Waypoints For People Walking And Cycling

Imagine the equivalent of a service station for pedestrians. A place where they can break their journey, to rest, recharge, check their directions. It’s a landmark and a meeting spot.

This is a continuation from an earlier post where I was asked what we need to do if we are to create cooler, shadier, walkable cities and suburbs. Three things we must do to cool our streets and cities was about creating more space for growing shade and reducing the surfaces that contribute to urban heat.

The Next Step Is Waypoints

Imagine the equivalent of a service station for pedestrians. A place where they can break their journey, to rest, recharge, check their directions. It’s a landmark and a meeting spot. I’ll meet you at … Larger ones are places to hang out and may include playgrounds, picnic tables, and barbecues.

Unthinkable?

Even now, when electric cars have brought calls for the government to provide charging stations along highways and even in the streets outside people’s homes, there are no corresponding calls for recharging stations for electric bikes and their riders. Or recharging stations for people who walk.

Many active transport advocates live in inner-city suburbs and treat walking journeys as a simple A-to-B journey. They promote the idea of 15-minute cities as though that is the longest reasonable walking journey in this country where many people drive one or two hours each way for their daily commute. Fifteen-minute walking trips to everyday destinations are irrelevant to the majority of Australians, especially in the regions but also in the middle and outer suburbs.

At most, we get calls to add the occasional benches as rest stops for the elderly. That fails to acknowledge that opportunities to recharge, and in some cases add in some public transport, are for everyone to extend their journeys, regardless of the distance.

For vast areas of regional Australia and for mid and outer suburbs of major cities, there is minimal, if any, public transport. A walk to a school, shop, etc. is a half an hour or more, double that if you have walking difficulties, or are walking with prams and young children.

Frequent public transport to all these places is not coming any time soon. What they can have now is safe paths, street trees for shade, and waypoints. It’s these, not distance, that make walking both a choice for transport and a way of life.

Just today, I walked from my home in the Brisbane suburbs to the nearest business centre and caught the bus for most of the journey home. The recent addition of a footpath that has been long missing makes a big difference, although it has no shade. The 3.2km journey takes me about 45 minutes to walk one way, an hour for the round trip if I catch the bus home, an hour and a half to walk both ways. That’s not time lost; it’s a conversation time if I have someone with me, and a thinking time if not, and it makes exercise something I get as part of my regular activity without the need to do it as a separate thing. There is inadequate signage for pedestrians, large areas that are unshaded, and no attractive waypoints. But it is still better than getting in the car.

What Are Waypoints?

We had the word before we had cars. Waypoints are that place where people can break their journey, to rest, recharge, check their directions. It’s a landmark and a meeting spot. Larger ones are places to hang out and potential community hubs.

Very thinkable. Very doable. Very organic.

All we need to do is to look more closely at our existing infrastructure like bus stops and picnic shelters, and playgrounds, and transform them into special places by adding features like seating, protection from sun with trees and other covers where necessary. Add water to refill bottles, wayfinding signs and maps in physical or electronic form to connect them, and even charging stations for phones or electric bikes where it makes sense.

These are not linear repurposing or upgrading projects. That way of thinking is how my local bus stop was upgraded to meet new disability standards. How does it look?

New concrete slab and short piece of footpath either side, new bench, new tactile paving for people with vision impairments. The sharp lines under the seat are the shadow from the hot midday sun. There is still no shelter because not enough people get on there, and nothing was done about the trip hazards just beyond the new concrete path. Apparently, passengers getting off a bus aren’t counted in the statistics used to justify a shelter and nor are the school children getting on private buses, nor the potential users if this was a better place to stop and wait or rest.

What we need is recombinant innovation - taking diverse assets that we already have and combining to create something new that gets multiple benefits out of every activity and every piece of infrastructure. It means innovative collaborations across departments, organisations, and sectors, and including the community and local knowledge.

Why Is It So Hard?

Like many seemingly simple solutions that could bring widespread benefits to everyday people’s lives, faster and at much lower cost than the big showcase projects, it is hard to put into practice because of opposing imperatives and forces that maintain the status quo.

Our waypoints need to be as diverse and localised as the communities and locations they are in. That defies top-down design for uniformity and aesthetics. Instead, it requires collaboration where everyone gets out of their silos, and off their professional pedestals, to meet local community members in the “swampy lowlands”.

These small, localised projects lack the photo opportunities and big announcements for politicians, the status and awards for architects and designers, and the large contracts for consultants and suppliers. Why would any these be interested in a humble waypoint?

The only people with a financial incentive might be local businesses who can see how the increasing numbers of people walking past their door are potential customers. A busy waypoint nearby would be a significant boost to a local shop.

How Might We Make It Happen?

Waypoints are a step up from verge garden projects.

When people start verge gardening, they often get enthusiastic and start seeing barren and unloved places everywhere that could be transformed. I do it myself when walking, and every time I walk past that bus stop. That would make fabulous verge garden I think when I see sad, mown patches that are at best ignored between mowing and at worst used for impromptu and illegal car parking.

