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

by Jeff Speck

the United States, typically in conjunction with Monderman’s other big idea, shared space. In some ways, shared space is simply the extension of the naked streets concept to include the elimination of physical cues and barriers as well, such as curbs and distinct materials for streets and sidewalks. The goal is to create an environment of such utter ambiguity that cars, bicyclists, and pedestrians all come together in one big mixing bowl of humanity. As David Owen notes, “This sounds to many people like a formula for disaster.” Not so: “The clear experience in the (mainly) European cities that have tried it has been that increasing the ambiguity of urban road spaces actually lowers car speeds, reduces accident rates, and improves the lives of pedestrians.”16 In Monderman’s terms, “Chaos equals cooperation.”17

to stay competitive in the face of suburban out-migration, cities needed to retool themselves around the goal of moving suburbanites in and out of the downtown quickly. One part of this effort—the obvious part—involved building elevated interstates, with the near-suicidal outcomes that have been well documented. The other part, less discussed, involved the remaking of downtown street networks around free-flowing systems of one-way pairs. By replacing two-ways with one-ways, cities were able to introduce synchronized signals and eliminate the slowdowns caused by left turns across traffic. Like the interstates, these retrofitted streets were indeed effective at speeding commuters, enough so that there was no longer any reason to live downtown. They also turned what had once been a great urban asset—the public realm—into little more than a collection of surface freeways.

Now the head of Vancouver’s Downtown Association, Rebecca Ocken, has some planning advice for other cities: “One-way streets should not be allowed in prime downtown retail areas. We’ve proven that.”

Few sidewalks without parking entice walking, yet cities routinely eliminate it in the name of traffic flow, beautification, and, more recently, security. Many curbs in Oklahoma City have lost their parking spaces based on the assumption that terrorist bombers are afraid of getting a parking ticket.

If they are truly to offer an alternative to the automobile, bikes and trolleys must displace moving cars, not parked ones.

In my travels, it is almost always the cities with push-button crossings that need the most help.

Far from empowering walkers, the push button turns them into second-class citizens; pedestrians should never have to ask for a light.

With the LPI, the “walk” signal appears about three seconds prior to the green light, allowing pedestrians to claim the intersection before cars do. This is the ideal form of walkability enhancer, since it improves both pedestrian safety and pedestrian convenience, rather than pitting the two against each other.

Millennials routinely cite biking as an important motivator in location choice, and today’s seventeen-year-old is a third less likely to have a driver’s license than a baby boomer was at that age.

As anyone who has taken advantage of a good biking city will tell you, cycling has got to be the most efficient, healthful, empowering, and sustainable form of transportation there is. Using the same amount of energy as walking, a bicycle will take you three times farther.3 Bicycle commuters enjoy about double the amount of daily physical activity of drivers.4 Bikes are cheap, and the fuel is free. And it’s fun. As one happy biker put it, “It’s like being able to golf to work.”5

In Washington, I have found that there is simply no faster, easier, or more convenient way to get around. If I have an appointment almost anywhere in the city, I just set my alarm for fifteen minutes prior and I will be there on time. Were I to take transit or drive and park, that would require twice as long.

the main reasons that Canadians “cycle about three times more than Americans” are “Canada’s higher urban densities and mixed-use development, shorter trip distances … [and] higher costs of owning, driving and parking a car”12—all conditions associated with city living. Second, and also cited by the authors, are “safer cycling conditions and more extensive cycling infrastructure”●—in other words, streets that have been designed to welcome bikes. Of these two categories, the former equates with walkability. The conditions that support pedestrians are also needed to entice bikers. Once they are in place, the further provision of a truly useful biking network should be enough to allow a cycling culture to grow. Build it and they will come.

