10 The ministry of sensible walks

‘Hundreds of thousands of salaried employees throng
the streets of Berlin daily, yet their life is more unknown
than that of the primitive tribes at whose habits those
same employees marvel in films’

Siegfried Kracauer¹

You see it most in the evening rush hour, a strange, improvised street dance you could call ‘the pedestrian shuffle’. Thousands of workers stream out of city offices after work and, in the hurry to get to the railway station or to the bar, they weave between the cars on busy roads, using little head swivels, swerving movements and quickened steps, often not waiting for traffic lights or using pedestrian crossings. Crossing the road is a social habit that people do almost unconsciously. You might hear the occasional honked horn or see the odd two fingers raised in anger, but the rival parties generally manage to work things out amicably enough – a testament to the power of instinctual actions and non-verbal signals.

Crossing the road is a simple routine, but a rather important one: after all, getting it wrong can get you killed. We forget how crucial this routine is because there are so few legal constraints on pedestrians in Britain. The Highway Code (which is simply that – a code of good behaviour – only some of which is backed up by statute law) contains several pages of instructions on how pedestrians should behave, but they are mostly unenforceable. You can jaywalk with impunity – unlike in both North America and much of Western Europe, where there are hefty fines for naughty pedestrians, handed out with varying degrees of alacrity. In the US, the pedestrian is brusquely ordered by the lights simply to ‘walk’ or ‘don’t walk’, although natives of certain American cities, like New York, are inveterate jaywalkers, a tradition threatened only slightly by Mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s zero-tolerance approach at the end of the 1990s. Crossing the road in Germany in defiance of the red standing man is almost as serious an offence as a driver ignoring a red light. In Singapore, the capitalist dictatorship and traffic management capital of the world, it can land you in jail.

These cultural differences are sometimes taken as a sign of the British reliance on good manners rather than rigid rules. But there have been many abortive attempts to police the movements of pedestrians in this country, and their relationship with drivers has often been difficult. Like queuing, crossing the road operates through unspoken rules, and these rules have emerged gradually in response to the sometimes fraught history of the motor car in Britain. One 1937 newspaper leader encapsulated the intractability of this problem with the mock epitaph:

Here lies the body of William Day,

Who was killed disputing a right of way.

He was right, dead right, as he walked along,

But he’s just as dead as if he’d been wrong.²

Pedestrian crossings were first introduced after the 1934 Road Traffic Act, at a time when the growing number of deaths on the roads was seen as a national scandal. To make the crossings conspicuous, they were marked at kerbside by ‘Belisha beacons’, named after the minister of transport, Leslie Hore-Belisha. These seven-foot-high striped poles with amber-coloured globes on top were garish additions to the streetscape and produced a great deal of both amused and hostile public interest. The Spectator protested that they made London look like it was ‘preparing for a fifth-rate carnival’.³ In the four months after their introduction, 3,000 of the 15,000 beacons installed in London had been destroyed, by people throwing stones or taking pot shots at them with air rifles.⁴ Perhaps these guerrilla foot soldiers were protesting at the way in which the crossings conceded the rest of the highway to the motor car. By the end of the 1930s, both local authorities and the government began to restrict pedestrian movement. Miles of pedestrian barriers were erected in London, making it harder not to use the provided crossings.⁵ In a pilot project in the capital, policemen stood on the roofs of police cars in busy streets during the rush hour, shouting advice and admonishments at pedestrians through megaphones.⁶

The next major innovation was the zebra crossing, invented in the late 1940s after a series of studies by the Road Research Laboratory on the conspicuousness of different road markings in different conditions like wet roads and night-time.⁷ The future prime minister James Callaghan, then a junior at the Ministry of Transport, came up with ‘zebra’ as a name for the crossing that would be easily remembered, particularly by children. A thousand sets of zebra stripes were painted on roads in preparation for ‘pedestrian crossing week’, held in April 1949 to test the new zebras and promote the use of crossings generally.⁸ There were also painted footprints on the pavement leading up to the zebras, silently urging pedestrians to follow their example.

The Ministry of Transport believed that there were now so many crossings that they were not being observed by either motorists or pedestrians.⁹ So the Belisha crossings not converted to zebras were gradually abandoned, reducing the overall number of crossings by about two-thirds. In many towns, parents protested against the removal of crossings, forming human barriers and holding up traffic while their children crossed the road to school.¹⁰ The zebra crossing also failed to get rid of the longstanding confusion over rights of way. The 1954 version of the Highway Code informed pedestrians that they had precedence on the zebra but should ‘be sensible; wait for a suitable gap in the traffic so that drivers have time to give way’.¹¹ It is easy to see how, in heavy traffic, this could lead to a game of chicken.

