Pedestrians aren’t (always) pedestrian

Here’s a great graphic from the Carfee France site run by Marcel Roberts. The website is a repository of thoughts, links and information about carfree life in France and elsewhere. If your French isn’t great, Google translate will only mangle it a bit when turning it into English. The reason why the graphic is so brilliant is that it captures the variety of things we get up to on two legs (well, many of them), and in so doing, gets away from the notion of we bipeds as merely “pedestrian.”

It reminded me of a graphic on street hoardings I saw when I was carfree in Toulouse in 2012. The hoardings explain a new pedestrian-friendly development in the centre of the city. At first I wondered if it was something in the water in France. And then I realised that the authorities in Toulouse, as in so many other European cities, are serious about prioritising streets for people who aren’t in cars.

I wonder if they have to put up with the likes of Unchain the Brighton Motorist?

And to illustrate the point that pedestrians are shoppers too, here’s a picture from the carfree streets of central Toulouse.

PS: Planning a holiday? See the Marcel Roberts book on Islands Without Cars (Isles San Voitures).