integrity Principle (SHIP), a paper you can find
on my website (www.flora.org/chris/).

It would be 10 more years before Ottawalk was founded.  I would
probably not have gotten that far if it were not for a chance
encounter, something quite common when one walks.  During our
family’s annual visit to Long Island (where my wife grew up), I
took my usual day trip to the City.  My practice was to stick my
head in lobbies of smaller office buildings and read the
directory of businesses to find interesting people and groups.
This day, I found the people who were starting up Urban Design
Newsletter, on Lexington Avenue, “Holly” Whyte’s favourite
street.  Lois Heyman, associate editor, responded gamely to my
unannounced visit.  It resulted in a three-para. item on my plans
to form what I suggested would be the first metro pedestrians
association on this side of the Atlantic, complete with my phone
# and address, in the newsletter’s second issue.  The result?
Over 15 enquiries from planners, engineers, and writers from as
far away as South Africa asking for my ideas and experiences (the
article erroneously suggested that my project was part of my
municipal responsibilities).  Even though my initial focus was
Ottawa, I realized there were people over a much larger area who
wanted us to succeed.  What a motivator!

But I wasn’t getting very far finding kindred spirits locally,
even though I carried around handouts explaining the idea.  I
organized a meeting of interested people, but it  attracted only
three people.  However, while attending a City of Ottawa public
open house on a proposed downtown superblock redevelopment
project, I met city planner and architect Patrick Chen, who
agreed to form a committee of other pedestrians who dropped in
over the two days.  The project’s “pedestrian reference group,”
in 1981, became the Ottawa’s first formal pedestrians group.  In
1984, Patrick started a bigger project to develop downtown urban
design guidelines for the official plan review.  Although he
wanted just a small advisory committee of citizens, Council
became enthused enough to give the group additional resources and
a wider mandate, resulting in the formation of the Ottawa
Pedestrians Citizens Committee, which stayed active for two years
after the study was finished, and had over 35 members.

In late 1987, I felt that we needed a way to reach more
pedestrians and to have more autonomy from the City.  I wanted it
to have a newsletter, funding from a membership, and to conduct
walks regularly.  At about this time, a friend, Jim Feeley, with
whom I had worked lobbying for freedom of information and privacy
legislation for Canada, heard me being interviewed on radio about
the need for an association to get a better walking environment
during our brutal winters.  He called to said, “Hey, I couldn’t
agree more with you that sidewalks are a mess in winter and one
of the biggest culprits are these sections at driveways that are
steeply sloped for the sake of the homeowner in his car.”  He
continued, “My wife fell on one of the these and broke her hip a
couple of years ago.  I know you can’t become leader of such a
group, but I will commit to three years as leader of one, if you
will do most of the behind-the-scenes legwork.”I quickly said
yes.  I had already developed the name, Ottawalk.  (Jim also had
one, the Pedestrians and Walkers Society, or PAWS; but members at
the founding meeting accepted mine).  I became the secretary and
newsletter editor, and both of us led many walks.

Ottawalk’s formation caught the interest of the special people in
Boulder CO who, since 1981, had hosted their International
Pedestrian Conference.  They invited me to present on our
experience starting a pedestrians associations.  (Sort of like
herding cats, I would say).  This was the height of hubris, since
we had barely gotten started.  Up until then, the presenters were
almost exclusively professional architects, planners, and
engineers who had a side interest in walking, and most
presentations were accompanied by slides.  Even then Dan Burden
was the king of this medium.  These people were the real
pioneers, providing a perspective of the city’s small scale,
without which people like me wouldn’t have been able to visualize
what was possible.  Bob Whitson, the gentle spirit behind these
unlikely conferences, has since converted his advocacy to action,
and today runs that city’s innovative transit program.

