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**Males and females have different commuting habits. Male commuters are significantly more likely to bike to work, more likely to walk to work, and less likely to drive alone than female commuters.**
I was referring to this, most people don't live within walking distance of their work, but they do live within biking distance of their work.
Thanks for clarifying. There are some details in that study about how far people live from work.
**The average one-way commute for survey respondents was 13.95 miles, with 25% having a commute of 5 miles or less. . . . Commuter age has a strong effect on mode choice. Biking and walking, the most active transportation modes, decrease with age. Driving alone peaks when commuters are in their 30s and declines as commuters get older. Transit use increases with age. . . . Commuters who walk have the shortest
commute and commuters who vanpool have the longest commute. Also, those who drive alone have a shorter commute than those who use transit.**
Average length of walk is 1.4 mi. one way. Average length of bike is 4.7 mi. one way.
Last edited by Katarina Witt; 05-16-2014 at 03:50 PM..
most of those pedestrians aren't even really pedestrians. They drove to a store or an office building on Hollywood Blvd. and parked their car (along the street or in a parking garage or parking lot). Naturally once they arrive they have to actually walk from their car to the store. But that doesn't make them a pedestrian. A pedestrian is someone who has not utilized a private vehicle at all to arrive at their destination (or else all drivers could be considered pedestrians, making the term effectively meaningless).
OK, this borders on the most ridiculous post I've read all year.
Someone walking down the street isn't really a pedestrian?
Oh, that's rich.
Pedestrians all use the same sidewalks and crosswalks no matter how they arrived at their particular spot on the pavement at any given time.
I don't find it to be much of an issue. The sidewalks are so wide and the trees, lampposts and other objects provide sufficient buffering from traffic. There's a sense of protection I feel as a pedestrian on the Champs that I don't feel on Queens Boulevard.
I don't think a street really has to be one lane in each direction to have good pedestrian design elements. I mean, it's hard to say that the Champs is "auto-scaled" when it's had essentially the same form for more than 150 years. Paving a street and allowing cars to run down it does not automatically make the urban form auto-scaled. When I say "auto-scale," I'm talking about an urban form that was ostensibly designed around the automobile (i.e., parking lots, drive thrus, gas stations, strip malls, buildings with no street-facing entrances, setbacks, distances between structures, etc).
Also, those who drive alone have a shorter commute than those who use transit.[/i]**
Average length of walk is 1.4 mi. one way. Average length of bike is 4.7 mi. one way.
That's a weird one I would have guessed people driving alone would have averaged a longer distance, but it points out an interesting thing with Denver, that it's transit is attractive to use for those that live further out in the metro, which is good that it is having a positive effect on people living further out. That probably could lead into what is happening around those stations that are further out.
I use to walk to work and it was about a mile each way, I couldn't imagine walking any further than 1.5mi without feeling like there has to be a better way to commute. 5 miles for biking is very realistic, especially seeing many people live within 5 miles of where they work.
Here's a picture of the Champs before they widened its sidewalks in 1994. Those inner lanes looked absolutely pointless. And awkard. But as you can see, the sidewalks were still full of pedestrians. There were still sidewalk cafes and restaurants then just as there are today.
Now I don't think most cities could do what Paris did by merely widening the sidewalks. Widening the sidewalks on a street where the built environment was built with the car in mind isn't really accomplishing anything.
Commuters who walk have the shortest
commute and commuters who vanpool have the longest commute. Also, those who drive alone have a shorter commute than those who use transit.[/i]**
Average length of walk is 1.4 mi. one way. Average length of bike is 4.7 mi. one way.
Did this mean shortest time-wise or shortest distance-wise?
OK, this borders on the most ridiculous post I've read all year.
Someone walking down the street isn't really a pedestrian?
Oh, that's rich.
Pedestrians all use the same sidewalks and crosswalks no matter how they arrived at their particular spot on the pavement at any given time.
