Mark Fenton Leads Official On Walk Audit

MOSCOW -Transportation consultant Mark Fenton led city and university officials on a walk audit of downtown Pullman and surrounding areas on Thursday. Fenton began his talk by preaching the benefits of getting daily exercise and making it easier to walk from place to place.

“Basically, we know humans benefit from routine physical activity.” Fenton said.  “We know that as little as 30 minutes a day will reduce risk for chronic disease and an early death.”

Fenton spoke about active transportation and how it’s important to not only make it easier to walk places, but to make it more enjoyable as well.

“We’ve got good evidence that behavior change alone is not enough. We also have good evidence that environmental factors have a huge influence on people’s transportation choices and how active they are as part of daily life,” Fenton said.

Fenton has four main criteria for breaking down quality of transportation. They are: destinations and mix of land use, quality and connectivity of the network, details of site design, and Safety and access for all.

He asked members of the group to grade parts of the town based on these criteria in order to gain multiple perspectives on each location.

“If you do walk audits [and] you’ve got a parent pushing a stroller, they may have a different perspective than the super athletic runner-person who uses the trail all the time and is really familiar with this,” Fenton said when asked why everyone was participating.

Fenton then gave his advice for how to make transportation more effective and he even had group members serve as a demonstration for how curb extensions can make a crosswalk safer.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The video was aired on a previous broadcast.