Walk [ San Jose ], in collaboration with Walk [ Your City ], began installing pedestrian wayfinding signs the afternoon of Wednesday, April 8, 2015 to direct people to parks, venues, services and nightlife that might be closer than they realized. Supported by the Knight Foundation, the effort supports San José’s goals to increase pedestrian accessibility and navigability by creating a more inviting and walkable city for all.
Walk [Your City] helps boost a community’s walkability, linking informational street signs for people with web-based campaign management and data collection to complement traditional approaches to wayfinding. The initial set of signs supports pedestrian connectivity along two east-west corridors, St. John Street and Santa Clara Street, for visitors, residents and downtown workers. More signs will appear through the rest of 2015.
How many of these signs can you find along Santa Clara and St John Streets in downtown San Jose?
Matt Tomasulo, the “Civic Instigator” behind Walk [ Your City ], travels to San Francisco today to do more of the same at the Market Street Prototyping Festival.
Salud! For more info, visit City of San Jose website.
It is good to be a tourist in your own home town. The things we drive by every day and never seem to have time to check out can be amazing.
I wish they had put biking times on the signs as well for comparison.
Google maps says it would take ~10 hours to walk from the south to the north border of San Jose. That’s assuming you could keep your walking pace up for that long. Realistically it might be more like 12 hours. By bike its only around 2.5 hours though. Similar signs showing longer walking distances/times compared to biking times might help get the point across that biking is so much more efficient.