Dorthea Hass, a planner from Brookline MA was in that audience;
as she is tonight.  She chatted with me afterwards, saying, “I
have been thinking of starting a pedestrians association in
Boston, and now I think I will get started as soon as I get
back.”  Ottawalk was the first metro association in North
America, and Walk Boston, the group Dorothea started a year
later, the first in the U.S.  Fittingly, both focused on walking,
a most ubiquitous activity, rather than on pedestrians, a
transitory, often involuntary status.  I think that decision,
also echoed by the names of most groups to follow, as well as in
the name of your national group, is prophetic, as both of our
countries, in the name of health, sanity, and environmental
security, are getting on their feet.  As an aside, I once joked
that in NA cities, pedestrians were people who walked to their
drives, while walkers were people who drove to their walks.
Those who don’t use cars at all, are just people, precious
people.

The next twelve years, while the movement grew, brought Ottawalk
through four presidents (Jim died of a heart attack in 1993).
When I, the last of them, announced that I was going to focus my
attention on starting Ottawa’s car-sharing organization, since
named Vrtucar, none of the other officers stepped forward to take
my place.  During those twelve years, we developed about 30
position papers, conducted a Pedestrian Awareness Day in 1993,
and co-sponsored the Pedestrian Safety Conference in 1997.  The
position papers were especially important, because we had to
create from scratch a pedestrian perspective, a walkability
vocabulary.  One of these concepts, the 1992 “Green
Transportation Hierarchy,” or GTH — in which walking was to be
prioritized as first, cycling second, transit third, and driving
last — was included in the revised Ottawa-Carleton official
plan, replacing the so-called “balanced” transportation system
extolled by the previous one.  Car-sharing is a natural
complement to the GTH.  Why?  Because if individuals prioritize
them in this way, they (eventually at least) won’t have enough
need to drive to warrant owning a personal vehicle.

I also put a great deal of time editing (and doing most of the
writing) for our quarterly newsletter, Ottawalk News.  I wrote
items I read about in periodicals from around the world, causing
issues, by the mid-nineties, to get as large as a magazine.  With
the establishment of pednet by Pam Judd of Portland’s Willamette
Pedestrian Coalition, in 1994, that role for OWN, as the de facto
NA pedestrian journal, shifted from my shoulders to a new sharing
technology, and became more participatory, since items could be
posted directly to the list by any of the eventual 350
subscribers.

So it didn’t seem like too much to accept ownership of the list
from Pam a year later when she wanted to get on to other
projects.  Pednet, though, has never since had the poetic aura
Pam provided. Today’s posts are more likely to be didactic and
even cranky, but they continue to spread the pedestrian
consciousness and to spread the infection of the possibility of
change.  Several regular contributors to pednet are here tonight:
Peter Jacobsen, Sally Flocks, Ann Hershfang, David Kleinfelter,
and, less frequently, Dan Burden.  Those of you wanting to check
it out, go to http://www.flora.org/pednet/ to find the info file and the
archives of all past posts.  Ottawalk’s 1993 T-shirt, “Feet
First,” says it all.

In declining to step forward, Ottawalk’s other executive members
said unanimously that Ottawalk’s cause was being adopted by so
many other groups, which was good since it replaced the need for
pedestrians to be seen as a “special interest group.”  I am
active on one of them, which I lobbied for: a four-year health
department walking program called, fittingly, Gottawalk.  Most
recently, it obtained a $207,000 grant awarded by Health Canada
to promote walking as a way to reduce the onset of Type-2
diabetes.  That health shift is in keeping with Mark Fenton’s
advice.  I also sit as a member of the City’s Mobility Issues
Advisory Committee.

Part of the spirit I was trying to bring to Ottawalk, and to the
broader movement, was not that pedestrians were a poor
underclass, but that walking was/is at the centre of life, part
of every trip we make.  If you can’t walk, or your walking is
seriously inhibited, your life is diminished.  The fact that many
people don’t see it this way, is itself a sign of the decline of
walking environments. [As the 60s essay, “Student as Nigger,”
said: “The problem is not with Mr. Charley, but with what Mr.
Charley’s done to our minds.”]

