Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time

by Jeff Speck

In the small and midsized cities where most Americans spend their lives, the daily decisions of local officials are still, more often than not, making their lives worse. This is not bad planning but the absence of planning, or rather, decision-making disconnected from planning. The planners were so wrong for so many years that now that they are mostly right, they are mostly ignored.

Walkability is both an end and a means, as well as a measure. While the physical and social rewards of walking are many, walkability is perhaps most useful as it contributes to urban vitality and most meaningful as an indicator of that vitality.

In the absence of any larger vision or mandate, city engineers—worshiping the twin gods of Smooth Traffic and Ample Parking—have turned our downtowns into places that are easy to get to but not worth arriving at. Outdated zoning and building codes, often imported from the suburbs, have matched the uninviting streetscape with equally antisocial private buildings, completing a public realm that is unsafe, uncomfortable, and just plain boring.

The General Theory of Walkability explains how, to be favored, a walk has to satisfy four main conditions: it must be useful, safe, comfortable, and interesting.

The modern world is full of experts who are paid to ignore criteria beyond their professions.

Most significantly, generalists—such as planners and, one hopes, mayors—ask the big-picture questions that are so often forgotten among the day-to-day shuffle of city governance. Questions like: What kind of city will help us thrive economically? What kind of city will keep our citizens not just safe, but healthy? What kind of city will be sustainable for generations to come? These three issues—wealth, health, and sustainability—are, not coincidentally, the three principal arguments for making our cities more walkable.

The number of nineteen-year-olds who have opted out of earning driver’s licenses has almost tripled since the late seventies, from 8 percent to 23 percent.

In “The Great Car Reset,” Richard Florida observes: “Younger people today … no longer see the car as a necessary expense or a source of personal freedom. In fact, it is increasingly just the opposite: not owning a car and not owning a house are seen by more and more as a path to greater flexibility, choice, and personal autonomy.”

Sixty-four percent of college-educated millennials choose first where they want to live, and only then do they look for a job.4 Fully 77 percent of them plan to live in America’s urban cores.

And according to Christopher Leinberger, the Brookings Institution economist who first brought my attention to the Brady Bunch/Friends phenomenon, empty nesters want walkability: At approximately 77 million Americans, they are fully one-quarter of the population. With the leading edge of the boomers now approaching sixty-five years old, the group is finding that their suburban houses are too big. Their child-rearing days are ending, and all those empty rooms have to be heated, cooled, and cleaned, and the unused backyard maintained. Suburban houses can be socially isolating, especially as aging eyes and slower reflexes make driving everywhere less comfortable. Freedom for many in this generation means living in walkable, accessible communities with convenient transit linkages and good public services like libraries, cultural activities, and health care.

That seems to be the case in walkable Washington, D.C., where the past decade has seen a 23 percent uptick in the number of residents between twenty and thirty-four, simultaneous with an increased number of adults in their fifties and early sixties. Meanwhile, the number of children under fifteen has dropped by 20 percent.

Now that it has been around for a few years, some resourceful economists have had the opportunity to study the relationship between Walk Score and real estate value, and they have put a price on it: five hundred to three thousand dollars per point. In his white paper for CEOs for Cities, “Walking the Walk: How Walkability Raises Home Values in U.S. Cities,” Joe Cortright looked at data for ninety thousand distinct home sales in fifteen markets nationwide, places like Chicago, Dallas, and Jacksonville. After controlling for all other factors that are known to impact house price, he found a clear positive correlation in all but two of those markets.● In a typical example, Charlotte, North Carolina, Cortright found that an increase in Walk Score from the metropolitan average of 54 (somewhat walkable) to 71 (very walkable) correlated with an increase in average house price from $280,000 to $314,000.17 That’s two thousand dollars per point, or two hundred thousand dollars across the full scale. Interestingly, two hundred thousand dollars is about the minimum price you can pay for an empty buildable lot in the more walkable parts of Washington, D.C.

Perhaps most fascinating is the way that Portlanders refuse to disobey DON’T WALK signs, even if it’s 1:00 a.m. on a tiny two-lane street swathed in utter silence … and even if a blithe east-coaster is striding happily into the intersection (I’m not naming names here).

A significant amount of the money saved probably goes into housing, since that is a national tendency: families that spend less on transportation spend more on their homes,23 which is, of course, about as local as it gets.

