“Take the stairs”, it may soon be a global mantra, but some places are adapting faster than others.
John Zacharias, formerly a professor in the Department of Geography, Planning and Environment at Concordia University, now at the University of Peking, says Europe and Japan are using stairs, and thinking of stairs for their health enhancing properties, but he says in Canada, the thinking is only beginning to change.
Listen“We know this is our growing sedentary lifestyle and it’s really a problem and is costing the economy billions of dollars a year, we could correct these problems.” says John Zacharias. “It seemed logical to me that if you move the stairway away from the escalator, you eliminate the choice of the escalator… It was just a hunch but it turned out to be true.”
It really changes the design of these places
He and and his study co-author, Richard Ling, Concordia Pshychology alumnus, set out to test the hypothesis. And they did not have to go far to get results from 33,973 pedestrians.
“Montreal just happens to be quite an ideal location for this because we’ve got a multi-level down town core, with a lot of stairways and escalators, so it just presented itself a good opportunity to test.”
They monitored 13 stairways and 12 pairs of escalators in seven connected shopping centres. The results demonstrated that the increased distance between stairs and escalators led to an increase in stair use; a 95 per cent increase in Montreal.
What I think is interesting is the people in Beijing behave the same way as they do in Montreal
Professor Zacharias reproduced the study in Beijing and they got basically the same results. “What I think is interesting is the people in Beijing behave the same way as they do in Montreal.”
“China really needs to pay attention to this, because they’ve designed places so that you cannot take stairs, and they have a quickly ageing population, so they need to be thinking about this issue.”
“I think the commercial operators would see the benefit of having different streams of movement, you know through their centres.” Zacharias says what they want people to do is cover more area and stay as long as possible. He believes the placement and design of staircases can aid this goal, while helping people too.
Professor John Zacharias says “we’ll be talking about it more in the future.”
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