Posts
Gehl (#9) counted three things on a street: people passing, people standing, people sitting. For years, before he said anything about what a street needs. The Yale and MIT team behind Eyes on the Street (#31) kept the same split when they re-counted Whyte's plaza footage, and the two columns moved differently: walking about 15% faster, lingering roughly halved. …
Kiran Keswani's notes on Russell Market (#35) come with clock times. At the St. Mary's Basilica corner, 1:25 to 2:25 p.m., a tempo stops and pedestrians are left a gap of about 2.5 feet between it and a vendor. At the Broadway corner, 3:00 to 3:15, around 15 autorickshaws wait at the edge and a coconut seller on a bicycle makes a few sales.
Alcantara's Luzon Ave (#27) has the same arrangement at 5:30 a.m.: walkers in the road because vendors hold the pavement. Neither writer calls it a problem. The width of the walkway is whatever is left after everyone else has worked.
Try it: pick a corner, write down the hour, and measure the narrowest gap a walker has to use.
Whyte (#5) filmed New York plazas in 1979-80 and counted who sat where. The Yale and MIT team behind Eyes on the Street (#31) went back with computer vision to footage of four spaces from 2008-10 and found walking about 15% faster, lingering roughly halved, and fewer group encounters. The share of people walking alone barely moved, 67% to 68%. …
Alcantara's Luzon Ave (#27) is a street where walkers use the road because the pavement is taken by vendors, and the day starts at 5:30 with men smoking at the curb until a salon opens. Duneier's Sidewalk (#11) asks who a sidewalk is for.
Luzon Ave answers in passing: whoever gets there first. Jacobs' ballet (#1) assumes a pavement to dance on; here the dance has moved into the road.
A bench is not a place to sit
Whyte (#5) found that people sit where there are places to sit. Genevieve Barber's corner in Atlanta (#17) adds a catch: the bus stops there have concrete benches, but they face full sun, with no shelter and no street trees, and the only shade comes from a cemetery oak.
So count the seats on your street, then stand at one at 3 p.m. and ask whether you would stay. Barber's neighbors did stay there at night, and vendors followed. Whyte's rule needs a second line: people sit where sitting is bearable.
Whose bench is it
Whyte (#5) counted who sits where; Duneier's Sidewalk (#11) asks who is allowed to be there at all. Put them on one block.
Spend a week on a single stretch of pavement and log two things: where people sit or stand, and who works there (vendors, buskers, delivery riders, someone who sells from a blanket). Then ask whether the seating Whyte would count is also where the working people are tolerated. Write the block as a short map of overlaps and conflicts, not a verdict.
Seven to nine
Write one street from 7 to 9 a.m., hour by hour, as Jacobs' sidewalk ballet (#1). Use Gehl's three kinds of outdoor activity (#9) as the frame: what people must do there, what they choose to do, and what happens only because others are around.
Where people sit
A post with one rule: count the places to sit on your way to work. Whyte (#5) found that's most of what makes a plaza used. Solnit (#7) gives the reason it matters: a walk you can pause is a walk you can think in.
Drift your own street
Take the street you walk every day and drift it, the way the dérive (#3) describes: no destination, follow what pulls you. Then write it up as Jacobs would (#1): who was out, at what hour, and what they were doing there.