‘We need to think more about how walking can help us overcome violence’

“People have to be able to walk like fish swim,” said Minister for Transport Eamon Ryan at an international conference on walking in Dublin this week. He was quoting the Mayor of Bogotá, Colombia, in one of many off-script comments in a speech that supported a move away from the mindset of designing urban spaces around the car.

The image of walkers weaving through streets unhindered by vehicular traffic, like fish in water, is a novel one.

“We have to fight to put walking on the agenda and to foster a culture that people choose to walk. We have to raise road safety and personal security issues, look at it through a gender lens, improve liveability, and reduce air and noise pollution,” said his colleague, Ciarán Cuffe, MEP.

The two Green Party politicians were among those addressing Walk 21 Ireland, an international gathering of researchers at Technological University of Dublin (TU Dublin), discussing everything from the rise of walking meetings and group step challenges (eg, Walktober and Marchethon) to safe routes to school. Also mentioned were walking apps with motivational quotes and information on safe walking streets for women; community groups drawing up new walking maps for their cities; and a Rotterdam doctor who goes on regular walks with his patients.

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One “walkshop” session on Wednesday, hosted by Chantelle Smith of the National Council for the Blind Ireland (NCBI), involved a practical examination of the experiences and challenges faced during “outdoor navigation” by people who are blind or vision impaired.

The conference heard planners had to stop thinking that traffic flow was about cars and start thinking of it as about people – who walk, cycle, take public transport and, yes, drive too.

At Walk 21 Ireland, Joe Seymour, an engineer with the National Transport Authority (NTA), said that rather than having to look to countries like the Netherlands for positive examples, we could simply look back a generation to how most people here walked or cycled to education and workplaces.

“You just have to look at how in Ireland in 1986, there were 700,000 cars but in 2016, there were over two million. Most college students now drive to college and children are driven to school. Everyone is dropped to sports activities and people drive to the park to walk around it. Most of these trips could easily be done by active travel,” said Seymour.

International efforts to dethrone the car were under way, the conference heard, with the removal of some city centre car parking spaces; the narrowing of car lanes; more public transport-only routes; longer times to cross the road at busy junctions; and the widening of footpaths and removal of street clutter and traffic barriers, so pedestrians are not corralled at busy traffic junctions.

And the worldwide movement to reduce urban speed limits to 20 miles/30km per hour is hugely significant to inverting the road user hierarchy and putting walkers and cyclists first.

Rod King, founder of campaigning group 20’s Plenty for Us-Love 30, was at Walk 21 Ireland this week.

According to King, if cars are going too fast, people will not feel comfortable about walking or cycling.

“The World Health Organisation, the European Transport Safety Council and others all recognise that 30km an hour should be the speed limit when vehicles are mixing with people in a planned and frequent way,” said King. More than half of all large urban areas in the UK have embraced the 20’s Plenty speed limit and Wales will have it in all its towns, villages and cities as the default speed limit from September 2023. In Ireland, the Love 30 campaign is pushing for these lower speed limits with some success in Sligo, Kilkenny and parts of Dublin.

Arguably the success of greenways in increasing cycling and walking in Waterford, Limerick, Mayo and other parts of the country is energising community groups to look for safer and more pleasurable routes to walk to local shops, schools, offices and sports facilities as well.

One example is the work of Connecting Cabra, a community group in north Dublin which plans to transform parking spaces outside shops in Cabra into “parklets” on Saturday (September 24th) with benches for older people and play spaces for children. It is part of a wider effort to draw attention to the needs of pedestrians at busy junctions dominated by vehicular traffic.

“Ten thousand cars go through the Cabra cross junction every day and we’re campaigning for wider footpaths, cycle lanes and traffic lights that all go red at the same time so people can walk diagonally across the road,” explained Brian Gormley of Connecting Cabra.

Something similar sprang up in Limerick when people started walking around the city more during the Covid pandemic. Madeline Lyes from the voluntary group Irish Pedestrian Network spoke at Walk 21 Ireland on how about 100 people mapped the so-called Three Bridges walking route around Limerick, pointing out where walkers get stuck or lost.

“During Covid, we started to see how important walking was and how little regard it was given in public space. We are now looking for more accessibility on these paths and key routes into this looped walk from other parts of the city,” said Lyes.

The tenfold increase in the budget for Active Travel (from €30 million to €360 million) at the Department for Transport is a good indication that walking, cycling and public transport are now firmly on this Government’s agenda. Spending this budget on lasting improvements to walking and cycling infrastructure rather than on more policies and reports will be the challenge for State-funded agencies.

But reclaiming streets for pedestrians also means ensuring that it is safe for everyone to walk on those streets. Dr Lake Sigaras, professor of planning and community development at the Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile, said at Walk 21 Ireland that “walking is the invisible transport mode”.

While in wealthy countries 80 per cent of transport is by car, things are different in the global south. She suggested that we need to stop talking about women being afraid to walk and instead focus on how social violence plays out on our streets.

“We need to think more about how walking can help us overcome these types of violence. Don’t blame the victim by saying why are you walking or crossing there. It’s not about teaching people to adapt to a dysfunctional system, it’s about changing the system,” she said.

According to Sigaras, the best way to make streets safer is to have more people on those streets. “Car-based cities are a magnet for delinquency because people steal from cars and they use cars to attack from and escape from street violence. The fewer cars there are, the safer an urban space is. The biggest factor in making streets safe is to have women and children and older people in these public spaces,” she said.