In Copenhagen, most of the city’s major four-lane streets have been converted to two lanes plus two bike paths. As a sign of the city’s priorities, these bike lanes are always cleared of snow before the driving lanes are. The minimum recommended bike path width is over eight feet,19 which makes America’s five-footers look pretty dinky. The impact of this investment has been profound. Forty years ago, peak-hour motorists in Copenhagen outnumbered bicyclists by three to one. In 2003, the two modes reached parity, and now cycling is the most popular way around town.20 Forty percent more people bike to work than drive.21

According to Mia Birk, the city’s bicycle coordinator at the time, “For less than one percent of Portland’s transportation budget, we’ve increased bicycling from negligible to significant. For the cost of one mile of freeway—about $50 million—we’ve built 275 of bikeways.”24 Spending 1 percent of transportation funds on a network serving 8 percent of commuters sounds like a good deal, even better when you consider the indirect economic benefits. In contrast to widened roads and other highway “improvements,” new bikeways actually increase the value of nearby real estate.

From city to city, the “strength in numbers” theory holds sway. In New York, with bicycling up 262 percent since 2000, injury risk has declined by 72 percent.35 In Portland, a fourfold increase in cycling has brought with it a 69 percent reduction in the crash rate.36 Davis, California, “America’s Bicycle Capital”—where one trip out of seven is by bike—has the lowest bicycle fatality rates of sixteen similarly sized California cities.●

As seen in Brooklyn, trading driving lanes for biking lanes need not make a street less efficient for automobiles. The same goes for the “road diets” of the previous chapter: trading four lanes for three lanes plus cycling rarely reduces car capacity when it introduces a center turn lane.

The final question to ask is whether a bike lane is in keeping with the nature of the street. While carving bike lanes out of existing retail Main Streets can sometimes make sense, they should not be allowed to replace curbside parking, nor can they be allowed to create an impediment between cars and shops. For this reason, separated paths rarely belong in a retail environment. All those stripes and posts may send a message of sustainable transportation, but it is still a message of motion, not of the stasis appropriate to a Main Street. The design objective for this type of street should be to create an environment of such slow driving that bikes and cars can mix comfortably at biking speeds. The technical term for this sort of facility is a shared route, and the vast majority of bikeways must remain unmarked streets that belong to everyone. To use an extreme example, a residential cul-de-sac is no place for a bike lane. Only when car speeds get well into the thirties does the need for lanes kick in.

I remember in 1998, when I was helping Andres Duany redesign downtown Baton Rouge and we were taken to the top floor of the tallest banking tower for a bird’s-eye view, that a tremendous amount of development was on display—the city had abolished its downtown height limits—but every block of construction was surrounded by at least three blocks of parking. The result was a checkerboard city, almost completely devoid of two-sided streets in which a pedestrian could feel comfortable. In towns and cities of every size, with buildings of every height, otherwise promising pedestrian environments have been rendered uninviting by these empty lots—what planners call “missing teeth.”

Figural space is one of the things that allows traditional cities to so generously support pedestrian life. Look at an aerial photo of Paris and you will be astounded by how contorted some of the buildings become in order to shape the delightful spaces they frame. In contrast, modern urbanism was founded on the cult of the figural object. It became the role of the hero architect to create buildings as three-dimensional sculptures akin to a Brancusi or a Calder, floating freely in space. The shape of this space became residual and meaningless—and inhospitable to pedestrians. Most urban designers now consider this evolution to have been a horrible mistake. Most architects also agree with this assessment publicly, even as they hope against hope for their chance to design the figural object building that will land them on the cover of a hero architect magazine. And then there are the starchitects, most of whom don’t care about figural space at all.

