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

by Jeff Speck

Nobody likes congestion, and, despite appearances, I am not arguing here for more of it. Rather, I am asking that it be better understood by those who build and rebuild our communities, so that we can stop making stupid decisions that placate angry citizens while only hurting them in the long run. There is a simple answer to congestion—and it’s the only answer—which is to bring the cost of driving on crowded streets closer in line with its value. That technique is the subject of the Congestion Pricing section ahead.

Depending on what state you live in, a few or many of your streets are the responsibility of the Department of Transportation. In Virginia, whose DOT is famous for calling street trees “FHOs”—Fixed and Hazardous Objects20—almost every street is state property. In most states, however, it is just the ones that carry a lot of traffic. Unfortunately, this means that many American Main Streets are not controlled by the communities that rely on them, but by state engineers.

fighting the DOT is always a struggle, but there is a way to win, and it’s called leadership. The communities that prevail are those whose elected officials confront the DOT head-on and publicly demand a more walkable solution. This approach is admittedly easier for bigger cities, but even small towns can come out on top if they make enough noise.

In most communities, there are also daily battles to be fought within city administration, where, in the absence of mayoral leadership, traffic trumps livability.

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.

Stop doing traffic studies. Stop trying to improve flow. Stop spending people’s tax dollars giving them false hope that you can cure congestion, while mutilating their cities in the process. I understand that it might be difficult to tell the public that you can’t satisfy their biggest complaint. But there is a happier way to frame the message, and it goes like this: We can have the kind of city we want. We can tell the car where to go and how fast. We can be a place not just for driving through, but for arriving at. This is the story that traffic engineers should be sharing, rather than spending their careers running scared from congestion.

each year students have poured forth from universities, a clear, harmful case of education surrendered to credentialism. One wonders at the docility of the students who evidently must be satisfied enough with the credentials to be uncaring about the lack of education.23

Through all of that, a two-year design process was shortened to six months, and the entire effort was completed within thirty months. A sixteen-lane highway was replaced by an urban boulevard and a spectacular 3.6-mile river park.26 A few years later, the river’s ecosystem had been significantly restored, an urban heat island had its temperature reduced by more than five degrees, and traffic congestion had dropped sharply—thanks in part to simultaneous investments in transit. As of this writing, property values surrounding the former highway have risen 300 percent. And Lee Myung-bak has been elected president of South Korea.27 I wish we had known about this effort in September 2004, when Seattle’s Mayor Greg Nickels came to the Mayors’ Institute on City Design, and brought along the Alaskan Way Viaduct as his planning challenge. Like the Embarcadero, the two-deck, six-lane viaduct had been damaged in an earthquake and needed replacement. The state DOT proposed replacing the highway with an elegant surface boulevard … and a $4.2 billion highway tunnel. “That sounds perfect—just cut the tunnel!” the planners around the table shouted in unison. “But where will all the traffic go?” asked the mayor. “Not to worry!” we responded.● But we apparently weren’t very convincing, as Mayor Nickels returned to Seattle still committed to the tunnel. Even this Democratic leader of a progressive left-coast city—and an environmentalist so devout that he didn’t allow salt for snow removal—cou...

Tree-lined boulevards, of course, do the opposite. The Embarcadero boulevard project cost $171 million, but raised property values by 300 percent—the same as in Seoul—for a full 1.2-mile stretch.29 You don’t need a real estate degree to understand that a threefold increase in property taxes for 1.2 miles of downtown San Francisco has probably paid for the boulevard several times over since 2000. Some cities, if they care to do the math, might find ample economic justification for tearing down an expressway or two, even before they begin to crumble.

The connections between invitations and behavior came to a head for cities in the 20th century.… In every case, attempts to relieve traffic pressure by building more roads and parking garages have generated more traffic and more congestion. The volume of car traffic almost everywhere is more or less arbitrary, depending on the available transportation infrastructure.30 This assessment, to my mind, properly conveys the noninevitable nature of the auto-dominated city, and how communities, by making concerted choices about their infrastructure, can fully dictate the quality of their landscapes and lives. In his work in Copenhagen, Gehl has presided over a gradual removal of cars from the heart of the city. From 1962 to 2005, a central zone dedicated to pedestrians and bicycles has grown sevenfold in size, from about four acres to over twenty-five acres.31 In concert with this effort, the city has been eliminating 2 percent of its downtown parking spaces every year, for the past thirty years.32

Unless you have similar residential and pedestrian density and stores that can thrive in the absence of car traffic—a rarity—to consign a commercial area to pedestrians only, in America, is to condemn it to death.

