Nick Taylor, Civil Engineer

Londoners (2012) is a new book by Craig Taylor.  It is an oral history that allows ordinary Londoners the opportunity to provide a view of their city.  One participate was Nick Taylor, a civil engineer.  A portion of Nick's comments were as follows:

"If we could make London easier to walk in, it would be great.  I think we could make that a lot easier and I think it would be really beneficial to think about how one does that.  Because walking is the most natural way to move.  If you think of transport on a personal scale, you have the opportunity to understand what the environment looks like, what it feels like.  Walking makes a city human, so cities ought to be for walking, and yet we don't really see walking as a means of getting around.  The thing about pedestrians is that we tend to think of them as traffic.  So we model them as rather like cars, but actually we want people to stop.  That's a good thing.  People stop and they talk and they turn to go into the streets: they're not like cars.  We don't want cars to stop, but we do want people to stop.  Finding some way to represent how we enjoy stopping is a really important issue."