Large public spaces, increasingly demanded of developers by citizens’ committees and planning boards, can often end up offering less of an amenity than smaller ones, especially if the buildings surrounding them are not very tall. Since the key measure of a place’s spatial definition is its height-to-width ratio, wide spaces only feel enclosed when flanked by buildings of considerable height.■

In A Pattern Language, the bestselling design book of all time, Christopher Alexander drew the limit at four stories, noting that “there is abundant evidence to show that high buildings make people crazy.”5

Chris Leinberger has notoriously dared to question Washington, D.C.’s century-old height limit. This position is right in theory, but the economists don’t seem to have fully processed one thing the designers know, which is how tremendously dense a city can become at moderate heights. Boston’s North End, in Jane Jacobs’s day, achieved 275 dwelling units per acre with hardly an elevator in sight.8 A ten-story city like Washington simply does not need towers to achieve great walking density. Indeed, outside of Midtown and the Financial District, most of Manhattan’s lively avenues are lined by buildings closer to ten stories tall.

The typical American downtown is not faced with the volume of development, even in good times, that needs tall buildings to contain it. In most places, the challenge is the exact opposite: a preponderance of vacant properties and parking lots, the missing teeth that make walking so unpleasant.

Talking to audiences across the United States, I am always surprised to hear that—no matter where I am—their city’s weather makes it somehow less capable of supporting pedestrian life than the rest of planet Earth. Never mind the crowds of happy visitors who flock to New Orleans in the summer, Quebec City in the winter, Seattle in the rain, and Chicago in the wind … “people won’t walk here because it’s just too hot/cold/wet/blustery!” There is no doubt that climate exerts some influence on walking, but the evidence suggests that this factor is not half as impactful as street design.

Often the first item in the budget to be cut, street trees are key to pedestrian comfort and urban livability in so many ways. In addition to offering shade, they reduce ambient temperatures in hot weather, absorb rainwater and tailpipe emissions, provide UV protection, and limit the effects of wind. Trees also slow cars and improve the sense of enclosure by “necking down” the street space with their canopies. A consistent cover of trees can go a long way toward making up for an otherwise nasty walk. Because they have such a powerful impact on walkability, street trees have been associated with significant improvements in both property values and retail viability. Since this enhancement translates directly into increased local tax revenue, it could be considered financially irresponsible for a community to not invest heavily in trees.

A twenty-year window, for water systems planning, is not a long stretch of time. Any sensible analysis of present and future costs would conclude that we should plant trees now.● But since asking a sewer specialist to plant trees is like asking a pig to fly, we need to make the case to the generalists who are hopefully in charge, like mayors, to make trees a priority. Fortunately, there are even greater financial rewards that can be reaped by doing so.

According to a study conducted by the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business, trees planted within fifty feet of houses in one Philadelphia neighborhood caused home prices to increase by 9 percent.20 A more comprehensive study, this time of Portland’s east side, reached conclusions that were less dramatic but, taken as a whole, no less compelling. Comparing houses with and without nearby street trees, it found that an adjacent tree added 3 percent to the median sale price of a house,

But a clear outcome in which city revenues dramatically outpace city investment seems a sturdy foundation on which to build policy. For this reason, it would be wise for other cities to pursue their own Portland-style investigations in order to help justify the multimillion-dollar investment in street trees that they invariably need.

Most progressive American cities only go so far as to become a “Tree City USA,” a status achieved through the faint-hearted commitment to spend two dollars per capita on trees. Apparently, every citizen gets a handful of acorns to scatter.

But it is not only parking that contributes to a blight of boredom in many American downtowns. Almost every city that has witnessed construction since 1950 has its share of cold, uninviting buildings fronting the sidewalk with rough concrete, tinted glass, or other such nastiness. Most architects have moved on from this style of building, but that is not to say that they are any more motivated to engage the pedestrian. Evidence would suggest that, among the leading starchitects, creating street life still ranks low on the list of priorities, somewhere down there with staying on budget and keeping the rain out.

