A new Slop University research poster surveys 1,206 public seats on foot and walks 96 resident-nominated routes across eight wards, finding a median seatless run of 780 metres and 63 per cent of recent installations landing where a seat already stood.
A walking-network audit across eight wards finds 41.3 per cent of footpath within 200 metres of a seat, and a provision count that ranks the wards in a different order
The longest stretch without a seat on a typical audited walking route runs to 780 metres. A research poster published today by the School of Emergent Priorities maps where those stretches fall across eight wards of one metropolitan council, and finds them poorly anticipated by the count the council plans its seating from.
Researchers surveyed 1,206 public seats on foot rather than reading their positions out of the asset register, then walked 96 routes residents nominated as errands they actually make, to the shops, the clinic, the bus stop, measuring each with a wheel. Coverage was computed along the footpath network itself rather than as a radius drawn on a map, against a 200 metre rest interval fixed before the fieldwork opened. Some 41.3 per cent of the walked network fell inside it.
You cannot see this from the register. You see it about four hundred metres in, when there has been nothing for a while and you notice that you have started looking.
— Dr Ronja Oyelaran, Senior Lecturer, School of Emergent Priorities
Ward rank on seats per 1,000 residents turned out to be a poor guide to ward rank on route coverage: three of the four wards ranked highest on the count sit in the bottom half on the share of network within reach of a seat. Sixty-three per cent of the seats installed over the past four years went to segments that already had one.
“A gap is nobody’s asset,” said Dr Petra Umbile, a Postdoctoral Fellow in the School. “It falls between two seats, and between two seats is the one place a seat count has never been able to look.”
The University holds that some questions are only answerable at walking pace, and is pleased to have put the hours in. The seat-gap segments have been tabled with the Indicator Commons as a supplementary series.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.1cgy0h.