And since walking is so old and so fundamental to our lives, it
is not something that we tend to give much thought to.  If things
hadn’t gone so wrong a century ago, we wouldn’t need to think
about it much now Although it has so many benefits, it doesn’t
get promoted much, since it is not seen as generating economic
activity.  The advantages Mark Fenton points out — it requires
no planning, special training, no special accessories or
“infrastructure”   tend to cause it to be ignores as “no big
deal.”  In an age of letting the dollar determining our
priorities and walking doesn’t attract any entrepreneurial
champions.  How could we reverse that?  That was the challenge.
And it still is.  Look at the announcement that the lone walking
magazine (compared to the number of cycling ones) is ceasing
publication.  Maybe there are those among us here who could try
to fill that market.

We have to get people to focus on their deeper priorities, on the
plethora of small stuff that makes up their quality of life (not
to be confused with “standard of living”).  What better way to
make new acquaintances, to ensure neighbourhood relations, to
reduce opportunities for crime and traffic collisions, to add
vigour and rhythm to life, to control weight and maintain fitness
of the whole body, to reduce stress, to stay involved and find
people and things to care about (and to care back)?  Just look at
the singles want ads; what activity is most mentioned?  Right,
walking.  But not just walks, “long walks.”.  And did you ever
notice how novelists use different synonyms for walking to
connote their characters’ state of mind?

We learn walking at one year of age, and talking at about three.
I suspect that the former probably contributes to the development
of the latter. Walking remains important.  Even in the age of the
automobile, it is part of every trip.  Think about it; walking is
the mode that would be the hardest to eliminate and the most
devastating to life if it were.  The freedom to move about,
ironically, was not formally talked about until the car arrived.
But it is the right to walk that is being threatened, not the
right to drive.  The car industry achieved some form of level
playing field in cities by the 1950s, but we didn’t stop then, as
we should have, reshaping the common built environment to serve
its needs.  Now roads are designed as if the driver were the only
legitimate user, rather than balancing his needs with those on
foot.

The concern that has agitated me more than any other is the
importance of walking for children and for the elderly (as well
as those recuperating from illness or injury).  Walking seems to
be the right speed and provide access to just enough of the world
for these surprisingly similar age groups.  From the age of four
or five, children are ready to explore the world beyond their
home and yard; and the aging process means seniors are ready to
retire to the slower pace and tight-knit relationships of the
neighbourhood and block.  Both are prevented from this by the
lack of nearby destinations, by the intimidation of others
choosing to drive (usually with the attitude that pedestrians are
“pests”), and by the lack of natural surveillance, Jane Jacob’s
“eyes on the street.” [The arrival of air-conditioning is one
less-mentioned reason people use their porches much less; I guess
Californians, in the current energy crisis, are rediscovering
theirs.]  Children become dependent on school buses and “Mom’s
Taxi.”  And seniors must maintain a car on a fixed income,
continuing a dangerous activity later in life than they may want
to.  We need to find a way to free them from the onerous
responsibilities of driving.  Mayer Hillman did a study that
showed British parents in 1971 thought 7 was the age a child
could be trusted to walk safely to school; in 1990 the mean age
was 12!  Adults in England, one must conclude, have robbed their
children of five years of developmental opportunities in their
own neighbourhoods.  Ironically, the guilty were themselves the
children of the earlier idyllic era.

If you added to these two groups the disabled, the poor, those
temporarily ill, and visitors, as the population disadvantaged by
our loss of walking places, you would have, not a minority, but
approximately 50% of the population at any time.  And there is a
seventh group, which would include many here, people I call
“simplicists,” people who are offered membership in the the club
of active affluent adults, or AAAs, but reject it, choosing a
slower, lower consumption, more local life.  Although those seven
groups, which answer to the acronym, PEDS-CIV, constitute a
majority of the population, planners and engineers, along with
nervous politicians, mindlessly keeping building the driving
city.

Since I retired in 1995 I have more consciously followed this
simplicist path, partly to gain my time and priorities by trying
to live on my small pension rather than get another full-time
job.  Maryann and I have done well enough that I can afford to
“carry” Vrtucar for probably another year before it will be able
to start paying my partner and me for our time.  And, I have had
the time to not just join the Green Party, but to run as a
candidate in 1999 and 2000 provincial and federal elections.  And
in March I agreed to serve as interim leader of the Green Party
of Canada, the sixth largest (of 11 registered parties), a
position I might seek on a more permanent basis at our national
convention in the summer of 2002.

