Continuous Footways for the Future: Embedding Sustainable Transitions into the Design Journey of Active Travel Infrastructure

Streets are the foundation of a city’s urban fabric. As efforts to adapt existing carriageways into multi-modal movement corridors with segregated space for active travel modes and vehicles gather pace, street design will play a critical role in this transition. This research focuses on continuous footways, a design intervention at side roads that gives priority for people walking, over those who are driving. It aims to investigate the processes taking place during the conceptualisation and design of two continuous footways in a contemporary street in Glasgow, and to examine the implications of their design for people using them. A novel methodology is presented to analyse movement behaviour at side roads, captured more broadly within an adapted framework based on socio-technical transition theory (STT). The results indicate that the continuous footways were altered between the initial design and the constructed design due, in part, to the constraining actions of roads engineers who were uncomfortable with the proposed design. Pedestrians are altering their behaviour to some extent at the continuous footways; however, drivers are continuing to behave as if they have priority. Framing the actions of the various design actors within the context of STT illuminates new ‘regime-aware’ approaches to managing the design governance process during future street regeneration projects.