Street-walking

IN JUNE, I got lucky twice over: I got a sponsored trip to Seoul and a sponsored trip to Vienna to attend two different conferences.

Seoul surprised me. I was expecting a rather crammed, high-rise, cheek-by-jowl experience; after all, the Seoul-Incheon sprawl is one of the biggest cities in the world. Maybe it’s different elsewhere in the city, but we were in Gangnam (yes, Gangnam Style!), which has been called the Beverley Hills of Seoul.

I walked the streets daily, exploring and going to and from the conference, and found them pleasant, clean, and highly walkable – even though the main roads have so many lanes that you have to cross in two stages.

Vienna is even more walkable. My hotel was about 20 minutes from the conference venue (the Hofburg Palace) and the sun went down just before nine at night, so there was plenty of time for touristing, and I walked an average of three or four hours a day. You have to watch out for trams, which rattle by every minute; and cyclists – make sure you don’t walk in the cycle lane, or you risk a collision!

I was stunned by the fact that pedestrians have the right of way on all the smaller side streets. Initially I would hover on the pavement edge before crossing, cautious about approaching vehicles – as one does, if one has walked in any of the South African cities, where taxis inarguably have right of way.

But each time, no matter how close they were, the car would slam on anchors and wait for me to cross. Novel. Wonderful. I thought: “Hey, I could get used to this!”

I also adored the fact that ‘little green men’ on the traffic lights come in an assortment in Vienna: solitary walking men, little green women, two men hand in hand, two women hand in hand, a nuclear family with one kid… I got skeef looks as I stopped to take pictures.

And I loved the dogs. In Seoul, I saw many dogs, but most of them were tiny, miniature Maltesers or Yorkshire terriers. (Passing a dress shop window one night, I realised that the white dog wearing a tiara in the window was alive. I had to stop to check: yes, the shop was still open and the attendants were there.)

In Vienna, people walked with their Labradors, Staffies, pointers and mutts. Early in the evening, the Volksgarten filled up with people taking their dogs for a walk and a game of fetch. (Not once did I see dog poo in the street, though, as I did in Paris.)

I love to travel and have adventures and see amazing things, but I love to come home, too. I always find myself missing the Highveld sky, of which there is surely no better than that vast arch of shocking blue that spells Home to me. But this time, for the first time, I felt a real itch. Oh, I wanted to be back there! Or at least, to transport some of There to Here.

The planning and consideration in Seoul that has gone into merging walkability, public transport and eight-lane roads that are wall-to-wall cars, alongside little village-y side-streets with boxes of huge peaches and strange exotic melons spilling out onto the sidewalk; the dance of pedestrians, cyclists, runners, dogs, trams, buses and cars in Vienna, all guided by well-thought-out signage and technology – and the feeling that this system is people-centred, that the two-legged and their four-legged companions come first.

Two days ago, I went to Sandton Holiday Inn to meet a colleague from London. First time in Joburg, with a five-minute walk from the Gautrain station, nothing for a savvy, fairly youthful international traveller, even trailing his luggage behind him. But he’d felt exposed, he said. So yesterday, when I had occasion to use the train to head in the same direction, I followed in his footsteps to check it out.

At the best of times, Sandton does not make walkers particularly welcome, with uneven pavements and surging, impatient vehicles that seem bent on mowing someone down – as a matter of fact, they say, I DO own the road!

But if you don’t know that you can detour and avoid Rivonia Road – well, have you tried it lately? There’s construction or diggings going on on both sides of the road – no pavement at all for some stretches. There was the odd straggle of orange-and-yellow tape, but no signs directing people to a detour. So you have to walk on the middelman – but even that has been dug up in one place, forcing you to step out into the road itself, and deal with motorists whose attitude to walking people is rather like that of an urbanite with a can of Doom chasing a self-effacing little spider.

I know this is a small issue – I should be wailing about the EFF in parliament or Riah Phiyega or something – but about two thirds of the people who work in this country either walk as their primary mode of transport or take a taxi, bus or train and then walk.

We want to encourage ‘non-motorised transport’ for all sorts of reasons, from climate change to congestion. So can’t we pay some attention to the needs of the walkers when we’re digging up roads, building yet more massive buildings or doing maintenance?

Give us somewhere safe to walk!

*Mandi Smallhorne is a versatile journalist and editor. Views expressed are her own. Follow her on twitter.