Like many of the people who have joined car-sharing, our
family’s simplicist journey started slowly.  In 1981, we faced
the decision to either buy a second car or move to an older
neighbourhood that would reduce our need to drive.  We did the
latter.  Giving up space for place was the beginning of what I
now call choosing propinquity   defined as proximity in space and
time   over _sprawl_.  A few hundred square feet of place can
replace an acre of space.  I discovered this term in one of the
many books I have read, realizing that drivers are simply people
who, through their own lifestyle choice, are “propinquitally
challenged,” people who don’t have their life together
(geographically)

It does not cost more to live in a “together” neighbourhood; in
fact, my wife and I simply couldn’t afford to live on my small
pension elsewhere.  Car-sharing allows people to cash in on the
housing premium they pay to live there, several times over.  When
you have destinations and the transportation alternatives so
near, you don’t have enough driving trips left to warrant having
your own car, (not to mention facing the high cost of parking and
the major hassles of owning a car).  My Green Party campaign
slogan in both elections was “Want to drive less?  Vote Green,”
reflecting my observation that people might expect to drive
more each year, but they want to drive less.  An example of how
confused we have become is a saying, the source of which I can’t
remember: “We park in driveways, and drive on parkways.”

Besides sharing four econo-cars with 70 others, I rely on an
array of cargo-carrying devices: many bags and bikes and
trailers, including one, a recumbent bike with a cargo “sidecar,”
built by a friend who runs a “bike dump.”  It is close to the
“bringhy” that I envisioned in my 1992 “Walk and Roll City
vision.”  This land dinghy is now being referred to as a
neighbourhood utility vehicle.  Maybe Vrtucar can add a few to
our fleet.  One of the first excuses people use for owning a car
is the need to carry things, especially groceries.  The Bringhy
not only saves money over using a car, but by buying smaller
amounts of food more frequently, we also save on having a stand-
alone home freezer.

Since we have put walking on North America’s agenda, the planning
profession has caught on and come up with “new urbanism” and
“smart growth” (The first is the principle applied to the
neighbourhood, while the latter to the metro scale)  They boil
down to one simple idea: bringing back to cities the urban form
and transportation choices and vitality of streets and parks that
existed a century ago.  Even though the urban problems that
existed then — communicative diseases, crowding, fire, lack of
light and air — were solved in relatively short order, the
development/car industry continues to flog the fears that
stimulates more sprawl.  Shame on them!

One of the best ways to put a lie to the idea that a car improves
one’s access to things and places is to compare the # of unique
destinations an urbanite or village dweller of a hundred years
ago had within a five minute walk, with what today’s
suburbanite has within a 5-minute drive.  Once enough people
own cars, the businesses simply consolidate and move to larger
(cheaper) sites further away, usually at the “intersection” of
two freeways.  The consumer, by owning a car and traveling
further each shopping trip, is accepting the downloading of the
last 7-8 miles of goods movement, the most expensive part of the
goods-movement component of the items on retailers’ shelves.
Along with the savings that come with larger retail operations
and land costs, the lower prices that are used to attract
consumers is probably only a fraction of what the businesses
pocket.

We as a society have literally headed up a no-exit street (an
“impasse” in Quebec), created by the “found” energy stored for
many millennia under our earth’s crust.  Cheap energy has
cheapened distance, and the connections between people.  We have
essentially gotten drunk on this energy.  What a hangover we’re
going to have when it runs out!  But how much worse if we don’t
change direction now.  Maybe road rage is an anticipatory
societal case of “the shakes.”

There is the matter of speed as well as spread to consider.
Anton Nelessen’s Visual Preference Survey is a process that
induces participants to look at scenes of their city from a
standstill and head on, rather than from a fast-moving car,
catching most of the scenery via peripheral vision.  The
participants universally reject the 50-mph environment they have
built, which critic James Kunstler has described so well.  A 3-
mph built environment, along with a lot of pedestrians (and dogs)
paying no heed to motorists, is the best form of traffic calming.
We seem to have a collective form of split personality: we lobby
for more and wider and faster roads, at the same time we push for
gentler streets.  We even push for more parking for businesses
and to have them located further away in the mistaken assumption
that these measures reduce local traffic.

