Walkie-Talkie

Walk Walk Walk

I have been discussing Sydney’s issue with traffic and its deplorable public transport system, along with its non-cycling friendly streets. I am certainly pro-cycling within cities, due to my love of bikes and that has shown in my last couple of posts.

More to the point, I am exploring alternatives to cars within cities and I may have skipped over one of the easiest and most important options, the joy of walking.

Pedestrians are incredibly important in the overall fabric of a city.

There are a number of advantages of walking around a city.

·      It is the easiest way to move around

·      It doesn’t cost anything

·      It promotes a healthy lifestyle for people to be active and,

·      It is environmentally sustainable.

So let’s look at the city of Sydney and its walkability.

The Sydney CBD has areas where it is very easy to walk around. The Domain, Mrs Macquarie’s Chair, the Botanical Gardens, the Rocks and Hyde Park are all centrally located, ‘green’ and cultural areas that represent lovely opportunities to walk around.

However, once in the very heart of the city a pedestrian will soon find themselves at the mercy of cars, buses and very narrow, bustling sidewalks, making Sydney not very pleasant for the mixture of tourists and workers who move around.

So how to promote walking within Sydney?

There was actually an article in the Saturday Sydney Morning Herald on the 2^nd of May that discussed a $60 million upgrade to the Sydney streets to make them more pedestrian friendly.

The City of Sydney Council set out a Walking Strategy and Action Plan that intends to:

·      To boost the number of commuter trips by foot

·      Reduce delay times to journeys

·      Reduce traffic collisions with pedestrians by 50%

·      Widen footpaths

·      Improve access to shops

The article states that 90% of all journeys into the city are made by pedestrians, with 15% of people are coming in on cars (these statistics are straight from the article, I know they make up 105%).

I think that this is a step in the right direction for Sydney, yet I believe this Action Plan is only touching the surface of the walkability of the city (I’m also not sure how correct the figures are that the article gave)

A more radical step would be to make a number of main streets pedestrian only (such as the George St renovation at the end of 2015). This would ensure that people are constantly moving around the city on foot, rather than by Taxis or cars.

Lastly, while putting into place a number of initiatives that ‘encourage’ walkers in a city, there needs to be more impetus on the streets of Sydney to get people walking. Street art, food vendors, entertainment are all reasons to move around on foot, Sydney just needs to find the right balance.

So for my next post, again I will continue to explore alternatives to driving. I feel this will be such an important aspect for cities in the next 20 years and it needs to be discussed.

If you want to read about the Action Plan that the Govt. will put in place, have a look here;

http://sydneyyoursay.com.au/walking-strategy

http://www.sydneymedia.com.au/new-walking-strategy-puts-people-first/