Tag Archives: walking

“Testing a No-Cellphone Sidewalk Lane”

Posted on by

I’ve always been interested in the walking patterns of people along sidewalks, in public places, or in hallways so this TV test of cellphone lanes on sidewalks looks fascinating:

Sidewalk collisions involving pedestrians engrossed in their electronic devices have become an irritating (and sometimes dangerous) fact of city life. To prevent them, what about just creating a “no cellphones” lane on the sidewalk? Would people follow the signs? That’s what a TV crew decided to find out on a Washington, D.C., street last week as part of a behavioral science experiment for a new National Geographic TV series.

As might be expected, some pedestrians ignored the chalk markings designating a no-cellphones lane and a lane that warned pedestrians to walk “at your own risk.” Others didn’t even see them because they were too busy staring at their phones. But others stopped, took pictures and posted them—from their phones, of course.

Of course, you have to watch the show to find out the complete outcome. But, I would guess most people didn’t pay much attention to the markings. While the experiment targets cell phones, there are lots of ways pedestrians can create problems on sidewalks. Cell phones may be particularly dangerous because people keep moving while not paying attention but other issues abound including people who suddenly stop right in the middle of walking people or others who walk at least three people across and force others to move out of the way.

There are places where such signs or markings do seem to work. It is common in Europe to see signs telling people on escalators or moving walkways to stand to one side to let others pass on the other side. In contrast, Americans tend to clog up such pathways. Similarly, the BART in San Fransisco has markings indicating where to line up for train cars while waiting. This works with a system where the train always stops at the same place but it does create a more orderly system than the free-for-all that is often common around train car doors.

It would be interesting to know why people might or might not follow such directions. Are they not paying attention while walking (this is common amongst drivers who can tune out all of the signs)? Is there a lack of enforcement? Are sidewalks and other walkways seen as more democratic settings (they are public property after all) where people should be able to do what they want?

Two videos of walking in sync with strangers

Posted on by

I’ve used a YouTube video of some students walking in sync with strangers several times in my Introduction to Sociology class. While the video has just over 7,500 views (of which I’ve probably contributed at least 10), it is pretty good compared to a lot of other YouTube breaching experiment or breaking social norms videos.

Here is another take on the same scenario: a more professional short film on walking in unison with strangers.

It happens often enough: you’re going down a busy street and all of a sudden you find yourself walking at the exact same pace as a stranger and … uh oh, time to speed up or slow down.

This phenomenon is masterfully captured in Walking Contest, a new short film from artists Daniel Koren and Vania Heymann. In the video, shot entirely on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue, Koren avoids walking next to strangers by treating it as a race. But he ultimately questions why we react so strongly to this phenomenon in the first place. Is it because it seems rude, unsafe, or just too awkward?

Both videos do something interesting: they adopt some sort of ruse or mask that helps make walking in unison with a stranger, not a normal behavior, easier. The more professional video suggests walking together is a contest. The student video shows those intentionally breaking the norms wearing sunglasses or headphones so they presumably can plead ignorance at walking in unison with others. These techniques echo some of the early findings from breaching experiments with Garfinkel and his students where it was hard, sometimes even physically so, for people to intentionally break social rules.

Focus less on how all of Manhattan’s 120,000 blocks can be walked and spend more time with the sociological findings

Posted on by

A sociologist who has walked every block of Manhattan shares what he learned in a new book:

The result is his new book, The New York Nobody Knows: Walking 6,000 Miles in the City. The expansive sociological study relies on Helmreich’s on-the-ground research, culled from thousands of hours of observation and casual conversations with local residents, to help parse hot-button issues like immigration, assimilation, and gentrification. But more than that, the miles and miles clocked – he wore out nine pairs of shoes in his trek across the city – come through as a sort of extensive love letter to the frenetic energy and diversity of New York…

For non-New Yorkers, the time the book spends on the outer boroughs is a fairly obvious corrective for what Helmreich sees as the tourism-generated, Manhattan-centric view of New York. And for all its diversity – the book spends hundreds of pages on the immigrant communities of the city – New York comes off as an inextricably linked web of groups that constantly must interact, change, and adjust. “It’s almost as if you dropped a hundred towns in Nebraska into the middle of the city,” Helmreich says. But what sets New York apart, he adds, is that “there’s this duality to New York that you can be in these places, but you can also be in the city.” Even those who live in more isolated pockets, such as the waterfront community of Edgewater Park in the Bronx, have a sense of connectedness…

By necessity, given the size of the city, Helmreich calls his book no more than a much-needed “introductory work” to the diversity of New York City. His method is, in some ways, a throw back to a much earlier form of social criticism, when walking was curiously in vogue for the self-styled intellectuals and elites of 19th century Europe. Think of Charles Dickens’s night walks through London or the well-dressed flâneurs of Paris. And it’s one that anyone can learn from. “If I accomplish anything besides sociology,” Helmreich says, “it’s to encourage people to walk through what I call the greatest museum in the world.”