Mayor Joe Riley of Charleston, South Carolina, now in his tenth term, tells the story of when he tried to convince a local architect to make a new parking garage look instead like a traditional Charleston building. “We learned in school that form follows function,” the architect said, “so this building needs to look like a garage.” “Yes, I learned that too,” replied the mayor. “We’re just not going to do that in Charleston.” That building now graces East Bay Street, where it does three important things right. First, it places high-ceilinged commercial space on the ground floor directly against the sidewalk, giving it windows, doors, and human activity. Second, it hides its tilted car ramps away from the edges of the building, so that it doesn’t shout “I am a garage.” Placing the flat parking areas at the building’s perimeter also allows for its eventual transformation to nonautomotive use.● Third, it details its upper floors as if they were inhabited, with window-sized openings equipped with Charleston-style shutters. The shutters are closed, which limits the building’s gregariousness but also hides the cars behind them.

It is fairly easy to gauge the intelligence of a city’s planning department by asking a simple question: in downtowns and other areas of potential pedestrian life, do your rules require that all parking lots be hidden behind a habitable building edge?

Most often, this job is performed by the fronts of buildings which, if adequately porous and deep, attract both walkers and lingerers. By porous, I refer to windows and doors, proper interior lighting, and any other measure that better connects the interior of the store to the sidewalk. By deep, I mean the degree to which the facade provides opportunities for shelter, leaning, sitting, and other physical engagement, and also how effective the design is at blurring the distinction between public and private while drawing out the experience of entering and exiting.

A bit ahead of the curve, both Melbourne and Stockholm have adopted active facade policies. Melbourne’s code, for example, requires that “60 percent of street facades in new buildings along major streets must be open and inviting.”4 While many new communities have recently been designed with such rules in place, few older cities have adopted equally prescriptive guidelines requiring friendly building fronts on new buildings.

The most prominent version of this ordinance, called the SmartCode, is a piece of open-source shareware available for free download.●

Most architecture schools still promote an intellectual and artistic sensibility that has little patience for such mundane questions as whether a building will sustain pedestrian activity.

This discussion reminds me of a wonderful set of drawings by Leon Krier in which he shows two buildings side by side from three different distances. From far away, we can see that one is a classical palace, the other a modernist glass cube. The palace has its base, middle, and top, while the glass cube is articulated with the horizontal and vertical lines of its large, reflective windows. As we get closer, the palace reveals its doors, windows, and cornice, while the glass cube remains the same as before: horizontal and vertical lines. Zooming in to just a few paces away, we now observe the palace’s decorative string course, the window frames, and the rafter tails supporting the eaves. Our view of the glass cube is unchanged and mute. We have walked a great distance to its front door but received no reward.9

As Jane Jacobs noted, “Almost nobody travels willingly from sameness to sameness and repetition to repetition, even if the physical effort required is trivial.”● Getting the scale of the detail right is only half the battle; what matters even more is getting the scale of the buildings right, so that each block contains as many different buildings as reasonably possible. Only in this way will the pedestrian be rewarded with the continuously unfolding panorama that comes from many hands at work. This fact seems to be lost on the vast majority of architects, especially the big names, whose unspoken goal is to claim as much territory as possible for their trademarked signature, even if it means a numbingly repetitive streetscape. It is rarely taught in architecture schools, where there persists a deep misunderstanding of the difference between city planning and architecture, such that most urban-design projects are seen as an opportunity to create a single humongous building.

Most of the design codes that I write for governments include a paragraph that goes something like this: “While even smaller units of design are encouraged, no more than 200 feet of continuous street frontage may appear to have been designed by a single architect.” Along with an active facade policy, such a rule can help save a street from succumbing to Jane Jacobs’s “Great Blight of Dullness.”

Ultimately, however, this is as much a business discussion as a design discussion. Too much of real estate practice in this era has been about faking variety, about creating the impression of multiple actors when control has unwisely been concentrated in the hands of too few powerful players.

where can spending the least money make the most difference? The answer, as obvious as it is ignored, is on streets that are already framed by buildings that have the potential to attract and sustain street life. In other words, places where an accommodating private realm already exists to give comfort and interest to an improved public realm. Most cities have their fair share of streets like this, where historic shopfronts and other attractive buildings line sidewalks that are blighted only by a high-speed, treeless roadway. Fix the street, and you’ve got the whole package, or close to it. In contrast, there is little to be gained in livability by improving the design of a street that is lined by muffler shops and fast-food drive-thrus. When you’re done, it’s still the auto zone and not worthy of our attention. Let it go.