It would seem that only one thing is more destructive to the health of our downtowns than welcoming cars unconditionally and that is getting rid of them entirely. The

proper response to obesity is not to stop eating, and most stores need car traffic to survive. With autos reintroduced, most failed pedestrian malls, like Monroe Place in Grand Rapids, have come back at least partway. The key is to welcome cars in the proper number and at the proper speed.

Most cities need congestion to keep driving in check, because driving costs drivers so much less than it costs society.● But what if motorists were asked to pay something closer to the real cost of driving, so that they were once again allowed to make market-based choices about when to drive where?

In the early 2000s, London was choking on traffic, and people were desperate for a solution. Having exhausted the alternatives, Mayor Ken Livingstone proposed the only known cure, economics. Against “a massive and sustained media campaign,”36 he introduced a roughly fifteen-dollar fee for any driver who wanted to enter the congested heart of the city on weekdays, with the revenue to be used to support a progressive transportation agenda. Here’s what happened: Congestion dropped 30 percent in the toll zone, and typical journey times went down by 14 percent. Cycling among Londoners jumped 20 percent and air pollution fell about 12 percent. The fee has already generated over a billion dollars in revenue, much of which has been invested in mass transit. London now has hundreds of new buses, providing almost thirty thousand more daily trips than before the charge. Bus reliability has jumped by 30 percent and bus delays have dropped by 60 percent.37

Illich discovered a hidden physical law: the faster a society moves, the more it spreads out and the more time it must spend moving. And he hadn’t seen the half of it. Since 1983, when the American sprawl machine really kicked in, the number of miles driven has grown at eight times the population rate.47 While almost one in ten commuters walked to work in Illich’s day, fewer than one in forty do now.

What is that balance? Better to ask: what do humans do? Work, shop, eat, drink, learn, recreate, convene, worship, heal, visit, celebrate, sleep: these are all activities that people should not have to leave downtown to accomplish. While there are exceptions, most large and midsized American downtowns possess a good supply of all of the above except places to sleep, lost to the twentieth-century suburban exodus. Moreover, thanks to the paucity of housing, many of the other categories are unable to thrive. Specialty shopping may remain, but food markets are rare. Restaurants do their best to survive on only a lunchtime service. Historic churches struggle to hang on to suburban parishioners who used to live nearby.

According to Adam Baacke, Lowell’s assistant city manager for planning and development, achieving this transformation was essentially a three-step process that could perhaps be best described as politics, permitting, and pathfinding. Politics refers to changing attitudes (and people) on the city council, where most members shunned downtown housing because “only commercial development was considered good.” Eventually, the city’s new outlook motivated it to sell one of its underutilized parcels for the express purpose of creating artists’ housing downtown.

To be accurate, Baacke cites one other essential step to the process of attracting downtown residents, what he describes as “a citywide commitment to creating an environment that people want to live in”—which I would call walkability. In a virtuous circle, more walkability begets more housing downtown, which begets more walkability. This chicken-and-egg relationship raises the question of which item to invest in first. The answer, of course, is both.

They are ideal in those older single-family neighborhoods that can often be found on the edges of downtown, where bungalows and larger homes line walkable streets. Indeed, that’s where they can still be found in places like Charleston and West Hollywood. Granny flats are also big in Canada, where NIMBYs generally hold less influence over local planning matters. Vancouver decriminalized them in 2008 as part of the city’s EcoDensity initiative, and hundreds have already been built and rented.● Despite all this, even some of America’s most progressive city councils have found it a struggle to make granny flats legal again. Seattle finally succeeded after a lengthy fight, with critics claiming that the cottages would double the city’s density. Others suggested that neighbors would lose the privacy they required to “barbecue, entertain guests, or walk around naked if they’re kinky.”4 Now about a hundred granny flats are receiving building permits in Seattle each year.5 As of this writing, the cottages have just been legalized in Portland, Miami, Berkeley, Denver, and Burlington, Vermont.6 If you make one of these cities home, you can build one for maybe seventy-five thousand dollars. If you live elsewhere, take heart: there are at least six working ADU ordinances that you can show to your city council.

Cities whose economic-development strategy is a corporate-capture strategy are typically those whose economic development director and planning director don’t talk to each other. The smart cities, like Lowell, hire a director of planning and development, who is first charged with creating a city where people want to be. Rather than trying to land new office tenants in a shrinking office market, this person understands that future economic growth will take place where the creative people are, and then works to lure more residents downtown.

