ABSTRACT
In a significant work on sustainable urban transport, Schiller et al. (2010: 218) stress the “long, profound and central role of walking in shaping human physical development, cognition and the formation of preautomobile communities,” advocate a central place for walking in transportation planning, and conclude that the environment created for pedestrians “defines the quality of the public realm and its capacity to support human community.” In reality, walking is the Cinderella of contemporary urban and transport planning and hardly figures at all in rural transport planning. In the Global North there is a considerable mismatch between the rhetoric around walking and the reality of what happens on the ground. In the US, UK and Australia, walking is in decline and struggles to find its place in political and planning discourse that, at best, talks about the importance of public transport even if it does not deliver.
