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

by Jeff Speck

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.

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.

Increasingly, it is becoming clear that the American health-care crisis is largely an urban-design crisis, with walkability at the heart of the cure.

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 by strangers as a cause of death in all locations and, in older cities like Pittsburgh, the inner cities were considerably safer overall.

Unsurprisingly, people with longer commutes report “lower satisfaction with life” than those who drive less.34 One study found that “a 23-minute commute had the same effect on happiness as a 19 percent reduction in income.”

In another poll, 5 percent of respondents said that they would be “willing to divorce their spouse if that meant they could stop commuting and work from home instead.”

Rather than trying to change behavior to reduce carbon emissions, politicians and entrepreneurs have sold greening to the public as a kind of accessorizing. “Keep doing what you’re doing,” is the message, just add another solar panel, a wind turbine, a bamboo floor, whatever. But a solar-heated house in the suburbs is still a house in the suburbs, and if you have to drive to it—even in a Prius—it’s hardly green.

This is the clear and convincing message of David Owen’s Green Metropolis, certainly the most important environmental text of the past decade.

the economist Ed Glaeser, who puts it this way: “We are a destructive species, and if you love nature, stay away from it. The best means of protecting the environment is to live in the heart of a city.”

The gold standard of quality-of-life rankings is the Mercer Survey, which carefully compares global cities in the ten categories of political stability, economics, social quality, health and sanitation, education, public services, recreation, consumer goods, housing, and climate.

But what’s not OK is the current situation, in which 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.

Even Lewis Mumford, a fan of decentralization, admitted that “the right to have access to every building in the city by private motorcar, in an age when everyone possesses such a vehicle, is actually the right to destroy the city.”

You don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to believe that, if three of the world’s four largest corporations are American oil companies● and those companies make millions of dollars in campaign contributions, then roads are fairly guaranteed to remain a priority.

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.

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—couldn’t be sold on induced demand.

Most cities need congestion to keep driving in check, because driving costs drivers so much less than it costs society.

New York City was apparently at a distinct disadvantage when Mayor Michael Bloomberg hatched a congestion-pricing scheme on Earth Day 2007. His proposal would have raised about half a billion dollars annually, and was additionally slated to receive $354 million off the bat from the federal government. To the surprise of many, it was killed by the State Assembly in Albany,40 which is disproportionately composed of suburban commuters.

The typical midsized American city center now contains a few market-rate apartment houses, a smattering of raw urban lofts occupied by people in black, one or two Corten-steel-walled fortress row houses of the type featured in Dwell magazine, and a ton of poor people, many of them in projects.

Inclusionary zoning—requiring a set percentage of all new housing developments to meet affordability criteria—hardly requires a mention, except to say that it works and it is always the right thing to do.

Shoup calculates that “the cost of all parking spaces in the U.S. exceeds the value of all cars and may even exceed the value of all roads.”

because cities and other sponsors keep parking prices artificially low. Because there are so many parking spaces, this cumulative subsidy was calculated a decade ago at between $127 billion and $374 billion a year,

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.

According to America’s Finest News Source, The Onion, “98 percent of U.S. commuters favor public transportation for others.” This fictional article described a campaign mounted by the American Public Transportation Association—slogan: “Take the Bus … I’ll Be Glad You Did”—that was remarkably insightful in its recognition of the impacts of one person’s transit on another’s traffic, known as the “multiplier effect.”

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.

Small nodal systems like these are perhaps the easiest to make work: all they need is a great interface with urbanism at each stop, frequent headways, and an expedited path. They are also useful for surmounting geographical obstacles, such as Pittsburgh’s famous Duquesne and Monongahela inclines, the latter of which does a pretty good job of connecting urbanism to urbanism.

Frequency is the thing that most transit service gets wrong. People hate to look at schedules almost as much as they hate waiting, so ten-minute headways are the standard for any line that hopes to attract a crowd. If you can’t fill a bus at that rate, then get a van. GPS-enabled time-to-arrival clocks at stations (and smartphone apps) are also essential, and particularly helpful after hours. What after hours means depends on the circumstances, but staying popular may require short headways all evening. 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.

Naked streets refers to the concept of stripping a roadway of its signage—all of it, including stop signs, signals, and even stripes. Far from creating mayhem, this approach appears to have lowered crash rates wherever it has been tried.

What makes a sidewalk safe is not its width, but whether it is protected by a line of parked cars that form a barrier of steel between the pedestrian and the roadway.

Another recent favorite among traffic planners is the “Barnes Dance” intersection, popularized in the United States by Denver’s Henry Barnes, in which all pedestrians wait a full cycle for all cars to stop and then are briefly given free rein over the entire intersection—including diagonally.

as Jan Gehl puts it, “the widespread American practice of allowing cars to ‘turn right on red’ at intersections is unthinkable in cities that want to invite people to walk and bicycle.”27 It is banned in the Netherlands.28

What if, instead of simply telling drivers when to go, we asked them to think for themselves? Four-way stop signs, which require motorists to approach each intersection as a negotiation, turn out to be much safer than signals.31 Drivers slow down, but never have to wait for more than a few seconds, and pedestrians and bicyclists are generally waved through first.