By the early 1960s it was clear that the zebra could not cope with the growing volume of urban traffic. The postwar office boom had created huge rush-hour congestion in city centres, as more white-collar workers drove to work in cars, many donated by their firms as non-taxable perks. So the government experimented with a ‘hybrid’ crossing that would stop cars more emphatically but would not disrupt the traffic flow as much as traffic lights. Instead of the zebra’s parallel stripes, these new ‘panda’ crossings had triangular black-and-white shark’s teeth, supposedly resembling panda markings. The pedestrian pressed a button at the roadside, which produced a flashing amber light followed by a pulsating red light for drivers, warning and then ordering them to stop, followed by a ‘cross’ sign for the pedestrian. This was a new concept of road-sharing, which gave pedestrians and cars priority on the same section of road at different times.¹² Panda crossings were introduced in April 1962, when the minister of transport, Ernest Marples, switched on the first one, opposite London’s Waterloo station. There is a curious piece of BBC news footage of this event in which, deprived of any ribbon-cutting moment, Marples simply walks over the crossing, holding a toy panda presented to him by the Mayor of Lambeth’s wife. Ominously, he has to wave the traffic on again once he has crossed the road.¹³

The panda was a flop. Motorists were baffled by the flashing and pulsating lights and did not realise that, if there was no light at all, it meant ‘go ahead’. Many of the new crossings broke down and were covered in sackcloth only hours after being unveiled, which created more confusion about whether a panda whose lights weren’t working became a zebra by default. Guildford had all thirteen of its zebras converted to pandas, this stockbroker suburb being selected by the Ministry of Transport as a show town, allegedly because of ‘the high standard of intelligence of its inhabitants’. But its local newspaper soon dismissed the experiment as a ‘farce’.¹⁴

London pedestrians had a particular reason to be angry with the pandas: their introduction coincided with the first serious attempt to penalise jaywalking in the capital. In September 1962, the Ministry of Transport proposed an experiment in three metropolitan boroughs (Ealing, Paddington and Tottenham) to make it an offence to cross the road other than at pedestrian crossings. One correspondent in The Times wondered if ‘Mr Marples’s next brainwave will be jay-walker wardens on roller skates’, and another asserted his ‘rights as a freeborn Englishman’ to cross the road wherever he liked.¹⁵ While the panda was quickly abandoned, the experiment of punishing badly-behaved pedestrians stuttered on for a few more years. The Metropolitan police tried a new tactic in 1966, painting red lines by the kerb and threatening jaywalkers with £20 fines. 5,000 people received verbal warnings but no one was fined, and the police dropped the scheme three months later, claiming it was ‘absolutely unworkable’.¹⁶

The next pedestrian crossing innovation after the panda, announced in September 1964, was more successful: shielded lights for pedestrians at kerbside showing the silhouetted figures of a red standing man (‘wait’) and a green walking man (‘cross’). The introduction of these matchstick figures followed the 1963 Worboys report, which recommended using symbols rather than letters in traffic signs. The green and red man symbols were inspired by the work of Otto Neurath, a member of the Vienna circle who in the 1930s devised a graphic language known as Isotype (International System of Typographical Picture Education) in the belief that universal visual symbols could transcend cultural and national differences.¹⁷ (In fact, apart from their colour there is nothing universal about the way green and red traffic-light men look – East Germans are very fond of their cute, jauntily-hatted Ampelmännchen (‘little traffic-light man’), a residue of the old GDR regime, and have fought long campaigns against his replacement by his blander West German cousin. More recently, a little green woman, nicknamed ‘Sophie’, has appeared at crossings in Germany and Holland.)

Even with little green and red men to guide pedestrians, there was still a lot of confusion about who had right of way, particularly when the various lights were flashing or unlit. Finally, in July 1969, the Ministry of Transport came up with a workable solution: a new crossing called the ‘pelican’ or ‘pelicon’, a compression of ‘pedestrian light-controlled crossing’. It was clearer for motorists than the earlier green-man crossings because it had a full green signal showing for them all the time, except when someone pressed the button to cross the road. The push-button box also had a plaque explaining to pedestrians how to use the crossing. These instructions are still there today (‘Pedest-rians: push button and wait for signal opposite’), read by no one except the occasional foreign tourist or bored child.