First, I study every street that has a chance of being walkable and I grade it in terms of its urban qualities. I ignore the street’s traffic characteristics, since they are simple to fix, and look only at comfort and interest: spatial definition and the presence of friendly faces. This effort produces a map in which the streets are colored from green through yellow to red based on their potential to attract pedestrian life. From this map, a pattern emerges, in which certain streets that are good enough come together to form a clear network of walkability. I then supplement this network with the additional streets that are necessary to connect it to the key anchors that it almost reaches, including other pieces of itself. The result is an urban triage plan: streets are either in or out. This plan mandates the pattern for both public and private investment over the next decade. Only the “in” streets are to receive walkability improvements like safer traffic patterns, street trees, and better sidewalks. Only the “in” street properties are to receive city redevelopment support, whether that means money or just expedited permitting. And the “missing teeth” within this network—especially along the key severed connections—get the full front-burner treatment. Ideally, the entirety of the city leadership, both public sector and private sector, comes together around a simple understanding: Build These Sites First.

it only takes a few blocks to create a reputation. The lesson of LoDo is to start small with something that is as good as you can make it. That is the beauty of urban triage.

Most mayors, city managers, and municipal planners feel a responsibility to their entire city. As a result, they tend to sprinkle the walkability fairy dust indiscriminately. They are also optimists—they wouldn’t be in government otherwise—so they want to believe that they can someday attain a city that is universally excellent. This is lovely, but it is counterproductive. By trying to be universally excellent, most cities end up universally mediocre. Walkability is likely only in those places where all the best of what a city has to offer is focused in one area. Concentration, not dispersion, is the elixir of urbanity.

In most American cities, realistic planning for walkability starts downtown, where most of the key ingredients are already in place. But not many people may actually live there yet. So, who are the efforts for, and are they justified? This is one of the toughest questions a city planner can face. In Baton Rouge, it was phrased this way: “Why are you working on downtown, when it’s in such better shape than where we live? Why aren’t you doing a plan for our community instead?”

The downtown is the only part of the city that belongs to everybody. It doesn’t matter where you may find your home; the downtown is yours, too. Investing in the downtown of a city is the only place-based way to benefit all of its citizens at once. And there’s more. Every relocation decision, be it a college graduate’s or a corporation’s, is made with an image of place in mind. That image is palpable and it is powerful. It is resolutely physical: a picture of buildings, streets, squares, cafés, and the social life that those places engender. Whether good or bad, that image is hard to shake. And, with rare exception, that image is downtown. Each city’s reputation therefore rests in large part on its downtown’s physical attributes. If the downtown doesn’t look good, the city doesn’t look good. People won’t want to move there, and it will be that much harder for citizens to feel good about the place where they have chosen to live. A beautiful and vibrant downtown, in contrast, can be the rising tide that lifts all ships. As in LoDo, a little bit of great downtown can help push a whole city into the great category. That is the place to begin.

it was mayors who helped me understand the need for this book, the issues that it had to address, and the requirement that its recommendations be both reality-based and actionable now.

According to the census, Portland’s bicycling mode share is 5.8 percent, and local studies place it at just under 8 percent. The national average is 0.4 percent.

●The Blue Zones, 220. It’s worth noting that Lesson Four is “buy a case of high-quality red wine,” which certainly adds to the book’s appeal (240).

Incidentally, monocultures also aren’t very good for society. Jane Jacobs put it this way: “Does anyone suppose that, in real life, answers to any of the great questions that worry us today are going to come out of homogeneous settlements?” (Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, 448).