Sidewalk Science

Since the early work of Zupan and colleagues, the body of walking knowledge has grown. We know, among other things, that nearly half of all daily walking ?bouts,? as researchers dub trips, are 12 steps or fewer. It has been observed that men walk faster than women, and that walking speed is correlated to socioeconomic standing. In Copenhagen, as Jan Gehl writes in Cities for People, ?on Copenhagen?s main walking street, Str?get, pedestrian traffic on cold winter days is 35 percent faster than on good summer days.? In New York, it was observed that streets with more people carrying bags had higher walking speeds. There are basic principles that have been established about group pedestrian behavior; e.g., per one study, ?an individual pedestrian diverges for a group of two or more pedestrians.? As people approach a bottleneck, they tend to walk straight; as they slow to enter it, they begin to ?oscillate? from side to side. There is more anecdotal research as well. As I walked one afternoon with Fred Kent, president of the Project for Public Spaces, he recalled his microscopic studies of Madison Avenue in the early 1970s, part of a project funded by National Geographic. (The street, presumably, was an exotic as a Sumatran rain forest.) ?I spent one day analyzing a waste basket, another day with pickpocket detectives,? he says. He recalls talking to the owner of a small cosmetics store, which leased the front of a wig store. ?I went in and asked him, you have 39,000 people going by, how do you like your location?? He was unhappy, it turned out, because he was next to a bank. ?When they walk past the bank, they speed up. It takes three or four stores to get back into a normal walking rhythm.?

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