Glideology: Deliberations on Traffic and Reimagining Urban Space

This is a book about the amenity that we call streets and how we choose to use them to move about. What makes the street so vitally important today is that it has the capacity to allow for many different modalities of travel to coexist in the public space instead of being dominated by any single mode of travel.

Glideology, an invented word, is meant to evoke memories of gliding downhill on your bicycle as a child or sledding down a hill in the winter. Glideology represents an optimistic outlook for traffic for the near future. It anticipates that common-sense will take hold and urban public space will be improved to focus on the many different reasons that one travels; short local trips, medium-distance trips of 15 minutes or less, multi-modal options to travel offer an antidote to simply defaulting to taking the car to get some milk at the corner store because this is a learned behavior that can be altered for a more sustainable and obvious options.

This book explores in a comic format the many shared experiences and feelings that go into commuting in urban areas and it looks to how the street can accommodate a multi-modal approach to sharing the laneways so that real options exist for the pedestrian.