Quality of Walking Experience

In an ideal world, we step out of our home and we go for a walk, like they did in The Last of the Summer Wine, and we socialise, and see local people. During the pandemic we could step out of the house, and go for a walk, without worrying about traffic, and without automatically taking the car.

When lockdowns ended, and the dependence on cars came back, so the local walk was degraded by the increasing frequency of car use. Eventually rural roads along secondary paths became unpleasant so new routes had to be found.

The irony is that we think nothing of getting into a car to drive five to ten minutes to walk very near home. If the walk to where we wanted to walk was pleasant, we would include that within our walk.

Recently I went for a local walk, without using the car. Most of the walk wa pleasant, with few cars, and plenty of time away from main roads. Such walks are pleasant. The issue is when you get to villages with 30 zones, where a main road has been diverted onto narrow streets, with no real pavement. Cars, buses and agricultural vehicles all come onto the “walking” path.

They spent millions over two years to improve walkability and cycling, but they never considered that having a main road along a primary walking and cycling route would provide for a toxic walking environment.

It’s worth quantifying just how toxic. During the walk I was at 70-80 BPM for almost the entire walk, or at least every time I checked my heart rate. It’s 20 BPM lower than it was when doing similar walks a year or two ago, before I took up regular running.

When I was doing hill intervals on Monday my heart rate shot up to Zone 3 but descended to zone 1 within thirty seconds. When I walked by the rush hour traffic along the key walking route between Eysins and Nyon, within the 30 zone, on the pavement, that isn’t a pavement, I saw cars mount the pavement, and my heart rate shoot up to 120+ beats per minute. That’s a fourty to fifty beats per minute increase.

I love walking, and hiking, and running, and cycling. I don’t love that those that invest millions on cycling and walking infrastructure don’t think like pedestrians and cyclists.

Those road works that have ruined my Quality of Walking Experience (QoWE) are still a year from being completed, and from what I see so far, they haven’t actually changed traffic patterns. They haven’t redirected cars from going into the business park and cutting off the cycling route. The cars haven’t been removed from cutting the walking path every intersection. The dense traffic that has no justification for going along the redesigned walking and cycling path is saturated with cars.

There is an obsession with infrastructure, as well as slowing cars down, but no one is actually walking along these routes every day, for an hour or two, so no one sees the flaws in the latest designs.

The goal is fantastic, and for the most part it could work well, if they had considered that two or three pinch points make walking dangerous and unpleasant. The problem is caused by a lack of a real obstacle, so cars mount the pavement in one place, and there is no walking infrastructure in the second.

Walkability is ruined by 300m of lacking infrastructure. If I drive two kilometres, and start and walk my end there, then the walk is pleasant, but I have touched the car, which I didn’t want to do. The paradox is that for walking it was great before. It’s now that walking is problematic. It’s in a year that walking might stop being unpleasant. Planners didn’t account for people walking during road works. Geneva and Lausanne have similar issues.