While transportation used to absorb only one-tenth of a typical family’s budget (1960), it now consumes more than one in five dollars spent.● All told, the average American family now spends about $14,000 per year driving multiple cars.24 By this measure, this family works from January 1 until April 13 just to pay for its cars. Remarkably, the typical “working” family, with an income of $20,000 to $50,000, pays more for transportation than for housing.25

Washington, D.C., which continues to benefit from earlier investments in transit. From 2005 to 2009, as the District’s population grew by 15,862 people, car registrations fell by almost 15,000 vehicles.● The National Building Museum, in its Intelligent Cities Initiative, notes that this reduction in auto use results in as much as $127,275,000 being retained in the local economy each year.

The conventional wisdom used to be that creating a strong economy came first, and that increased population and a higher quality of life would follow. The converse now seems more likely: creating a higher quality of life is the first step to attracting new residents and jobs. This is why Chris Leinberger believes that “all the fancy economic development strategies, such as developing a biomedical cluster, an aerospace cluster, or whatever the current economic development ‘flavor of the month’ might be, do not hold a candle to the power of a great walkable urban place.”

If she had been killed by a truck going by, the cause of death would have been “motor-vehicle trauma,” and not lack of sidewalks and transit, poor urban planning, and failed political leadership. That was the “aha!” moment for me. Here I was focusing on remote disease risks when the biggest risks that people faced were coming from the built environment.3 Jackson, who has more recently served as California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s state public health adviser, spent the next five years quantifying how so much of what ails us can be attributed directly to the demise of walkability in the auto age. The resulting book finally put some technical meat on the bones of the planning profession’s admonitions against sprawl.

In any meaningful discussion about American health (and health care), obesity has to be front and center.■ In the mid-1970s, only about one in ten Americans was obese, which put us where much of Europe is right now. What has happened in the intervening thirty years is astonishing: by 2007, that rate had risen to one in three,8 with a second third of the population “clearly overweight.”9 The childhood obesity rate has almost tripled since 1980 and the rate for adolescents has more than quadrupled.10 According to the rules of the U.S. military, 25 percent of young men and 40 percent of young women are too fat to enlist.● As recently as 1991, no states had adult obesity rates over 20 percent. By 2007, only one state, Colorado, was under 20 percent.

More recently, several more thorough studies have been completed by William Lucy at the University of Virginia, looking at auto accidents and murder by strangers. In one, he found that the ten safest places in the state of Virginia were eight of its most densely populated cities and the two counties abutting Washington, D.C., while the ten most dangerous places were all low-population counties.30 In another, he compared crash and crime statistics in eight large American cities between 1997 and 2000. Here the data produced more subtle results. The basic theory held true: car crashes far outweighed murder

Commuting unfortunately cuts into both. In his book Bowling Alone, the Harvard professor Robert Putnam documents a marked decline in American social capital, and notes that commute time is more predictive than almost any other variable he measured in determining civic engagement. He states that “each ten additional minutes in daily commuting time cuts involvement in community affairs by ten percent—fewer public meetings attended, fewer committees chaired, fewer petitions signed, fewer church services attended, and so on.”37

Much civic engagement is physical, grown from interaction on the street. Jane Jacobs put it this way: “Lowly, unpurposeful, and random as they may appear, sidewalk contacts are the small change from which a city’s wealth of public life may grow.”●

but there is scant admission that walking to the store is more possible, more enjoyable, and more likely to become habit in some places than in others. It is those places that hold the most promise for the physical and social health of our society.

Enrique Peñalosa, the former mayor of Bogotá, Colombia, sees things in a much simpler light: “God made us walking animals—pedestrians. As a fish needs to swim, a bird to fly, a deer to run, we need to walk, not in order to survive, but to be happy.”38 That thought is beautiful, perfectly obvious, and probably impossible to prove. But we do know that we need to be active in order to be healthy and that walking is the easiest way for most humans to be usefully active.

At last measure, we are sending $612,500 overseas every minute in support of our current automotive lifestyle.1 Cumulatively, over recent decades, this has amounted to a “massive, irreversible shift in wealth and power from the United States to the petro-states of the Middle East and energy-rich Russia.”2 This cash transfer, which is quickly working its way up to a third of a trillion dollars each year, is building some truly stunning metro-rail systems in Dubai and Abu Dhabi—our cars are buying their trains.

Electric vehicles are clearly the right answer to the wrong question. This fact becomes even clearer when we note that tailpipe emissions are only one part of the footprint of motoring. As described by the strategic consultant Michael Mehaffy, this footprint includes “the emissions from the construction of the vehicles; the embodied energy of streets, bridges and other infrastructure; the operation and repair of this infrastructure; the maintenance and repair of the vehicles; the energy of refining fuel; and the energy of transporting it, together with the pipes, trucks and other infrastructure that is required to do so.” These add an estimated 50 percent more pollution to the atmosphere than emissions alone.7

It turns out that trading all of your incandescent lightbulbs for energy savers conserves as much carbon per year as living in a walkable neighborhood does each week.9 Why, then, is the vast majority of our national conversation on sustainability about the former and not the latter?

