Amble Time Across World Cities? Neal Peirce DUBLIN, Ireland--High technology and the humble pedestrian are about to meet. Through an ingenious piece of software called Amble Time--being developed at Media Lab Europe here--digital maps of city streets and pathways can be wed with information about an individual's walking speed. Say you're at Dublin's train station, your walking speed is 3 miles an hour, and you wonder which of the town's attractions you can reach in a 20-minute walk. The software draws a bubble around you, showing what is within your reach. As it's perfected, Amble Time will be combined with the global positioning system (GPS) and available on hand-held computers (PDAs) with color displays. A pedestrian's physical location, his pauses and en-route variations and revised arrival times, will be noted automatically. He'll also be able to click on the map to check schedules of buses or local rail, hours of movies or museums, and locations of restaurants. The pedestrian focus of this project under development at the new Dublin Media Lab--financed by the Irish government and affiliated with the original Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology--isn't as "off the map" of global concerns as you'd think. Focusing on the needs of pedestrians--making cities safer, more convenient, more attractive to them--is rising as a concern across continents. Take Indianapolis, a classic auto-dominated city known for broad streets, weak public transit and Speedway roar. Indy is seriously considering a new pathway connector system that would actually close down traffic lanes on some major arteries for the sake of remaking the downtown area into a radically more attractive place for walkers and bikers. The plan is being considered by the area's Metropolitan Planning Organization, which makes decisions on big area transportation spending. It would create a cultural trail linking such attractions as downtown shopping and monuments, the White River State Park, Canal Walk, and the arts and entertainment offerings in the Fountain Square area. Why would Indianapolis consider a walkway system, with water connections, almost reminiscent of Amsterdam? The official line is economic development, but the reason is really broader. It's character--to create a more alluring place where people (businesses included) will want to be. Sort of as a P.S., Indianapolis backers also note walking's health benefits for a region whose population ranks relatively high in obesity and smoking levels. But talk to Enrique Penalosa, former mayor of Bogota and potential future presidential candidate of Colombia, and you hear an even deeper justification for creating cities for walking. In Penalosa's view, there's a global battle to reclaim our cities from the automobile that expanded its hold through the 20th century, occupying boulevards and streets and public spaces, subjugating the cities' own people to its voracious space demands. Penalosa delights in telling how, on becoming mayor of Bogota in the late '90s, he made an absolute priority of creating walkable spaces: pedestrian streets, sidewalks, greenways, bicycle paths and parks, both in neighborhoods and on a metropolitanwide scale. "I was almost impeached," Penalosa confesses, "for getting cars off sidewalks which car-owning upper classes had illegally appropriated for parking." There were lawsuits to block greenways that would connect lower-income neighborhoods to upper-income sectors. Many objected to the yearly car-free day that Penalosa instituted, as everyone was obliged to get to work or school by bus, bike, taxi or foot. And deep muttering was heard when he doubled the street miles covered by the city's traditional "Ciclovia"--seven hours each Sunday when the streets are available for walking, biking, jogging, socializing, but not for motorized vehicles. Why did Penalosa do all this? Because, he argues, parks, pathways and open spaces reclaim the city for its people, and restores their dignity. The mission for our times, he argues, should be "a city more for children than for motor vehicles. A city of large sidewalks, pedestrian streets, bicycle paths, parks--rather than a city of highways." There's an undertone of Third World class struggle in Penalosa's argument--not entirely appropriate to North America, where the middle class and even a significant segment of the poor have autos. But there's a universal, humanistic side to his appeal: "God made us walking animals--pedestrians. As a fish needs to swim, a bird to fly, a deer to run, we need to walk, not in order to survive, but to be happy." Cities, Penalosa adds, are where all the classes of humanity brush shoulders--not in their vehicles, which in fact separate them and indicate class status, but on sidewalks and in parks, shared civic space where we are all equal. No one is suggesting, of course, that automobiles--a colossus of the global economy and devices of incredible convenience--are about to go away. But it's hard to miss the whisper of a new era in which pedestrians start to reclaim their place in world cities. Neal Peirce's e-mail address is nrp@citistates.com. More Neal Peirce columns