Walking itinerary design: planning steps

A route is easier to build in a fixed order than by inspiration. The sequence below takes about an hour for an unfamiliar town and produces something you can hand to someone else. It also fails visibly, which matters: you find out at step two that the day does not work, rather than at four in the afternoon on the day itself.

What to take away

• Work in order. Each step depends on the one before it.
• Constraints come before preferences, always.
• Draw the route before choosing the sights, then fit the sights into it.
• Write down what went wrong afterwards. It is the only way the next route improves.

The five steps

Structured planning frameworks tend to converge on the same shape. EPA and FEMA's Regional Resilience Toolkit, published in 2019 for coordinating disaster planning across jurisdictions, runs on five steps: engage, assess, act, fund and measure. The scale is entirely different, but the discipline transfers, and the last step is the one amateurs skip.

Step	For a walking day	Output
Engage	Agree who is walking and what they want	One sentence per person
Assess	Collect constraints: times, grade, weather, service	A list, with unknowns marked
Act	Draw the route, place waypoints, add sights	A map with a bail-out
Fund	Set the day's spend and where it goes	Two named costs
Measure	Note what worked at the end of the day	Three lines in a notebook

Step by step

Engage. Ask each person for one sentence about what would make the day good. A group where one person wants distance and another wants interiors needs to know that before the route is drawn, not at the second uphill.

Assess. Write down the fixed times, the total grade, the sunset, the forecast and the return service. Mark anything you do not know as unknown rather than assuming the good case.

Act. Draw the route between the fixed anchors, place the functional waypoints, then slot the sights into the gaps. If a sight will not fit, it does not go in.

Fund. Name the day's two paid items in advance. A day with an unspecified budget acquires a third and fourth item by mid-afternoon.

Measure. Three lines at the end: what took longer than expected, what you skipped, and where you sat down.

Where alterations complicate things

Half the surprises on an American walking route come from work in progress. The Access Board hosts a 2007 advisory report on planning and design for alterations, produced by a subcommittee of its public rights-of-way advisory committee, covering the design process, design solutions, model sidewalks and curb ramp examples. The report itself states that it provides technical assistance only, is not a rule and has no legal effect. What it shows is how much thought goes into rebuilding a single sidewalk, which is why a street rebuilt last year can be excellent while the identical street beside it has been untouched for decades.

Check recent street imagery dates before trusting a route. An image from four years ago in a town doing sidewalk work is a fiction.

Our guide to how walking itineraries are built covers the reasoning behind each stage, and the waypoints piece gives the spacing rules used in step three.

Common questions

Can I skip the assess step for a familiar town? Skip the research, not the write-down. Familiar towns are where people forget the Sunday timetable.

What if the group disagrees at step one? Split the middle of the day and meet for the second half. It works better than compromise.

How detailed should the map be? One page, with the bail-out and the two paid items marked. More than that goes unread.

Is the measure step really worth it? It is the difference between ten years of walking trips and the same trip ten times.