Australian Walking and Cycling Conference summary
Kylie Nixon and Jerryn Zwart provided a great presentation of the highlights of the Australian Walking and Cycling Conference held in Adelaide in October. They managed to pack a great deal into their short summary, and then we had a great discussion on some great questions.
Some of the points that stood out for me were:
Slow cities - a city should be built so people can be time-rich because they dont have to rush everywhere by car. Slower cities have healthier citizens and economies.
Walktober is an annual event to encourage children to walk to school - Children are the catalyst for changing parent's negative mentality about walking to school
The economic benefits of increased pedestrian traffic is often missed in the calculation of economic benefits of public transport.
The questions at the end of their talk got some great discussion going. The questions raised were:
how can slower speeds be put on the agenda?
what is holding up/blocking delivery of our QLD State Planning Policy on leavability?
how do we encourage more innovation to support active travel in QLD?
how can we take the challenges of climate change and the needs of younger people into what we are planning and delivering?
Most of the discussion was around the question of speed and the benefits of 'slow cities' and I think we will need to have a seminar in the future to look into this in more depth.
