Shared space

Standing at the junction of two of the busiest streets in central London – High Holborn and Shaftesbury Avenue. 
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In one direction is Centre Point and the start of Oxford Street; in another Leicester Square; to the south-east is Covent Garden; behind is Bloomsbury and the giant hulk of the British Museum. 
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It's quite a vista. 
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But this view only lasts for eight seconds before the little green man turns turns red and a herd of black cabs rev their engines.
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Pointing down the streets and cursing the crossing barriers that pen in tourists and office workers is Tim Stonor, managing director of Space Syntax, a UCL-affiliated consultancy whose job it is to understand how humans move within spaces like these. 
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Space Syntax's work has included analysing how people flow within the British Museum and helping Norman Foster to redesign Trafalgar Square.
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London is – when compared to car-heavy cities such as Los Angeles – quite easy to navigate on foot. 
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But all too often roads are designed for cars – pedestrians are plodding afterthoughts.
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Stonor's firm came to this spot when it was working on the Renzo Piano-designed Central St Giles complex next door. 
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It discovered that tourists heading from Covent Garden to the British Museum were so perplexed by the crossings that they ended up turning back and getting on the Tube.
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This wouldn't happen in a more "walkable" city. 
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Walkability is the measure of how easy and pleasant it is to get around a place on foot, whether that's quick road crossings; lots of routes; cut-throughs and meeting areas; housing in central areas and transport links. 
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If a city is walkable then more people will walk. 
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Simple. 
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And what does a walkable city get you? 
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Healthy citizens, clean air, economic vitality (having people walk past smaller shops instead of driving to out-of-town shopping centres), higher house prices and lower fuel costs.
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It's not just an important thing for Britain to consider. 
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If emerging cities in China and India develop in the same way they have in America, then their material and fuel use would be unsustainable. 
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Walkable cities may well be the only way for all of us to live in the future.
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Stonor's work on Central St Giles was to make sure it was walkable. 
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Rather than a block which pedestrians would have to traipse around, the new site features two public walkways that go straight through the middle of the complex. 
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This creates a large meeting point in the middle – perfect for lunching office workers and retail spaces – the spaces at floor level are occupied by restaurants including Jamie Oliver's new Union Jacks.
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Cities that grew organically tend to be walkable for the obvious reason that the main form of transport pre-car was by foot. 
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But towns and cities planned around the car are the antitheses of walkability. 
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These failures were due to well-intended but naive planning, Stonor tells me. 
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People saw garden cities as a wonderful alternative to urban congestion – and then we built them as New Towns: Bracknell, Skelmersdale.
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The problem with New Towns is that if cars become too costly, and local transport infrastructure isn't improved, then there'll be no easy way of getting around. 
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For instance, in the New Town where my in-laws live, Redditch in Worcestershire, the nearest shop is a 35-minute walk away. 
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You can't get a pint of milk without a car. 
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This creates other problems, Stonor explains. 
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The other method of urban planning in the 1960s was to separate the cars from the pedestrians to reduce road accidents. 
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If you combine the pedestrianisation of town centres with depopulation then come 7pm the place is dead. 
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The most important thing to do in this country to make towns safer, more economically vibrant and convivial – is to build more houses in the middle of towns.
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But how do you measure how walkable those towns are? 
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A number of people are beginning to try and quantify the walkability of an area. 
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The US website Walkscore rates areas on criteria including distances and transport links. 
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But this is different to walkability, which considers many other factors.
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In the UK, former sustainable transport consultant Adam Davies has created Walkonomics, a website that uses government data and crowdsourcing to measure how walkable a street is from crime rates to how hilly places are. 
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He's ranked more than 600,000 streets.
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Walkonomics gives local authorities and planners a visual assessment of the parts of their towns that need to be improved. 
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If they can do that and act upon it, then the overall benefits are good for everyone: 
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Research suggests that people who live in more walkable areas walk 30 minutes more a week than those who don't. 
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There's also a study which links how walkable a street is to house prices. 
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Walkability can add about £30k to the average house price.
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As with Stonor's High Holborn junction, it's the smaller elements of walkability which Davies thinks could dramatically improve things: 
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It's things like waiting to cross the road – there was a stat that said that 50 per cent of all time walking in London is spent waiting to cross the street. 
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You can get crossings with four different stages and you get herded across like cattle when you could get across in one stage if it was well designed.
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Concerns such as this are at the heart of the shared space movement. 
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Shared spaces are roads in which pedestrians, cyclists and cars are all on an even footing.
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They can be controversial – many don't have kerbs, which can disadvantage blind people – but done well they can drastically reshape what a city space can be. 
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They work by desegregating the space between cars and people – examples of the idea can be seen at New Road, Brighton and Seven Dials in Covent Garden.
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The most noticeable shared space project so far is the new Exhibition Road in west London – which runs from South Kensington station past the museums (Natural History, Science, V&A); Imperial College and up to the Royal Albert Hall and Hyde Park. 
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The idea is that as a driver you enter that space and you feel 'this is a space for people to walk within' so you slow down. 
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It's psychological traffic calming without the speed humps.
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Ben Hamilton-Baillie, one of the key proponents of shared spaces, played a role in the early stages of the scheme. 
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He says that shared spaces work because they reflect the way in which we actually walk. 
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Pedestrians are the world's greatest Pythagoreans, they always take the hypotenuse shortest route.
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Diagonal movement patterns are typical when you start to analyse what are called pedestrian desire lines.
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This is reflected in the new Exhibition Road, where diagonal paving tiles encourage pedestrians to drift between the institutions on the street. 
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This combines with signs telling drivers to give way to people; a lack of street markings; benches in the middle of the road and distinctive street lights. 
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These elements do two things – they make Exhibition Road a nice place to be and inform drivers that this is a public space and not just for them.
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It's about designing and building streets "along the grain of human behaviour", adds Hamilton-Baillie. 
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This means understanding the way humans interact and how we anticipate each others' movements – which a far more sophisticated language than conventional engineering assumes.
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The advantages are clear – studies show that urban traffic flows better at 20mph, while the museums are happy with the slowly passing crowds.
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Obviously shared spaces aren't the answer for all streets. 
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We still need highways linking places, but if the thinking behind them spreads then it should make our cities and towns pleasant places to walk. 
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And if that happens then everyone – apart from Jeremy Clarkson – stands to win.
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A smart route

This 'walkable' space in London works because it connects a university, a Tube station, Hyde Park and museums. The large crowds help explain its purpose to drivers
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The paving
Different colours and patterns to regular streets make it clear to drivers that this isn't an ordinary road – the diagonal patterns reflect how people will cross the road
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Low/no curbs 
Rather than protect pedestrians from the traffic, curbs and some other safety measures are thought to encourage drivers to go faster as they feel distanced from people
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A 'shared space'
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This is one of the few street signs on the new Exhibition Road – cars are kept to low speeds by the surroundings and the free movement of pedestrians