Interesting findings that could suggest how disparate communities within a larger community understand their place in the whole. Additionally, there is a lot of potential here to detail the New York that most of its residents know, not the big money Wall Street/hedge fund world or the celebrity/glamorous crowd.

However, this article goes more for the human interest angle than the actual findings of the book. While it may be interesting to detail how a single person was able to walk the whole city, it may not mean much if they weren’t very observant or didn’t find much of interest. Rather then calling this an “epic quest,” how about thinking through what this methodology leads to compared to traditional ethnographic work that calls for spending extended time with a more limited group of people? How does this compare with other studies of American streets, such as the work of Jane Jacobs looking at places like Greenwich Village and Rittenhouse Square (Philadelphia), Elijah Anderson examining street life in poor Philadelphia neighborhoods, or Mitchell Duneier analyzing how black street vendors utilize public sidewalk space in New York City? Even as New York City gets a lot of attention, this seems like a lost opportunity to highlight how a sociologist (versus a journalist or a reality TV show or an academic from another discipline) views the street-level operation of the world’s #1 global city.

The “Big Parade” in Los Angeles really highlights the city’s lack of walkability

Posted on by

A Los Angeles writer started an event called the “Big Parade” that makes use of a number of staircases in the city. But, this event serves to highlight the city’s overall lack of walkability compared to other big cities around the world:

Koeppel’s early obsession evolved into a piece for Backpacker magazine called “I Climbed Los Angeles” that ran in June 2004. It’s since developed into an annual event called the Big Parade — a two-day, 40-mile urban hike from downtown Los Angeles to the Hollywood sign that covers 100 public stairways along the way. For this year’s parade, the fifth, Koeppel expects several hundred people to join him from around the country…

The parade’s secondary mission is to encourage a sense of community. Koeppel says the parade keeps pace with the slowest walker; he describes it as a simple “walk with neighbors.” The event is free, and Koeppel has even rejected sponsors to keep things as casual as possible. Each day’s walk is divided into segments, with a main loop of five or six miles, and participants are invited to come and go as they please.

“The majority are people who have not walked more than five or six miles in L.A. in the streets in their entire lives,” he says. “Taking them and showing them what L.A. is like on foot — showing them secret passages and landmarks and things they never see from outside the window of their car — has been just really fun.”

Koeppel, who’s known beyond Los Angeles for his celebrated book on the history of bananas, maintains that his purpose in starting the Big Parade isn’t to prove that Los Angeles is a walkable place. He denies the axiom that nobody there walks — rather, he says, nobody seems to walk when you’re looking out from a car window — and sees the city’s infamous sprawl as simply an opportunity for pedestrian exploration. The Big Parade, he says, “is a way to reestablish the presence of individual propulsion within that sprawl.”

So the “Big Parade” is a pedestrian cry in a wilderness of cars and vehicles…

Two things in particular intrigued me in this story:

1. Walking can involve building community. This reminds me of Jane Jacobs’ famous axiom about “eyes on the street” or her thoughts about “public characters” who are out and about and known in neighborhoods. Places like Los Angeles simply don’t allow for much informal encounters on the street level. But, a group of people walking together or near each other can engage in conversations in ways that are very difficult to do in cars. (This also reminds me of an idea my dad had years ago about putting scrolling sign boards in the back windshields of cars so drivers could deliver messages to each other. I imagine the ratio of destructive versus encouraging messages would get high pretty quickly…)

2. The article suggests a number of the staircases were constructed for homeowners who wanted to get off the streetcar and make the trek up to their house. This is a reminder of the extensive streetcar system that Los Angeles once had. How might the city be different today if those streetcars had survived or had been replaced by a similarly spread-out system of mass transit? As historian Kenneth Jackson explains in Crabgrass Frontiers, streetcars had a number of factors working against them. However, these staircases are a suggestion of what Los Angeles might have been.

How streets came to be for cars and not for pedestrians

Posted on by

There is little doubt that American streets and roads are typically made to optimize the driving experience. It wasn’t always this way:

According to Peter Norton, an assistant professor at the University of Virginia and the author of Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City, the change is no accident (so to speak). He has done extensive research into how our view of streets was systematically and deliberately shifted by the automobile industry, as was the law itself.

“If you ask people today what a street is for, they will say cars,” says Norton. “That’s practically the opposite of what they would have said 100 years ago.”