We planners have taken to calling this phenomenon gizmo green: the obsession with “sustainable” products that often have a statistically insignificant impact on the carbon footprint when compared to our location. And, as already suggested, our location’s greatest impact on our carbon footprint comes from how much it makes us drive.

This point was pounded home in a recent EPA study, “Location Efficiency and Building Type—Boiling It Down to BTUs,”11 that compared four factors: drivable versus walkable location; conventional construction versus green building; single-family versus multifamily housing; and conventional versus hybrid automobiles. The study made it clear that, while every factor counts, none counts nearly as much as walkability. Specifically, it showed how, in drivable locations, transportation energy use consistently tops household energy use, in some cases by more than 2.4 to 1. As a result, the most green home (with Prius) in sprawl still loses out to the least green home in a walkable neighborhood.12

And because it’s better than nothing, LEED—like the Prius—is a get-out-of-jail-free card that allows us to avoid thinking more deeply about our larger footprint. For most organizations and agencies, it is enough. Unfortunately, as the transportation planner Dan Malouff puts it, “LEED architecture without good urban design is like cutting down the rainforest using hybrid-powered bulldozers.”

If—in America—dense, transit-served cities are better, then New York is the best. This is the clear and convincing message of David Owen’s Green Metropolis, certainly the most important environmental text of the past decade. This book deserves a bit more of our attention, so profound is the revolution in thinking that it represents. As Owen himself notes, the environmental movement in the United States has historically been anti-city, as has so much American thought. This strain traces its roots back to Thomas Jefferson, who described large cities as “pestilential to the morals, the health, and the liberties of man.” Not without a sense of humor, he went on: “When we get piled up upon one another in large cities, as in Europe, we shall become as corrupt as in Europe, and go to eating one another as they do there.”

Sure, New York consumes half the gasoline of Atlanta (326 versus 782 gallons per person per year). But Toronto cuts that number in half again, as does Sydney—and most European cities use only half as much as those places. Cut Europe’s number in half and you end up with Hong Kong.20

Vancouver, British Columbia, number one in The Economist’s ranking, proves a useful model. By the mid-twentieth century, it was fairly indistinguishable from a typical U.S. city. Then, beginning in the late 1950s, when most American cities were building highways, planners in Vancouver began advocating for high-rise housing downtown. This strategy, which included stringent requirements for green space and transit, really hit its stride in the mid-1990s, and the change has been profound. Since that time, the amount of walking and biking citywide has doubled, from 15 percent to 30 percent of all trips.24 Vancouver is not ranked number one for livability because it is so sustainable; the things that make it sustainable also make it livable.

Washington, D.C., is one of a handful of American cities that can accurately be described as car-optional. New York, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, and not many others, provide an equivalent or better quality of life for the carless, thanks to a combination of pre-auto-age provenance and subsequent enlightened planning. In contrast, most American cities have been designed or redesigned principally around the assumption of universal automotive use, resulting in obligatory car ownership, typically one per adult—starting at age sixteen. In these cities, and in most of our nation, the car is no longer an instrument of freedom, but rather a bulky, expensive, and dangerous prosthetic device, a prerequisite to viable citizenship. I got rid of my car because my city invited me to and rewarded me in spades. Not everyone who is able to make a similar choice will benefit as I did—certainly not in the spouse department—but the benefits are clear. Independent of the global impacts of reduced tailpipe emissions and energy use, the personal financial and health advantages of losing the car are tremendous. They are not attractive to everyone, and a significant number of our fellow citizens will never trade their cul-de-sacs and SUVs for any other option.

Cities that have recently combined reinvestment in their downtown cores with the creation of transformative transit and biking facilities—like Portland and Denver—are the current relocation places of choice, for those who have a choice.

For those who don’t, it could be said that every city has an obligation to free its residents from the burden of auto dependence. When a city does, everyone benefits, including the city.

This same tourist experience is commonplace in Washington, Charleston, New Orleans, Santa Fe, Santa Barbara—and a few other places in America that have elevated walking to an art form. They are the cities that enjoy a higher standard of living because they provide a better quality of life. Unfortunately, they remain the exceptions when they should just be normal. This situation need not continue indefinitely—indeed, we can’t afford for it to. We need a new normal in America, one that welcomes walking.