But thanks for the laugh.
And how does that poster know how those pedestrians arrived in the neighborhood? Is there a button on Google you can push that shows how each person in the streetview arrived at their location? I know it is a stretch to imagine this - but maybe those pedestrians live in the densely populated neighborhoods around the main street - you know, like I did for years. Is the poster aware there is a heavily-used subway station not a quarter mile from that streetview? Is it a huge stretch to imagine the pedestrians arrived via the Red Line?
Besides there are at least a half dozen people waiting for buses in the streetview...
That's a weird one I would have guessed people driving alone would have averaged a longer distance, but it points out an interesting thing with Denver, that it's transit is attractive to use for those that live further out in the metro, which is good that it is having a positive effect on people living further out. That probably could lead into what is happening around those stations that are further out.
I use to walk to work and it was about a mile each way, I couldn't imagine walking any further than 1.5mi without feeling like there has to be a better way to commute. 5 miles for biking is very realistic, especially seeing many people live within 5 miles of where they work.
Just goes to show you shouldn't rely on "feelings". A good object lesson.
Quote:
Originally Posted by nei
Did this mean shortest time-wise or shortest distance-wise?
Distance. You could read the article; it's not long. My computer seems to have closed it down, or I'd quote it for you.
I don't find it to be much of an issue. The sidewalks are so wide and the trees, lampposts and other objects provide sufficient buffering from traffic. There's a sense of protection I feel as a pedestrian on the Champs that I don't feel on Queens Boulevard.
I don't think a street really has to be one lane in each direction to have good pedestrian design elements. I mean, it's hard to say that the Champs is "auto-scaled" when it's had essentially the same form for more than 150 years. Paving a street and allowing cars to run down it does not automatically make the urban form auto-scaled. When I say "auto-scale," I'm talking about an urban form that was ostensibly designed around the automobile (i.e., parking lots, drive thrus, gas stations, strip malls, buildings with no street-facing entrances, etc).
Champs is an exception rather than the rule. Paris is highly dense and also has an astronomical amount of tourists walking the streets daily. Also, Champs is a world-renowned place so that itself will attract people to walk it. Therefore, DESPITE the fact that Champs is a huge highway full of cars, there are many pedestrians. Hollywood BLVD is a similar case; it is a famous street with many tourist attractions along it, so obviously there will be pedestrians. These are exceptions. Your average wide street offers no benefits to promoting walkers; it simply makes walkers walk farther. When a city has too many wide streets, if you account for all the space wasted for vehicular traffic, you lose land that could go to be developed upon. So in general, when designing a city and laying down city blocks, the goal is to make streets only as wide as is necessary for proper transportation because streets theoretically are a waste of space.
Champs is an exception rather than the rule. Paris is highly dense and also has an astronomical amount of tourists walking the streets daily. Also, Champs is a world-renowned place so that itself will attract people to walk it. Therefore, DESPITE the fact that Champs is a huge highway full of cars, there are many pedestrians. Hollywood BLVD is a similar case; it is a famous street with many tourist attractions along it, so obviously there will be pedestrians. These are exceptions. Your average wide street offers no benefits to promoting walkers; it simply makes walkers walk farther. When a city has too many wide streets, if you account for all the space wasted for vehicular traffic, you lose land that could go to be developed upon. So in general, when designing a city and laying down city blocks, the goal is to make streets only as wide as is necessary for proper transportation because streets theoretically are a waste of space.
This has nothing to do with the design elements of the street. People were calling it "auto-scaled," but that makes no sense to me as the basic form of the built environment has been largely unaltered since the 19th Century.
The problem that most American cities have when it comes to walkability, imo, is not street width. Absent a handful of super arterials, most streets aren't really much wider than Fifth Avenue. The problem is that most of the stuff on the street is built around cars. Gas stations and parking lots only exist because of cars.
A secondary issue is block length (though I don't think that's much of a problem in most American urban cores).
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