Transportation
The Next Big Infrastructure Crisis? Age-Proofing Our Streets
By 2031, one in five people living in America will be older than 65. But virtually none of our cities or suburbs were built with them in mind.
We often talk colloquially about the "fast pace of city living," and that pace actually has a default speed: We’ve long assumed that people cross the street walking at about 4 feet per second.
Crosswalks are timed with this number in mind, so you don't get clipped by a creeping car when the red hand starts flashing at you midway through an intersection. But the older we get, the more likely we are to slow down. Most 80-year-olds just don’t move at 4 feet per second.