Toronto Star

Advocates of walking have gathered in Toronto this week for "Walk 21," a conference about "putting pedestrians first" in the 21st century. It's astonishing that anything as natural as putting one foot in front of the other should need advocacy, but that's the essence of the current crisis. When the machine dominates, the natural is trashed: Local food is hard to find, clean air rare and using your feet discouraged. Toronto and its suburbs provide the conference-goers with bitter examples of how we allow motor vehicles to dominate at the expense of pedestrians. Sadly, our municipal epithet could be "city of stingy sidewalks" because these fundamentals of urban walking are narrower than in most North American cities, and traffic engineers have made them even narrower in places like Avenue Rd. above Bloor St. The suburbs, organized for car travel, are even more ungenerous to walkers. No destinations can be reached easily on foot.