Unlike the earlier crossing experiments, the pelican received little press attention, perhaps because it was jostling for news space with the moon landings. Television adverts about the pelican focused on the still-ambiguous period when the little green man was flashing. One 1974 TV advertisement used characters from the most popular sitcom of the period, Dad’s Army, creating the rather incongruous image of the Home Guard marching through a 1970s suburban street. The platoon is crossing on a pelican when the green man starts to flash. As Corporal Jones begins to panic, Sergeant Wilson, the embodiment of patrician calm, says that ‘one continues to cross if one’s already on the crossing. There’s plenty of time.’ He then restrains Captain Mainwaring from stepping out, warning him that ‘one shouldn’t start to cross’. A voiceover instructs the viewer to ‘learn your blinking pelican signals’.¹⁸ This film was released five years after pelicans were first introduced, suggesting that the government was still not convinced that pedestrians had got the hang of them. As late as 1976, there was an advert with a ‘pelican crossing song’ in the style of an American hoedown:

When the green man’s flashing and the amber too This is what you’ve got to do

Pedestrians, don’t start to cross

Your life’s more important than the time that’s lost.¹⁹

The sixties innovation of the push-button crossing – which meant, in a sense, that pedestrians had to ask for permission to cross the road and then wait until permission was granted – was part of a growing attempt to limit their access to busy roads. Around the same time, the new science of traffic engineering, which had first emerged in America in the 1950s, began to have a big influence on British transport policy. Traffic engineering preferred to focus on road design and traffic data rather than more contentious issues like penalising jaywalkers or punishing speeding motorists. It was a car-centred discipline, treating pedestrians largely as impediments to traffic flow. With the rise of this new science, the trend shifted towards changing the street landscape in order to separate pedestrians from drivers.

Colin Buchanan’s influential government report and unlikely bestseller, Traffic in Towns (1963), epitomised this new approach. In part, this book owed its success to its author’s personal charisma and vivid turn of phrase. ‘We have taken a bull into the china shop,’ Buchanan said, ‘and to that old problem there are only two answers – shoot the bull, or more creatively, build a new china shop especially designed for bulls.’²⁰ Buchanan’s report was widely blamed in subsequent years for recommending the complete segregation of pedestrians and traffic.²¹ This was unfair. Buchanan simply argued that towns had a finite capacity to absorb cars. He suggested limiting the number of cars going into centres by restricting parking spaces and imposing a congestion tax, long before these ideas achieved political currency. But he also advocated designing ‘traffic architecture’, which would accommodate cars and pedestrians in multi-tier streets. Pedestrians would walk around on elevated pavements (because humans are easier to raise than vehicles) with most roads at ground level, and some major roads and car parks built underground. In London’s Oxford Street, for example – a ‘civic disaster’ where ‘even old ladies have to be spry as matadors to avoid the snapping bonnets of cars’²² – Buchanan proposed a six-lane freeway, with shops and pedestrians raised above it.

Whether inspired by Buchanan or not, there were some hugely ambitious plans for segregating pedestrians and cars in the 1960s and 1970s, not all of which came to fruition. In London there was a blueprint for a whole network of urban motorways smashing through the Georgian terraces of Islington, Hampstead and Notting Hill, stopped only by the pressure-group power of a growing band of middle-class gentrifiers. In the City of London today you can still see evidence of the aborted ‘pedway’ system, a network of elevated pavements inspired by New Town planning, which would allow pedestrians to walk for miles without ever descending to street level.²³ But Oxford Street remained (and remains) a traffic-clogged morass for both drivers and pedestrians. What did get built were lots of urban expressways, crossable only via footbridges and subways. Subways were not a post-Buchanan invention, but these dark, urine-stained, graffiti-sprayed tunnels symbolised the failures of urban planning in this era. Aside from their inherent design problems, they tended to be sited on the edges of city centres, underneath ring roads, so they came to be associated with inner-city crime, especially muggings.²⁴ Margaret Thatcher spoke to her party conference in 1987 about the ‘arrogant’ post-war planners who had ‘cut the heart out of our cities’:

They swept aside the familiar city centres that had grown up over the centuries. They replaced them with a wedge of tower blocks and linking expressways, interspersed with token patches of grass and a few windswept piazzas, where pedestrians fear to tread … they simply set the municipal bulldozer to work. What folly, what incredible folly.²⁵

In the 1980s and 1990s, there was a backlash against the subway era as planners and architects began to stress the importance of ‘walkability’ and ‘legible cities’. But the areas earmarked for greater pedestrian-friendliness were generally the central shopping and tourist districts. Pedestrians might be valued as consumers, but they were not allowed to get in the way of traffic flow elsewhere in the city. The pedestrianisation of city-centre areas was another way of segregating walkers from motorists – albeit a free-range solution which gave the former a little more room to roam around.

