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The World’s Longest Street Crossing

Via the Daily Mail:

A frail pensioner who lives in a village with no pedestrian crossing has to take a 14-mile bus journey just to cross the road.

Partially blind Nancy Underwood, 89, walks with a Zimmer frame and is unable to cross the busy road outside her home because of the constant traffic.

If she wants to visit the Post Office or shop in Chideock, Dorset, she has to catch the Number 31 bus to Bridport three miles away before using a pedestrian crossing.

The grandmother-of-five then boards a return journey and stops off in Chideock on the opposite side of the road to her house, where she can safely visit the shop.

Not surprisingly, the town ranks rather low on Walk Score (25).

(thanks Peter)

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This entry was posted on Friday, March 12th, 2010 at 8:55 am and is filed under Pedestrians. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

6 Responses to “The World’s Longest Street Crossing”

  1. Josh R Says:
    March 12th, 2010 at 10:55 am

    That walk score website is interesting, but flawed in that it measures raw distance and doesn’t take into account freeways and other barriers. My area rates 70 on their scale, but if you remove the shops I can’t reasonably walk to because of freeways, it would be considerably lower. (not terrible, just noticeably lower.) Viewed alone, her house would likely rate somewhat high on their scale because it’s right across the street from the shops, when in reality she can’t get there safely.

  2. Doug Faunt Says:
    March 12th, 2010 at 12:33 pm

    She needs the assistance of some guerrilla pedestrian facility builders.
    That’s absurd (I’m using that word a lot lately).

  3. Nate Briggs Says:
    March 12th, 2010 at 2:19 pm

    I also noticed this during my time in Britain.

    In a country which seems almost obsessed with assessibility and devices to assist differently-abled people, it’s amazing that you have long stretches of surface street where no concessions at all are provided to pedestrians just trying to cross from one side to the other.

    It’s as though no one even imagined that someone walking might want to do that.

    … Nate (SLC)

  4. Yokota Fritz Says:
    March 12th, 2010 at 3:00 pm

    In my area (San Jose, California), a couple of older individuals were hit while trying to cross 7 lanes of Stevens Creek Boulevard at an intersection. They were crossing the road from their retirement community to shopping when the time ran out on their crosswalk signal.

  5. Peter Says:
    March 12th, 2010 at 3:39 pm

    I’m glad you liked the story Tom, and thanks for the credit.

    I’d just like to point out that as the woman in the story was over 65 she would have qualified for a free bus pass, so although it may have taken her a long time to cross the road by this method, it would have monetarily cost her nothing.

  6. Kevin Love Says:
    March 13th, 2010 at 6:25 am

    Where I live in downtown Toronto scores rather high, but I note that this site practices religious discrimination.

    Churches, mosques and other places of worship are excluded from its places to walk to. But all the big commercial chains are definitely there.

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How We Drive is the companion blog to Tom Vanderbilt’s New York Times bestselling book, Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us), published by Alfred A. Knopf in the U.S. and Canada, Penguin in the U.K, and in languages other than English by a number of other fine publishers worldwide.

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