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What Are Walking Audits?
page 4
A
walking audit is a tool to enable people in a community to identify
barriers to more and safer walking. Typically four hours long, the
audit is an evolution of the Pedestrian
Roadshow pioneered by the Federal Highway Administration and National
Highway Traffic Safety Administration. They quickly and effectively
raise awareness of the political, technical, and practical issues
that combine to make a street or neighborhood walkable, and they begin
to identify potential solutions. Although every walking audit is a
little different, they usually include the following key elements:
a) a visual introduction to walkability drawing on national and
local examples
b) a local presenter who describes particular local problem or situation
c) a walk in the community to identify good and bad conditions
d) a discussion of people's observations on the walk, and
e) agreement on possible action items and/or proposed improvements
Depending on the community hosting the workshop, the session may focus
on general walkability issues, specific problems within a community,
or a single site or roadway with particular problems such as a school,
main street, or major intersection.
Even
though this was primarily a walking visit, I had heard so much about
the Caltrain service for bikes that I couldn't resist the chance to
see it in operation for myself. So I climbed aboard a free Valley
Transportation Authority shuttle to Caltrain, paid a whopping $2.00
for my peak-hour, 30-minute ride from to Palo Alto, and joined two
cyclists and about 20 passengers at the Santa Clara station. When
the 8.02am train pulled up, the two cyclists waited for other cyclists
and passengers to get off the train before climbing aboard and strapping
their bikes to the 20 or so already inside the purpose-built cars.
[Add a box with a link to http://www.caltrain.com/caltrain/caltrain_bikes.html
and to the bikes and transit section of the website]
Most of the bikes are tagged with their origin and destination to
help fellow riders stack their bikes alongside those with a similar
or later destination, and as the train rolled through the Silicon
Valley an increasing volume of riders got on and off. At each station,
a well-rehearsed dance was played out:
As the train nears a station, riders gather to unhook their bikes;
fellow passengers helpfully hold one or more bikes while others are
maneuvered into place to disembark. Riders wait for other passengers
to get on and off before exchanging places with the cyclists waiting
on the platform, and the bikes are hooked into the appropriate stack
of bikes.
Always, riders are helping each other to make the system work. At
the Mountain View Station the conductor announced that the car was
full (24 bikes) while at least one rider remained on the platform.
A woman on board quickly counted the bikes and argued that there were
only 22 bikes and thus space was still available…but the train hade
moved on, leaving the stranded rider with a 20-minute wait for the
next train.
While I was riding the rails, my fellow trainees and instructors were
gathering at the San Jose Airport Doubletree hotel, site of many common
walking problems (missing sidewalks and crosswalks, wide roads, fast
traffic, and airport and hotel staff who denied it was possible to
walk the ¾-mile between the two places) that we were to leave behind
for a few days.
A quick round of introductions revealed wide geographic and organizational
diversity, but a remarkably similar list of questions, concerns and
desires from the training. In an MPO covering dozens of jurisdictions,
how would we choose just eight to get one of the workshops? What was
the appropriate role for regional planning agency in something as
local and detailed as improving conditions for walking? How did these
"audits" work and who was it most critical to get to attend? What
if an agency wanted to do more than eight? And what makes an environment
walkable anyway?
Two and half days later, instructors Peter Lagerwey and Dan Burden
(with the help of encyclopedic local color commentator, Patrick Siegman)
had answered all these questions and many more that the enthusiastic
MPO staff hadn't even thought of. Site visits, a community workshop,
a walking audit, a bike ride, and a "survivor"-like test ("we're gonna
drop you off here, you have to find your own way to the hotel by 7.00pm")
taught us all about in-fill development, "scrapes", the best size
for tree-wells, the difference between roundabouts and traffic circles,
the pros and cons of angle-parking, the astonishing cost of housing
in the region, and why curb-and-gutter is better than rolled-curbs.
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