As Adam Baacke suggested, this strategy means building more market-rate housing while also promoting those things that residents want and need: parks and playgrounds, supermarkets and farmers’ markets, cafés and restaurants—

Shoup himself notes how the “bible” of city planning, F. Stuart Chapin’s Urban Land Use Planning, doesn’t even mention parking once.● We did better than that in Suburban Nation, but our focus was more on the what than the why, which Shoup has refined to the level of science. What Shoup has discovered about parking—using both an economist’s cold logic and the careful, sustained observation of reality—is that every city in America handles it wrong. Rather than parking working in the service of cities, cities have been working in the service of parking, almost entirely to their detriment. He has also determined, and demonstrated, that this problem can be fixed fairly easily and with great rewards for all involved. And he is just beginning to see his ideas bear fruit in places like San Francisco,

If parking is “free” or underpriced in so much of the United States, who is actually paying for it? The answer is: we all are, whether we use it or not. Shoup puts it this way: Initially, the developer pays for the required parking, but soon the tenants do, and then their customers, and so on, until the price of parking has diffused everywhere in the economy. When we shop in a store, eat in a restaurant, or see a movie, we pay for parking indirectly, because its cost is included in the price of merchandise, meals, and theater tickets. We unknowingly support our cars with almost every commercial transaction we make, because a small share of the money changing hands pays for parking.9 The ramifications of this situation are disturbing. Nobody can opt out of paying for parking. People who walk, bike, or take transit are bankrolling those who drive. In so doing, they are making driving cheaper and thus more prevalent, which in turn undermines the quality of walking, biking, and transit.

But businesses should be allowed to provide parking to lure customers, you might protest. Fair enough. But in America, such parking is not just allowed; it’s required. Some cities, like Monterey Park, California, not only require on-site parking, but insist that it be provided to visitors free of charge.11 These requirements are powerfully disruptive to the way cities function. A true master of the long-form analogy, Shoup describes the situation this way: If cities required restaurants to offer a free dessert with each dinner, the price of every dinner would soon increase to include the cost of dessert. To ensure that restaurants didn’t skimp on the size of the required desserts, cities would have to set precise “minimum calorie requirements.”

Look at any city, suburban, or rural zoning code, and you will see page after page of rules about parking. Of the six hundred or so land uses that we planners have managed to identify, each has its own minimum parking requirement.13 Shoup documents how these requirements have often been generated from a bare minimum of data and can bear little resemblance to reality.14 A gas station requires 1.5 spaces per nozzle. A bowling alley requires 1 space per employee, plus 5 spaces per lane. A swimming pool requires 1 space per twenty-five hundred gallons of water.● These requirements are then passed from city to city and town to town,15 almost always resulting in the same outcome: too much parking. How much? In 2010, the first nationwide count determined that there are half a billion empty parking spaces in America at any given time.16 More to our purposes, a 2002 survey of Seattle’s Central Business District found that, during times of peak demand, almost four out of ten parking spaces were empty.17 This condition of oversupply occurs most often in central cities, and is typically the result of downtowns importing zoning standards from the suburbs, where no alternatives to driving exist.

Whenever I feel like complaining about our own Washington parking struggle, I remind myself of the story of DC USA. In the mid-2000s, construction began on what was to become the District’s largest retail complex, a $145 million, 500,000-square-foot colossus anchored by Target, Best Buy, and Bed Bath & Beyond. Because the development was located at a Metro stop in the heart of Columbia Heights, with thirty-six thousand residents within a ten-minute walk,19 the city generously modified its parking requirements. Rather than insisting on its obligatory four spaces per one thousand square feet—a truly suburban standard—the District allowed the number to be cut in half.20 Despite the designers’ predictions that this was still way too much parking, the project went ahead with a $40 million, taxpayer-funded underground garage holding one thousand cars. Fast-forward to 2008: DC USA has become a resounding success, having brought new life to a struggling neighborhood, thanks in part to its pedestrian-oriented design. Shops are doing even more business than expected. And the parking garage is empty—so empty that its managers routinely shut off one of its two levels completely,

Ocean Avenue is free of off-street parking because it is illegal. Instead of providing parking lots for their customers and employees, businesses pay in-lieu fees that help finance shared city parking spaces located a few blocks away. This strategy has helped to create a unique collection of midblock courtyards and walkways, as well as ensuring a maximum amount of sidewalk activity, since nobody arrives at their destination from the rear. Carmel is now one of dozens of American cities that handle downtown parking this way, including Orlando, Chapel Hill, and Lake Forest, Illinois. In-lieu fees in these cities typically range from about seven to ten thousand dollars per space not provided, which is roughly in line with the cost of building a space in an asphalt surface lot.

because most cities lack a comprehensive parking policy that deals with off-street and on-street parking together. Until this mandate is met, in-lieu payments and parking cash-out can serve as good transitional strategies toward a more ambitious goal, which is the elimination of off-street parking requirements entirely.