At the turn of the millennium, the government, and major cities like London, began developing what they called ‘walking strategies’. Commissioned by the Central London Partnership to look at the problem of walk-ability, the Danish architect Jan Gehl concluded that London suffered from ‘pedestrian jams’, movement that was beyond comfortable walking capacity, a condition that Americans call ‘pedlock’ (pedestrian gridlock). He recommended removing urban ‘obstacle courses’ made up of guard railings, staggered pedestrian crossings and pavement clutter such as sign poles and ticket machines.²⁶ But the possibility of a national strategy for walking was met only with press ridicule. Journalists dismissed ‘the ministry of silly walks’, and lamented the loss of taxpayers’ money spent on promoting ‘this miracle method of locomotion, called putting one foot in front of the other’.²⁷ Wasn’t walking a rather simple, idiot-proof activity? It was certainly none of the business of meddling planners and politicians.

How times have changed. When cars first arrived in the early years of the twentieth century, newspaper journalists were on the side of pedestrians, who made up the majority of their readers. Drivers were seen as over-privileged yobs trying to take over the road at the expense of everyone else. The aristocratic road hog, immortalised as Mr Toad in The Wind in the Willows (1908), and, even worse, the nouveau riche businessman who spent his ill-gotten gains on luxury items like cars, were common hate figures.²⁸ As the car became an increasingly middle-class rather than aristocratic possession throughout the 1920s and 1930s, however, public opinion shifted and the free movement of cars became paramount. Nowadays most journalists are not so much hostile to pedestrians as oblivious to their existence. Walking is statistically almost invisible, particularly since all trips under one mile are discounted by the government’s National Travel Survey. But the best estimate is that, in the last quarter of the twentieth century, the amount of walking in Britain declined by about 25 per cent.²⁹ Given this context, a walking strategy does not seem quite so ludicrous.

From the point of view of public safety, government policy on crossing the road has been a great success story. In 1927, the earliest year in which statistics are available, 2,774 pedestrians were killed in road accidents. Despite a huge increase in the number of cars and roads since then, the number of deaths in 2004 was 671.³⁰ But the policy of segregating drivers and pedestrians, building ever more sophisticated crossings and bombarding pedestrians with road safety propaganda has also sidestepped thornier issues about the dominance of the car and the decline of walking in our society.

So what do we have instead of a walking strategy? We have intelligent technology. In the mid-1990s, two new pedestrian crossings were introduced which aimed to take all the remaining hassle out of crossing the road. Carrying on the tradition of lame puns around an avian theme, they were named the puffin (‘pedestrian user-friendly intelligent’) crossing and the toucan (‘two can’) crossing, which was basically a puffin that could be used by both pedestrians and cyclists. Both these crossings use infrared sensors to detect pedestrians, ensuring that the traffic is stopped until they have finished crossing, but giving drivers a green light as soon as the crossing is clear – so there is no need for intermediate flashing lights or amber stages, just constant red or green. Compared with their predecessors, these new pedestrian crossings generated little public interest, perhaps because their interactivity makes them so easy to use. But they were specifically designed with the eternal conflict between motorist and pedestrian in mind. The steady red signal meant that pedestrians were not harassed by drivers revving up during the flashing green/ amber period, and drivers were not irritated by having to stop pointlessly at crossings after pedestrians pressed the button and then crossed in a gap in the traffic, or even pressed it just to annoy drivers.

In order to broker this ceasefire between driver and pedestrian, the pedestrian crossing has had to become an incredibly complex and expensive piece of technology. Government guidelines about its design and installation – on the diameter of lamps, the rate at which lights should flash, the width of zebra stripes, the colour of beacons, the slope of the ramps for wheelchair users, the pitch and tone of the bleep for blind people – now fill entire volumes. This technology works so well that the crossings are, as engineers say, ‘black-boxed’ – that is, they perform complex functions automatically, with all the workings hidden inside. We do not have to think about how they operate, or about the fierce debates and power struggles that have brought them into being. Nor are pedestrians forced to use them. The only legal requirement imposed on pedestrians is that they must not dawdle on a crossing (although what constitutes dawdling is, of course, not easily defined).

So we are left with this improvised rush-hour ballet, as errant pedestrians take their chances in the busy city traffic. Observational studies of pedestrians have shown that many of them simply disregard the traffic architecture designed to segregate them from cars. They jump over and walk on the outside of guard railings, steer clear of subways and footbridges, ignore the white-painted signs on the road telling them to ‘look left’ or ‘look right’, walk across roads just yards away from pedestrian crossings and cross when the little red man is ordering them to wait.³¹ Since British traffic law has preferred to appeal to our sense of civic duty rather than the threat of punishment, the only real sanctions against pedestrians are the laws of physics. We cannot rebel too much against the ascendancy of the car, for one very good reason: those several tons of speeding metal racing towards us. We may be in a hurry, but we are also very soft and fleshy. So the pedestrian shuffle is a habit we all have to learn.