In the month of June, Transport 2000 hosted an important conference in Toronto on sustainable transport.  One of the topics put forth by Dr. Barry Wellar, creator of the Wellar Walking Index, asserts that municipal officials have a tendency to rely on outdated solutions rather than create designs that are tailored to existing circumstances.  (Enriching Sustainable Transport Decisions: Inputs from Operations Research and the Management Sciences) "As a result of earlier choices, municipal governments become locked in to particular patterns".

Almost fifty years ago in 'The Death and Life of Great American Cities', Jane Jacobs recognized that transportation and city planning were based on old habits and assumptions that persisted even though they no longer addressed reality.
"Some men tend to cling to old intellectual excitements, just as some belles…still cling to the fashions and coiffures of their exciting youth.  But it is harder to understand why this form of arrested mental development should be passed on intact to succeeding generations of planners and designers.  It is disturbing to think that men who are being trained now for their careers should accept…conceptions about cities and traffic which are not only unworkable, but also to which nothing new… has been added since their fathers were children."  (p.371)

When it comes to providing creative solutions, it's a mistake to think that institutionalized, policy-bound and risk averse traffic engineers can provide the solutions we need for a social milieu that is changing rapidly. They learned their craft and developed their biases in an age when the driving force of our society, the baby boomers, were career focused, upwardly mobile commuters.  We were a generation of car consumers in every sense.

Now those boomers have, or shortly will be working part-time/working from home/ engaging in drastic career changes or they are retiring early and moving out to rural, small town Canada.
Read more about rural and small town migration. --->
And, they will be eschewing their cars in favour of other, more amiable modes of transportation.

After driving, walking is the second most preferred mode of travel by older people.  However, older pedestrians are more vulnerable to death or serious injury when struck by motor vehicles, and older adults sometimes cite personal security as a reason for not walking. Because walking is often recommended as a way for older adults to maintain health and prevent injury, roadway infrastructure should help increase, rather than discourage walking.

The number of senior pedestrians being killed at intersections is rising steadily.  As a group, seniors are more vulnerable because of sight and hearing deficits, reduced alertness and an inability to react quickly to sudden danger.  They are less likely to notice vehicles coming toward them and they may need additional time to cross the street.  For example, older pedestrians are much more likely than the average pedestrian to be killed or seriously injured by a vehicle turning left.

Seniors accounted for almost 50% of pedestrians killed in an intersection crash, up from 44% during 1996-2001. This percentage is likely to grow even higher as the baby boomer generation turns 65 years old.
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The neglect of pedestrian and cycling safety by a generation of traffic and roadway engineers has made walking and cycling dangerous ways of getting around North American cities.  A road network dominated by a near-exclusive focus on the car has resulted in neighbourhoods bifurcated by traffic carriers, a dearth of social interaction on the street and a dangerous presumption that the car is king and everyone else had better watch out.

This attitude gets carried forward into future traffic projections and long range transportation planning, even though this will soon cease to be our reality.

Downsizing and re-allocating road space will be good for both cities and their taxpayers as the ongoing cost of roadway expansion and maintenance is forced on to a smaller and smaller tax base.

Infrastructure changes that communities make for older road users benefit users of all ages and society as a whole. "There are very few, if any, infrastructure recommendations that benefit older adults but hinder other road users."

Even though a pedestrian is five times more likely to be killed on the roadway than a cyclist, and is 3.5 times more likely to be seriously injured, the lowly pedestrian has no advocates in any quarter.

But the rising pedestrian accident toll, coupled with unprecedented spending on new and existing infrastructure requires a new look at how we allocate transportation resources.