Streets back then were vibrant places with a multitude of users and uses. When the automobile first showed up, Norton says, it was seen as an intruder and a menace. Editorial cartoons regularly depicted the Grim Reaper behind the wheel. That image persisted well into the 1920s…

Norton explains that in the automobile’s earliest years, the principles of common law applied to crashes. In the case of a collision, the larger, heavier vehicle was deemed to be at fault. The responsibility for crashes always lay with the driver.

Public opinion was on the side of the pedestrian, as well. “There was a lot of anger in the early years,” says Norton. “A lot of resentment against cars for endangering streets.” Auto clubs and manufacturers realized they had a big image problem, Norton says, and they moved aggressively to change the way Americans thought about cars, streets, and traffic. “They said, ‘If we’re going to have a future for cars in the city, we have to change that. They’re being portrayed as Satan’s murdering machines.'”

A fascinating story: as the car became more popular and the auto industry banded together, understandings of streets changed. If you look at old pictures of streets before the 1920s, they often seem like the Wild West: there are carts big and small (plus animals providing the power), pedestrians, sometimes electric streetcars, and more.

This reminds me of the efforts of New Urbanists to redesign streets so that cars become less dominant. They typically suggest several changes: reducing the width of the road, allowing cars to park on both sides of the road (this makes drivers more cautious), and putting trees close to the edges of the road to create another barrier between cars and pedestrians.

The suburban critic James Howard Kunstler is also fond of showing pictures of barren intersections where multiple 4-6 lane roads come together and the scale dwarfs even the most hardy pedestrians.

It is amusing to think of cars being portrayed today as “Satan’s murdering machines” – even though car accidents are a leading cause of death.

Claim: Obama wants higher gas prices. Is this necessarily bad?

Posted on by

Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour (a rumored Republican presidential candidate) suggested today that Obama wants higher gas prices:

Barbour…accused the Obama administration Wednesday of favoring a run-up in gas prices to prod consumers to buy more fuel-efficient cars…

Barbour cited 2008 comments from Steven Chu, now President Barack Obama’s energy secretary, that a gradual increase in gasoline taxes could coax consumers into dumping their gas-guzzlers and finding homes closer to where they work. Chu, then a Nobel Prize-winning professor, argued that higher costs per gallon could force investments in alternative fuels and spur cleaner energy sources.

Barbour said Obama’s energy team wouldn’t be happy until gas prices reached $9 a gallon.

Barbour goes on to say that there are two primary negative consequences of higher gas prices: it hurts workers and it hurts the larger economy. In a troubled economic period, Barbour is suggesting that Obama is willing to risk a prolonged economic crisis in order to promote things like electric cars and clean energy.

But this is really a larger issue and affects multiple dimensions of American life. Let’s assume that raising gas prices cuts down on driving and gas consumption overall – and there is evidence to back this up. There could be some benefits to this:

1. This would limit our dependence on foreign nations for  oil. What has happened in the Middle East in recent weeks can have an impact on our economy because we import so much oil. Some have gone so far as to say that this is a “national security issue.”

2. Using less gasoline would lead to lower levels of pollution.

3. Having more expensive gasoline may reign in sprawl, or at least make living in denser areas (cities or denser suburbs) more attractive. (See an example of this argument here.) In the long run, higher gas prices could be viewed by some as a threat (or by some as a welcome deterrent) to the sprawling suburban lifestyle that many Americans have adopted  since the end of World War II. Higher fuel prices would likely impact driving trips, fast-food restaurants, and trucking costs, all key pieces to the typical suburban lifestyle. One could argue that the American lifestyle of the last 65 years has been made possible by relatively cheap gasoline – and life would change if it was consistently at European price levels.

There could be other impacts as well including more walking and bicycling (cheaper, less pollution, better for health) and less time wasted due to traffic and congestion.

It bears watching how this rhetoric over gas prices continues. Is it simply a matter of a short-term (lower prices to help the economy) vs. a long-term perspective (higher prices help limit some negative consequences of driving) or could this turn into a debate about how driving (and cheap gasoline) is closely linked to the essence of American life?

Defining and explaining sidewalk rage

Posted on by

There was road rage. But the anger is not just limited to the roadway: now there is sidewalk rage. Here is a description of this phenomenon that is being defined and studied by a several academics:

Researchers say the concept of “sidewalk rage” is real. One scientist has even developed a Pedestrian Aggressiveness Syndrome Scale to map out how people express their fury. At its most extreme, sidewalk rage can signal a psychiatric condition known as “intermittent explosive disorder,” researchers say. On Facebook, there’s a group called “I Secretly Want to Punch Slow Walking People in the Back of the Head” that boasts nearly 15,000 members…

Signs of a sidewalk rager include muttering or bumping into others; uncaringly hogging a walking lane; and acting in a hostile manner by staring, giving a “mean face” or approaching others too closely, says Leon James, a psychology professor at the University of Hawaii who studies pedestrian and driver aggression…

How one interprets the situation is key, researchers say. Ragers tend to have a strong sense of how other people should behave. Their code: Slower people keep to the right. Step aside to take a picture. And the left side of an escalator should be, of course, kept free for anyone wanting to walk up…

People slow down when distracted by other activities, too. A 2006 study by the City of New York and the NYC Department of City Planning showed smokers walk 2.3% slower than the average walker’s 4.27 feet per second. Tourists creep along at an 11% more-leisurely rate than the average walker, while cellphone talkers walk 1.6% slower, according to the study. Headphone wearers, by contrast, clipped along at a 9% faster rate than average.

