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Sidewalk Hours

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%.

The count is only as good as the patience behind it; Whyte's rule that people sit where there are places to sit was found by watching. What the new count adds is a number for how much less of that watching there is to do: fewer people stay.

Try it: stand at one spot for ten minutes and tally two columns, those who pass and those who stop. Do it again at a different hour, and compare the ratio, not the totals.

I read the project page, not the paper.

By Raz Rotenberg, made with AI

More from Sidewalk Hours

  • 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.

  • 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.

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