Strategies for making walking normal

Our research shows that there are currently some situations where most people do indeed perceive walking to be a normal and expected means of travel. However, these tend to be restricted to trips that are undertaken for leisure and pleasure rather than those that are required for work or other essential everyday activities. The main exception to this is travel to school, especially for children of primary school age, where travelling on foot remains a common experience. Given that walking is something that most people associate with enjoyment, and that it is often a voluntarily-undertaken leisure activity, it ought to be reasonably easy to shift more short-distance everyday travel to walking. However, our research shows that most respondents only associate pleasurable walking with certain environments. When our respondents walked for pleasure they most often did so in urban parks, on off-road tracks, or in the countryside, usually with other family members or with a dog that was seen as providing a legitimate reason for walking. Many of these walking trips first required a car journey to reach a destination in which walking was seen as acceptable, pleasurable and a normal thing to do. Probably the most extreme example of this was in the small area in Leicester where ethnographic research was focused. Here, it was relatively common for residents to use the local park to walk for exercise, but rather than walk (sometimes only a few hundred metres) from their home to the park along local streets they would drive to and from the park. Thus there was a clear separation in respondents’ minds between walking for health and pleasure, in the park with others who engaged in a similar activity, and walking on the streets to get to and from a destination. The former was normal but the latter was not. Although rarely quite so visible within a small area, similar values and behaviours were observed and recorded in all study areas.

Apart from walking for pleasure and/or health, most people who walked occasionally did so out of necessity. Thus those who could not drive (children, the elderly) walked more than those with access to a car; and those on low incomes who either did not own a car or who wished to restrict car use walked more than those with fewer financial constraints.