Looking at this from a sociological perspective, sidewalks are problematic because they have a lack of formal rules. They are often wide, particularly in big cities, but there are no markers of where to walk. The situation can become more complicated with dogs, skateboarders, bikers, strollers, tourists, segways, and more. So would the answer to this problem be to institute some guidelines? Why not post signs in public places that escalators should have open lanes on the left?

Yet this lack of rules on the sidewalk can often make them fascinating places to watch or study (if one is not walking at a quick pace through a crowd of people with other objectives). For Jane Jacobs, the sidewalk was where people in the neighborhood gathered to interact and check up on each other. For Mitchell Duneier in Sidewalk, these spaces are where homeless street vendors and others mix, conduct business, and react to differential treatment from the police.

(As a side note, the strategy of the journalist in the second paragraph to cite the size of a relevant Facebook group is a harmful one. This is an interesting article about academic research on a new phenomenon – how does a Facebook group support this exploration? It is simply a number divorced of any context. What if the group had 500 members or if it had 10,000 members? Perhaps it is an attempt to be relevant. But it doesn’t help establish the facts about the phenomenon of sidewalk rage.)

Americans walk less than other countries

Posted on by

The Infrastructurist sums up some recent research that shows Americans walk less than residents of other countries. Explaining why this is the case is interesting:

The report’s lead author, David R. Bassett of the University of Tennessee, blames America’s poor performance on its auto obsession and lack of public transportation…

The researchers found no association between daily steps and living environment (e.g. urban, suburban, or rural)…

For the year 2009 alone, the top five walking commuter cities were Boston (14.1 percent commuted by foot), Washington (11.1), San Francisco (10.3), New York (10.3), and Philadelphia (8.7). The city with the lowest commuter walking share for the year was Fort Worth, at 1.2 percent. Freemark comments:

“As the chart shows, automobiles have a majority share in all cities except New York, Boston, Washington, and San Francisco. Unsurprisingly, these are dense cities and the places in the United States with the most complete transit systems.

These arguments make sense at face value: driving and setting would seem to play a large role. However, the first research study’s finding about driving may indicate that driving just trumps other factors for most Americans: whether Americans live in cities or suburbs or rural areas, driving is the preferred mode of transit.

Additionally, perhaps the number of people living in large cities with established and effective mass transit (the five top walking cities cited above) is simply not enough to counter all the drivers in other places.

Comparing male and female drivers

Posted on by

A recent study by New York City shed some light on gender differences in driving and traffic behavior:

80 percent of all crashes in a five-year period in which pedestrians were seriously injured or killed involved men who were driving. The imbalance is far too great to be explained away by the predominance of men among bus, livery, taxi and delivery drivers, said Seth Solomonow, a spokesman for the city’s Transportation Department…

The males of the species are not only more dangerous as drivers, they are more likely to be hurt while walking, the city’s study found. More men than women were killed or injured as pedestrians in every age group except among those over 64 (perhaps because women live longer and were overrepresented). Boys 5 to 17 years old ranked first in the absolute number of pedestrian deaths and serious injuries, with 785, more than twice the number of girls in that age range, though elderly people were more vulnerable as a share of the population.

The article suggests that boys and girls learn these behaviors at a young age: boys think it is okay to be more aggressive around the street.

So where exactly do boys pick up this information? From their fathers/role models, the media, watching people drive or walk around? This socialization process would an intriguing one to delve into.

Walking the entire Amazon

Posted on by

A British man recently completed an impressive walk: the entire length of the Amazon. The journey took two and a half years and he is supposedly the first human to make the entire hike.

I am slightly amazed that there are still feats like this left to accomplish. Even as we often think of ourselves as very modern people, there are parts of the Earth that we still know little about or few people have ever seen.  The journey drew the attention of another famous explorer:

His feat earned the praise of no less an adventurer than Sir Ranulph Fiennes, a fellow Briton whom the Guinness Book of World Records describes as the “world’s greatest living explorer.”

“To do all this in more than 800 continuous days with just a backpack puts Stafford’s endeavor in the top league of expeditions past and present,” Fiennes wrote on Stafford’s website.

Remarkable – and it sounds like he had many interesting experiences along the way.