American cities put a floor under the parking supply to satisfy the peak demand for free parking, and then cap development density to limit vehicle trips. European cities, in contrast, often cap the number of parking spaces to avoid congesting the roads and combine this strategy with a floor on allowed development density to encourage walking, cycling, and public transport. That is, Americans require parking and limit density, while Europeans require density and limit parking.

A study of six different urban sites found that roughly a third of all traffic congestion was made up of people trying to find a parking spot. In one Los Angeles neighborhood, Westwood Village, it was twice that amount—and between 1:00 and 2:00 p.m., an astounding 96 percent of cars on the road were circling

Shoup reports on how, by 1990, Aspen’s downtown merchants were suffering from overcrowded curbside parking. The city responded by building an expensive parking garage, but that structure sat half empty as the parking crush continued. Finally, the city proposed charging one dollar per hour on-street, and all hell broke loose.45 Opponents, mostly local employees, mounted a noisy “Honk if You Hate Paid Parking” campaign. This was quickly met by a rogue “Honk if You Love Dirty Air” campaign, in reference to all the cruising and double parking that had become the norm. Paid parking eventually prevailed and the new rates took effect in 1995. Almost immediately, the opponents realized that they had been wrong. Now the municipal parking structure is well used, the on-street parking and cruising are under control, the businesses are thriving, and the city receives over half a million dollars a year in new parking revenue, most of it from tourists.46

What happened over the next decade was as shocking in reality as it was predictable in theory. Old Pasadena staged a brilliant revival, while Westwood Village entered a steady economic decline that continues to this day. Now residents of Westwood drive to Old Pasadena to shop. Westwood’s curbs are crumbling, while the sidewalks of Old Pasadena boast new tree grates, fancy lighting, and street furniture. Not only does each parking meter in Pasadena generate an average of $1,712 in annual revenue for the city, but sales tax receipts are way up. Indeed, the city’s sales-tax revenue tripled in the first six years after the meters were installed.56 While it is always easy to park in Old Pasadena, the average shopper in Westwood Village circles for 8.3 minutes before either finding a spot or giving up. Shoup delights in telling us how Westwood cruisers cumulatively log a total of 426 vehicle hours per day, covering more distance than a trip across the United States. Over a year, this adds up to thirty-eight trips around the globe.57

Westwood’s ineptitude calls attention to the fact that parking decisions are never made in a vacuum and political pressures from an uninformed public can often sway the outcome.

such a comprehensive plan is ultimately what every “over-parked” place in America needs. This plan must include on-street pricing, off-street pricing, in-lieu payments supporting a collective supply, parking benefit districts, and residential permits where needed. Above all, it must be managed comprehensively with an eye toward community success, not just meter revenue. Parking is a public good, and it must be managed for the public good. Such management takes full advantage of the free market but—this is important—it is not the free market.64 The single largest land use in every American city is very much that city’s business.

Communities can only be their best if on-street parking, off-street parking, parking permits, and parking regulations are all managed collectively. In the past, this has hardly ever happened, but things are beginning to change. Places like Old Pasadena are showing us that well-managed parking is both possible and profitable.

With rare exceptions, every transit trip begins and ends with a walk. As a result, while walkability benefits from good transit, good transit relies absolutely on walkability.

In 1902, every U.S. city with a population of ten thousand or more had its own streetcar system.5 At midcentury, Los Angeles was served by more than a thousand electric trolleys a day.6 These were torn out in a vast criminal conspiracy that is as well documented

This is essentially what happened in northern Virginia, where Metro’s western Orange Line extension took the new subway through an area that had originally developed around streetcars. By any measure, that investment has paid off. Indeed, over the last decade, a full 70 percent of the population growth in Arlington County occurred in less than 6 percent of the county’s land area, that being the census blocks in closest proximity to the five Orange Line Metro stops. Now 40 percent of the residents in these census blocks use transit to get to work.14

This is the part of the story that the train boosters don’t want you to hear: investments in transit may be investments in mobility or investments in real estate, but they are not investments in reduced traffic.■ The only way to reduce traffic is to reduce roads or to increase the cost of using them, and that is a bitter pill that few pro-transit cities are ready to swallow. Civic leaders insist that driving remain as cheap and convenient as ever and new systems like DART go hungry for riders. Why take the train when you can drive there just as quickly and park for a dollar an hour?