Step 2: Mix the Uses. For people to choose to walk, the walk must serve some purpose. In planning terms, that goal is achieved through mixed use or, more accurately, placing the proper balance of activities within walking distance of each other. While there are exceptions, most downtowns have an imbalance of uses that can be overcome only by increasing the housing supply.

Step 4: Let Transit Work. Walkable neighborhoods can thrive in the absence of transit, but walkable cities rely on it utterly. Communities that hope to become the latter must make transit-planning decisions based upon a number of factors that are routinely neglected. These include the often surprising public support for transit investment, the role of transit in the creation of real estate value, and the importance of design in the success or failure of transit systems.

Step 5: Protect the Pedestrian. This is perhaps the most straightforward of the ten steps, but it also has the most moving parts, including block size, lane width, turning motions, direction of flow, signalization, roadway geometry, and a number of other factors that all determine a car’s speed and a pedestrian’s likelihood of getting hit. Most streets in most American cities get at least half of these things wrong.

Step 9: Make Friendly and Unique Faces. If evidence is to be believed, lively streetscapes have three main enemies: parking lots, drugstores, and star architects. All three seem to favor blank walls, repetition, and a disregard for the pedestrian’s need to be entertained. City design codes, focused on use, bulk, and parking, have only begun to concern themselves with creating active facades that invite walking.

the automobile has mostly been given free rein to distort our cities and our lives. Long gone are the days when automobiles expanded possibility and choice for the majority of Americans. Now, thanks to its ever-increasing demands for space, speed, and time, the car has reshaped our landscape and lifestyles around its own needs. It is an instrument of freedom that has enslaved us.

The graphs for Portland are particularly telling, with the highway and real estate lines charting almost exactly opposite one another, like an hourglass on its side. Here’s what happens: In the 1960s, highway construction inflects upward while property values lie flat. In the 1970s, highway construction inflects downward, and property values rise. In the 1980s, highway construction inflects upward and property values fall. Finally, in the 1990s, highway investment inflects downward and property values rise again.5 Again, correlation is not cause, but the researchers could find no other data set that consistently tracked along or against urban property values. Whether American or Canadian, the inner cities with less regional highway investment fared better than those with more. Of course, most of the latter could be found in the United States, where the federal government paid ninety cents on the dollar—versus Canada’s ten cents—for road building.6

Most current residents are unaware that, at one time, the Washington area was slated to receive 450 miles of interstate highways, 38 of which would have plowed through the District itself. Thanks to an epic twenty-two-year political battle, only ten miles were ever built. Instead, much of the federal funding was diverted to the 103-mile Metrorail system,9 now considered central to the city’s recent resurgence.

Opposition to the highways was largely grassroots, spurred on by the slogan “White Men’s Roads Through Black Men’s Homes.” People lay down in the path of bulldozers and tied themselves to trees. The protesters make it clear that the outcome could have gone either way, since the highway proposal had been warmly supported by the D.C. power structure, including The Washington Post, The Evening Star, the Board of Trade, and “leading lights on Capitol Hill.” This establishment support for road building was the national norm, and, ultimately, no large East Coast city got off as lightly as Washington did.

there have been so many incentives for driving, cars have behaved like water, flowing into every nook and cranny where they have been allowed. Cities with more available space (Houston, Los Angeles) got more cars, while cities with less available space (Boston, New Orleans) got fewer. The first step in reclaiming our urban centers for pedestrians is simply to acknowledge that this outcome was not inevitable, is not the global norm, and need not continue. Despite all the countervailing pressures, it is fully within the capabilities of the typical American city to alter its relationship to the automobile in subtle ways that can have a tremendous impact on walkability—to welcome cars, but on its own terms.

I have one hard-and-fast rule: every lecture, no matter what, I will talk at length about induced demand. I do this because induced demand is the great intellectual black hole in city planning, the one professional certainty that everyone thoughtful seems to acknowledge, yet almost no one is willing to act upon. It’s as if, despite all of our advances, this one (unfortunately central) aspect of how we make our cities has been entrusted to the Flat Earth Society.

Traffic studies are bullshit. They are bullshit for three main reasons:

Induced demand is the name for what happens when increasing the supply of roadways lowers the time cost of driving, causing more people to drive and obliterating any reductions in congestion. We talked about this phenomenon at length in Suburban Nation in 2000, and the seminal text, The Elephant in the Bedroom: Automobile Dependence and Denial, was published by Hart and Spivak in 1993.

I was delighted to read the following in a 2009 article in Newsweek, hardly an esoteric publication: “Demand from drivers tends to quickly overwhelm the new supply; today engineers acknowledge that building new roads usually makes traffic worse.”■