Abstract: A critical building block of a functional successful city is the presence of vibrant streets; streets that encourage walking. The level of pedestrian activity is an indicator of a great street as well as economic viability and is often used in determining rental values for retail premises. Walking creates a healthy population and is reflective of a liveable city. Walking is also critical to the overall effectiveness of a transport system, supporting every public transport trip and a lot of private vehicle trips. For decades traffic engineering and planning in Australian cities has focused on and invested in improvements to roadways, with the singular objective of moving vehicle traffic. An incremental shift towards the implementation of broader integrated transport objectives has started to occur. This shift is partly in recognition that building roads can not solve traffic congestion and that roads have a large influence on the overall fabric and function of cities. The complex challenge of balancing the needs of different road users will become more complicated as Australia continues to become more urbanised (Vallyon, et al 2009). Even with policy beginning to shift in support of walking, it is still under-represented in transport projects and designs are still leading to poor outcomes for pedestrians (Hess, 2009). While this is partly due to the size of the task to assess and modify roads to support all modes, there is more that can be done to provide good effective examples of interventions to support walking to help this process. These ideas are not new in terms of urban design and town planning (Jacobs J., 1961 and Utermann R, 1984) but more comprehensive change could be achieved if they were incorporated into traffic engineering practices. This challenge has started to be reflected in the changing terminology in traffic engineering practice. Recognition of the wider role of streets is evidenced in the UK Manual for Street (DFT, 2007) and locally in SmartRoads (VicRoads, 2010). Frameworks such as level of service have started to evolve and expand into ideas around streets providing a dual role as a Link for through movement and a Place as a destination in its own right (Jones et al, 2007), or broader provision for all users in Complete Streets (http://www.completestreets.org/). The link between transport and land use has also been recognised and is a major input into Network Operating Plans under the VicRoads SmartRoads framework. Creating direct and connected local walking network is the basic building block to start to increase walking. Physical barriers such as rivers, freeways and even railway lines are well recognised as impeding levels of walking activity. However, walking levels are more likely to be constrained by the ‘barrier effect’ resulting from “the delays and reduced access that vehicle traffic imposes on pedestrians’ (PWC, 2011). It is often caused by arterial roads which are prevalent in urban areas.