Walking checks: routes, detours and severed neighbours

The Design review group in ✅ Checks measures how people would walk around your layout, not only how vehicles drive it. It builds a walking network from your streets, shared surfaces and drawn footpaths, and reports four things. All four run on every plan, including Free.

What it walks on

Carriageways, shared surfaces, footpaths and hammerhead bars — a car cannot drive across the bar of a turning head to get somewhere, but a person walks across it. A footpath counts as joined to a street when it is drawn joined: the review uses the same reach the plan uses to snap a path end onto a kerb, so if the plan shows a path connected, the review treats it as connected. Two streets that merely run close together are not joined; a connection that is not drawn does not exist.

Driveways and parking aisles are not part of the walking network. Distances run along road and path centrelines, so they are good to a few metres.

The four findings

• Road and walking checks not run — you have drawn streets but not marked a site entrance. Without one, none of the road or walking checks can run, and this says so rather than leaving an empty panel that reads like a pass.
• Homes with no walking route — homes the network cannot reach from the entrance, usually because a street or path is drawn not quite meeting the rest. A home that cannot be reached has not been checked; it has not passed. It also mentions any footpath drawn too far from a street to count as joined.
• Indirect walking routes — homes whose walk to the nearest way out of the site is much longer than a well-connected street network would make it. Every plan also gets the furthest walk out, how long it takes at two walking paces, and how many homes it was measured across.
• Neighbours a long way apart on foot — a place where a short new path would bring neighbouring homes much closer together on foot, drawn on the plan as a line.

Why "indirect" is not measured against a straight line

No street network can offer a straight line: you walk along streets and turn corners. Even a grid where every street runs through costs up to about 1.4 times the straight-line distance, and that cost grows with the size of the site whatever its layout. Measured against a straight line, a perfectly connected grid scores worse than the same land laid out as cul-de-sacs. So the review allows for what a connected network would cost, and reports only the walking beyond that: a note above about 100 m, a warning above about 250 m.

Severed neighbours, and why a perimeter block is not one

This check reports a place, not a pair of homes: a gap of up to 30 m between two parts of the walking network, inside the site, where a 2 m path could run without crossing any plot, house, building, fence, hedge, parking bay or water, and would save neighbours over 100 m of walking. Because it will not run a path through anyone’s plot, a back-to-back perimeter block is silent: the homes are close as the crow flies and a long walk apart, but the land between them is gardens. That is what a block is, not a defect.

Each finding says what the walk is today and what it would be with that path alone, and how many homes would each get more than 100 m closer on foot to at least one neighbour. Where two places along the same strip of open ground would each help different homes, both are reported — the second only if it still helps someone once the first path exists. A place the review declines to propose because it would run blind is never treated as built.

What these checks do not claim

• Every figure — 100 m, 250 m, 30 m, the walking paces — is ours. No document we have read sets a figure for walking directness or severance, and the findings say so. None of them quotes a guidance document’s distance bands, because those are distances to a destination such as a shop or a bus stop, and the plan holds nothing off site.
• The plan holds one vehicle entrance. A separate pedestrian gate counts only if you draw a path out to the site boundary.
• Whether land is available for a new path, and who would maintain it, are things the plan cannot show.