The new streetcar opened in 2001 at a total cost of $54.5 million.23 Since then, over $3.5 billion of new investment has sprung up around the trolley line—an astounding sixty-four times the initial investment. According to a Brookings Institution report, adjacent property values have risen by 44 to well over 400 percent, compared to the city’s baseline appreciation of 34 percent. Several thousand people have moved in, and they, in turn, have caused a revolution in street life. The Brookings report notes that “pedestrian counts in front of Powell’s Books, a major retailer sited along the line, went from three people per hour to over 933.”24 Portland’s streetcar succeeded as a tool for increasing urban vibrancy because it was first a tool for neighborhood development. This fact is important for two reasons: first, because it is a mistake to promote a streetcar in the absence of a major real estate opportunity and, second, because such an opportunity suggests the presence of private parties who stand to benefit tremendously from the investment. And these parties should want to help pay for it.

The byword here is to provide service frequently or not at all. Limiting service due to limited ridership is a death spiral that few transit lines survive.

In short, the imperative of competitive transit has a hard side and a soft side. The hard side is all about not wasting people’s time and the soft side is about making them happy. If you can commit to doing both, then you can get people out of their cars.

That said, not all bus systems are duds—far from it. The most remarkable one nationally may be Boulder’s, an inexpensive network that confounds conventional transit wisdom in a number of important ways. Thanks to its system of cleverly branded routes—including the Hop, Skip, and Jump, with each route getting its own color—the city is living up to its motto of “Breathing Required, Driving Optional.” Despite gaining ten thousand new residents and twelve thousand new jobs since 1994, the city has seen zero increase in its total vehicle miles driven. Much of the system’s success comes from the way that it is marketed. Households buy a $120 EcoPass that gives all members free rides all year—and also gives them special treatment at local stores, restaurants, and bars. As a result, an entire EcoPass culture has evolved, in which driving just isn’t as cool.

As all the other steps make clear, pedestrian safety is not enough. But it is essential, and also so often needlessly botched by the people who build our cities. These failures stem from two principal sources: a lack of concern for the pedestrian and a fundamental misunderstanding within the professions about what makes streets safe. The first cause is political, and can be overcome through advocacy. The second cause is technical, and can be overcome by setting the record straight.

The definitive study on this topic was completed by Wesley Marshall and Norman Garrick at the University of Connecticut, who compared data from twenty-four medium-sized California cities. They looked at more than 130,000 car crashes that occurred over nine years, and were able to divide the subjects into twelve “safer” cities and twelve “less safe” cities. Among these two groups, they found no single variable to be more predictive of injury and death than block size. Blocks in the dozen safer cities averaged eighteen acres in size, while blocks in the dozen less safe cities averaged thirty-four acres in size. All told, a doubling of block size corresponded with a tripling of fatalities.1

This logic—that higher design speeds make for safer streets—coupled with the typical city engineer’s desire for unimpeded traffic—has caused many American cities to rebuild their streets with lanes that are twelve, thirteen, and sometimes even fourteen feet wide. Now cars are only six feet wide—a Ford Excursion is 6'6"—and most Main Streets were historically made of ten-foot lanes. That dimension persists on many of the best, such as ritzy Worth Avenue in Palm Beach, Florida. Yet many cities I visit have their fair share of twelve-footers, and that is where much of the speeding occurs.

As with induced demand, the engineers have once again failed to comprehend that the way they design streets will have any impact on the way that people use them. By their logic, just as more lanes can’t cause more driving, high-speed lanes can’t cause high speeds. Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to introduce you to the second great misunderstanding that lies at the root of most urban degradation today: widening a city’s streets in the name of safety is like distributing handguns to deter crime.

the simple fact was that nobody drove dangerously through this intersection, precisely because the intersection felt dangerous. Welcome to the world of risk homeostasis, a very real place that exists well outside the blinkered gaze of the traffic engineering profession. Risk homeostasis describes how people automatically adjust their behavior to maintain a comfortable level of risk. It explains why poisoning deaths went up after childproof caps were introduced—people stopped hiding their medicines—and why the deadliest intersections in America are typically the ones you can navigate with one finger on the steering wheel and a cellphone at your ear.9

let’s turn to the larger lesson: the safest roads are those that feel the least safe, demanding more attention from drivers.