Our cities and towns were built on the idea that each home and
business must face onto a walking-dominated public grid system, a
place packed with more people and social commerce outside than
occurs inside the houses and stores on either side.  Older
neighbourhoods still have that ambiance.  The street is where the
private and semi-private domains connect.  The habitues are not
just moving from one place to another, but use the space as
connective tissue between the city’s vital organs, a place to
view and encounter others.  The age-old architect’s dictum is
“form follows function”; for walking advocates, it is “feet
follow fabric.”  Any time a street is wider than two lanes, it cannot be
easily crossed and is therefore a breach in the community’s
fabric.

“Getting there,” when one walks, is truly “half the fun.”  In the
city of a century ago, if you needed to travel further, you walk
to a main street and catch a tram, which takes you to a central
station where a much bigger means of conveyance takes you to a
distant town or especially a city with connections to many
countries and continents.  These modes were linked in a way that
respected the hierarchy of scale, so that, although cargo-
carrying devices would ply the convivial street along with
pedestrians and cyclists, they would be slow-moving and their
operators would know they were truly guests.  In contrast, the
car is of no scale at all. It kills life at the small scale, and
becomes a pest on intercity-corridors.  Road engineers have
adopted a hierarchy of roads — which, by the way, cause trips to
meander along longer, roundabout routes — but are ignorant of a
hierarchy of modes.

The effort to relate to these consequences of driving have been
managed by the car and oil industry through a safety agenda.
This has been a great fraud.  As Psychology Prof. Gerald Wilde,
of Queens University in Ontario has pointed out in his book,
Target Risk, people demand not just a minimum level of safety,
but a maximum level. When authorities or automobile designers
increase it, drivers trade the excess for another good, and in
the world of transportation, the most “liquidatable” good is
speed.  To the industry, speed accomplishes two important things
at the same time: it increases the value of a car (especially in
relation to the “alternatives”) and it decreases the convenience
and safety of the alternatives, through intimidation and
decreasing the critical mass the others need.

The half-century-old defensive-driving campaign they foisted on
our society has told the driver to worry only about injury and
death to him, not others.  Not only are those walking and cycling
jeopardized by this lesson, but, since drivers are so far from
home most of the time, it jeopardizes other motorists, who are,
of course, assumed to be complete strangers, not real people.
The campaign focuses on danger, not endangerment, a kind of
might-makes-right on our roads.  Ottawa professor, Barry Wellar,
through his “walking security index,” is trying to measure
intimation and his index should allow us to target intersections
where it is highest.

Why are we willing to pay extra for free-range chickens; but not
for free-range children?  We have smoke-free buildings; why not
smoke-free cities?  Why, as a society, do we allow “bull bars” on
vehicles driven in cities?  Do drivers need help bullying others?
Why do we allow cars to be manufactured with enough power to
exceed the highest speed limits by double?  Why can a person get
a driver’s license and not face testing for interactions with
pedestrians?  Why are we so compromising with the auto industry?

But intimidation is more than a problem of speed.  One of the
areas we need to focus on more is the extremes in acceleration
and deceleration.  They provide additional threats, as well as
drivers “rolling” toward pedestrians; or when stopping to yield,
the driver comes very close to the pedestrian and his path.  I
think this behaviour is a lot more conscious than it is now
assumed.  Enough that it should be considered a form of assault.
Each driver counts on other drivers doing their bit to convey the
unambiguous message that pedestrians and cyclists who don’t show
proper respect are risking serious injury.  Where are the police,
who, after all, are supposed to protect the weak from the strong
and powerful?

Preaching to people to walk a little more isn’t the solution.  We
have to rebuild localness into our lives.  We have to see the
relevance of knowing and depending on neighbours, not only to
provide assistance in times of need, but to use each other as
early warning systems for those problems that creep
geographically, like crime, traffic, childhood diseases, etc.
And we need to realize that only deep relationships provide a
true window on life, true meaning, and the chance to care for
other real people.