Pedestrian Power

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Engwicht soon forgot his window-washing business as offers arrived from around the world to help communities think differently about pedestrians and streets. He delivers many talks each year and has been called in to help design people-friendly road projects in places from Edinburgh, Scotland, to Waikiki Beach.

Engwicht suggests that we treat the street as an "outdoor living room" and find ways to use it for more than just transportation of people and goods. He now believes that traffic-calming efforts must encourage vital public life just as much as discourage speeding motorists. "Kids playing on the sidewalk or beautiful canopies of trees over the streets slow traffic more than speed bumps," he told me. "There are all kinds of fun things a neighborhood can do to accomplish this. When I get back home, I am going to put a bench in my front yard to get people to stop awhile, and maybe help kids on the block create scarecrows to put up along our street. Drivers will definitely slow down to look at that."

Anyone joining this burgeoning movement to make America more walkable soon discovers the key issue is not urban planning or transportation priorities but love. Places we love become places that we hang out, and those are always the best places for walking. Fred Kent, president of the Project for Public Spaces (PPS), means that almost literally. "If I had to summarize our work in one image," he said, leading me through a maze of shops in New York's Chinatown, "it would be a couple smooching on a park bench."

Kent actually has thousands of pictures of people hugging and kissing on city streets on file among the hundreds of thousands of photos he's shot in 30 years as a tireless advocate for public places. His deep love for street life became apparent when I visited the PPS office last December. Every time we sat down to talk, Kent suggested we take a walk, so for several days I trailed him through the streets of New York as he snapped photos, pointed out favorite spots, and shouted answers to my questions above the hubbub of the city.

"Isn't it fun when you don't know where you're going to wind up?" Kent asked with a grin as we wandered through the winding streets of Greenwich Village, stopping to talk with two well-dressed and slightly tipsy couples from Auburn, Alabama, who were enjoying their walk as much as we were.

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