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Features &
Articles : Living
Longer, Walking Stronger : The Design Needs of Senior Pedestrians
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By Rebecca Johnson
Ina Evans demurs when asked to reveal her age, only admitting
vaguely that it's "over 70." She has lived long enough to have
had a successful magazine career in New York City and to be
the grandmother of two teenagers in Chapel Hill, N.C., where
she now makes her home. Still fit and fashionable, she changes
the colorful bow that adorns her cane to match her outfits every
day. She remembers a time when Seventeen magazine
wouldn't utter the word "s-e-x" in its pages- during the 1940s
and 50s when she was a fashion staffer there. She also remembers
a time when walking across the street to the grocery store didn't
entail risking her life.
Active and busy, Mrs. Evans generally travels by public transit
to work as a volunteer coordinator at Ackland Art Museum and
by car to tend to her daily errands. But her chores would be
much simpler if she were only able to walk to a grocery store
and shopping center just across the street from her apartment
complex. Traveling on foot to the other side of the street,
however, has become hazardous.
Mean Streets
Cars attempting to change direction on the highway or to merge
onto another highway altogether make unsafe and unpredictable
U-turns. Motorist focus their attention on safely merging rather
than the traffic in front of them.
In fact, kids who attend the elementary school next to the shopping
center are unable to cross the street alone. A five minute walk
becomes a thirty minute bus ride. When parents and students
walked together in the summer of 1999 to protest the unsafe
crossing situation, Ina Evans was among them—proudly brandishing
a red, white, and blue bow on her cane.
"The light is much too short for anyone to cross all the way
over safely," Mrs. Evans says, shaking her head and watching
a family run across the multi-lane street together. After pressing
the pedestrian button, she waits several minutes before being
given a walk signal.
Sure enough, as she steps out, the light changes midway through
her crossing. According to Mrs. Evans, the median refuge island
dividing the seven lanes of traffic is "miniscule" and set back
so far from the crosswalk so that cars ignore it, whipping around
in U-turns to change direction. Her solution? She speeds up,
hoping that motorists will see her in time to slow down.
It wasn't always this way. "I am used to living in New York
which is really a walking city," Mrs. Evans comments. But after
years dividing their time between the Big Apple and the Virgin
Islands, like many older Americans, she and her husband chose
to retire to a smaller, more slow-paced town. Over the years,
however, wider streets, complicated intersections, and suburban
sprawl outpaced their expectations of a simpler lifestyle.
Growing Older in Growing Numbers
Pedestrian design, unfortunately, has yet to catch up with these
changes. "As an industry, we've really done a bad job of designing
for the older pedestrian," admits David Harkey, an engineer
at the University of North Carolina Highway Safety Research
Center. "And this needs to change. We have to remember that
designing better for older people makes things better for all
of us."
After all, we're all getting older. A century ago, in an era
riddled with epidemics, the average life expectancy was only
about 47 years. Today, Americans can expect to live thirty years
longer than that, thanks to advances in health care, nutrition
and a better quality of life overall.
Currently older Americans represent 13% of the U.S. population.
By 2030 there will be about 70 million older persons living
in the United States. That's more than twice their number in
1998. And the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP)
notes that the older population will balloon between 2010 and
2030 when the baby boom generation reaches the age of 65.
Worldwide, the older generation is growing as well. The United
Nations has projected that the world's population over the age
of 60 will increase rapidly from 9% in 1995 to 30% in 2150.
Even the old are getting older. The number of Americans aged
80 or over will rise sharply from 61 million in 1995 to 320
million in 2050 and 1,055 million in 2150. In fact, in Florida,
the fastest growing population are those over 100!
These demographic changes will greatly change the course of
pedestrian design. "Older Americans are growing in numbers,
and are apt to be a driving force in the change," says Barbara
McMillen, Transportation Specialist with the FHWA. Design elements
such as street crossing times, she notes, will react to market
forces.
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