But if you think that adopting another area as a guerrilla gardener is a simple extension of verge gardening, you’ve missed the first lessons of verge gardening: governance, shared purpose, collaboration between councils and residents, and an understanding of the commons. (Revisit Understanding the Space and Three Guiding Principles of Verge Gardening)

Both verge gardens and waypoints in public spaces need, and foster, the sort of collaborative community action that builds social fabric. We need active local champions, local community groups, local councillors, local council officers, all working in the same direction.

Some verge gardens are low-key waypoints. They can be landmarks, places people pause for reflection or conversation. My verge garden is a bit of a landmark for pedestrians because there is a walkway between the houses opposite. Indeed, I have found that pedestrian behaviour has changed, and some people cross directly into the verge garden and into the shade of the tree rather than walking along the street to cross where there are ramps at the driveways.

Adding a seat to verge gardens adds complexities like maintenance and insurance liability if someone is injured which is why almost all council policies don’t allow it. It also means the acceptance that anyone can sit just outside your front fence whenever, and for as long as, they choose.

Re-imagining bus stops, park infrastructure, public library and school grounds to include the role of being waypoints would be an obvious place to start. It may change your idea about where some of that seating and infrastructure in a park should be. Depaving to create parklets is another. Through all of this, engaging the local community to take on some responsibility for maintenance is what makes it affordable enough to scale outwards so everyone benefits. Engaging local community to manage public land is what we are doing with verge gardening.

Public Or Private Waypoints

Service stations for cars, like shopping centres and cafes, are privately owned and controlled spaces. Verge gardens and waypoints on streets and in parks are publicly owned and managed.

Creating and maintaining a verge garden builds participants understanding of the complexities of gardening on public land, and nurtures the relationships and trust needed for communities to create and maintain waypoints.

Private waypoints like local shops and cafes can play a complementary role but they don’t replace the public waypoints that are part of the commons and available to everyone.

Councils Are The Innovators

While there is a place for state and federal government, the core action and place for innovation to care for the local commons is at local government and community level.

Council officers who advocate for and manage verge garden policy should be applauded for their courage and commitment to innovate - finding new and evolving governance models that take account of the complex “people” aspect as they draw the shifting line between allowing enough freedom for the citizen gardener and enough restriction to ensure the safety and wellbeing of other stakeholders and uses of that space.

Creating a network of waypoints: combining local knowledge with academic research and professional experience, and constructing the governance models for ongoing management is an extension of the challenges and opportunities of managing verge garden projects.

Verge Gardens As The First Learning Space

Both verge gardens and waypoints increase the status of our shared outdoor green space, encouraging people to use it more for activities and for connecting with nature and each other. They both provide complex, adaptive, and doable answers that play an important role in addressing complex social and environmental problems.

Learning on individual verge gardens, and then progressing to group verge garden projects provides opportunities to learn the collaboration skills and build the trust and relationships needed for more complex collaborations.

So, let’s start with the most doable: the verges that we already mow, every one of us working with councils to expand this form of collaborative governance, while creating shade and reconnecting with the idea of an urban commons.

While we are doing so, we make sure we observe and reflect, leverage and extend our knowledge and networks, and use our time in the streets noticing where the waypoints could be, who is interested, who might contribute.

Social Fabric

There are many calls to rebuild social fabric within communities tackle the lack of volunteering, growing loneliness and isolation in our suburbs, as we live inside our houses and travel between destinations within the private bubble of our air-conditioned car.

Proposed solutions usually focus on churches, sport, schools, and community gardens. These all have their place and can create the inclusive environments that people need to get to know and trust their neighbours. The flip side of that inclusivity is exclusivity. You have to believe, pay to play or eat, and go on rosters, if you want to participate.

Followers of the Shady Lanes methodology understand that they can’t exclude anyone from walking, stopping, or meeting in the verge in front of their homes. It’s not your space, or your group’s space, it belongs to everyone.

Waypoints bring the same challenge and opportunities. The relationships and trust we build in our communities and between organisations on the verge will be invaluable in coming up with answers to the governance and funding questions for waypoints at a local government level, supported (not directed) from state and federal governments.

Can We Do This?

Think back to my bus stop.

Yes, there’s a good policy demanding better accessibility for bus stops. And money in budgets to meet the new requirements.

Imagine if we took the wider view and asked how we could use this as an opportunity to address shade and cover issues.

Imagine if we coordinated the laying of that new concrete with replacement of the broken concrete between it and the nearby shops. (different projects and budgets)

Imagine if we engage the community into replacing some of that grass which is roughly mown by contractors into a waypoint.

Imagine if that uninviting space could become a place that increases the appeal of catching the bus versus driving your car.

How many places like this bus stop do you know that would make great waypoints?

Do you have the courage and commitment to work with others in your community to make it happen?

Let us all know in the comments.

Note: To their credit the BCC arborists listened and visited the site when I contacted them to ask if we could at least have some trees for shade. Not too long afterwards there was a change in policies to allow trees closer to the departure side of the bus stop. There are now 5 young street trees there.