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

by Jeff Speck

The need for this message became all the more clear after I had attended a handful of Mayors’ Institute sessions. In city after city, left to their own devices, traffic engineers were widening streets, removing trees, and generally reaming out downtowns to improve traffic flow. Much of this was happening below the mayor’s radar. In the absence of any design leadership from above, the city engineer, simply by doing his job, was redesigning the city—badly. It seems a bit unfair to blame the city engineer for this situation. Because most of the public complaints one hears in cities are about traffic, it stands to reason that any good public servant would work to reduce traffic congestion. This would be acceptable if efforts to reduce traffic congestion didn’t wreck cities and perhaps also if they worked. But they don’t work, because of induced demand. Most city engineers don’t understand induced demand.