Germany has a bit of a reputation for being officious and taking pleasure in bureaucracy, so you might giggle when you hear that the German city of Cologne has become the first to hire a pedestrian traffic officer. But after learning what he does, you might also wish that your city had a similar authority.
Nico Rathmann is the city’s first footpath commissioner but he doesn’t hand out violations for speed walkers. Hired in March of this year, Rathmann’s job is actually to make pedestrian concerns around the car-crazy city his sole priority.
“Foot traffic is omnipresent, but it doesn’t have a proper lobby,” Rathmann told Germany’s Tonight News, as translated by Google. As such, part of his job is to be a point of contact for citizens who have concerns about pedestrian infrastructure around the city. Additionally, he is tasked with developing concepts that promote traffic on foot but it is, in many ways, an uphill battle.
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According to a survey of 16 major German cities run by ADAC, pedestrians in Cologne felt the most unsafe walking around their city. That, Rathmann explains, is in part due to the fact that much of the city was rebuilt after WWII when city planners focused on car traffic to detriment of pedestrians.
Cologne was built “from the inside out,” Rathmann said. “That means: First comes the oversized road. And if there was still a little something left, the walkers were delighted with a too narrow walkway.”
Indeed, while speaking to Tonight News, Rathmann showed a piece of sidewalk at the Heumarkt, a public square, where the path narrowed next to a part of the road where traffic zipped by constantly. As he pointed to it, an elderly man with a walker struggled to get through, as if to prove the footpath commissioner’s point.
But Rathmann isn’t just expanding pedestrian infrastructure, he wants to protect it where the automotive infrastructure tries to take over.
“A parking ticket machine, for example, does not belong on a sidewalk—as this is clearly part of the car infrastructure. Something like that has to go down,” he says also pointing to e-scooters parked carelessly on the sidewalk, too. “The goal should be that everything that doesn’t belong on a sidewalk doesn’t stand there.”
He also mentions the parked cars near those meters as a problem. Cars in Cologned sit around, on average, for 23 hours a day, taking up vital space within the city. According to Rathmann, if you want clear sidewalks, if you want more walkable and greener cities, cars have to cede the right of way to pedestrians sometimes. Rathmann’s job is just to advocate for Cologne’s walkers to allow that.
