Snippets about: Cities
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Most New Urban Transit Systems in the US Have Failed Due to Poor Walkability
Time after time, American cities that build expensive new rail lines and transit systems are dismayed when ridership comes in far below projections. Dallas provides a cautionary tale:
- By 2015, with 62 miles and 55 stations in operation, the light rail system was carrying 30% fewer riders than the old bus system it replaced. For every 4 transit trips in 1990, there were only 3 in 2015 - despite billions invested.
- The reason is that DART ignored walkability around its stations. Many stops are surrounded by parking lots, vacant land, and arterial roads hostile to pedestrians. The lack of housing, jobs and amenities within walking distance of transit means most people still have to drive to meet their daily needs.
- Building transit without corresponding land use changes to enable walkability is a recipe for failure.
Section: 2, Chapter: 4
Book: Walkable City
Author: Jeff Speck
The Rise Of The Creative Class And Their Strong Preference For Walkable Cities
A large and growing percentage of college-educated millennials are choosing to live in urban, walkable neighborhoods instead of auto-centric suburbs. Companies are following their lead, relocating offices from suburban campuses to downtown areas in order to attract this coveted talent pool. 64% of college-educated millennials first decide where they want to live, and only then look for a job there.
A whopping 77% plan to live in America's urban cores. Walkability has become a key factor in the competition between cities over the millennials and creatives who will power economic growth.
Section: 1, Chapter: 1
Book: Walkable City
Author: Jeff Speck
Calculating The Per-Point Value Of Walk Score On Residential Property Values
Rigorous studies have quantified the impact of Walk Score on property values. Each additional Walk Score point correlates with between $500-3000 in increased home value, all else being equal.
For example, a 2009 study by Joe Cortright in Charlotte found that an increase from a Walk Score of 54 (somewhat walkable) to 71 (very walkable) correlated with a rise in average sales price from $280K to $314K. This equates to a $2000 per-point premium, or $34,000 in added value from just 17 Walk Score points. While the magnitude varies by market, it's clear that walkability, as measured by Walk Score, translates directly into increased real estate value.
Section: 1, Chapter: 2
Book: Walkable City
Author: Jeff Speck
The Key to Making Streets Safer Is Slowing Cars
Many traffic safety campaigns aimed at pedestrians - "wear bright clothing," "cross at the signal," etc. - implicitly blame the victim. They ignore the fact that streets are dangerous by design: built to prioritize maximum vehicle speed over pedestrian safety.
To reduce traffic deaths, we must address the root cause of reckless driving: streets designed like highways. Pedestrian fatalities aren't due to a lack of caution or personal responsibility among walkers. They're a direct result of wide lanes, long blocks, sweeping curves and other design factors that induce speeding and risky driving. Truly protecting pedestrians means fundamentally reshaping streets to slow cars down, not just cushioning walkers from the threat.
Section: 2, Chapter: 5
Book: Walkable City
Author: Jeff Speck
Walkable Cities Save Residents Time and Money While Boosting the Local Economy
The case of Portland, Oregon shows the tremendous financial upside of walkable urbanism for both households and entire metro regions:
- The average Portland resident drives 20% less than their counterparts in other major metros, or about 4 miles less per day. This equates to $1.1 billion in savings per year that residents aren't spending on vehicles.
- Less driving means less time wasted in traffic. Portland residents spend 11 minutes fewer per day stuck in peak hour congestion compared to 10 years ago. The entire region gains $1.5 billion worth of time savings.
- When these savings from reduced car ownership and usage are spent locally, it provides a significant boost to neighborhood businesses. Portland's "Green Dividend" from walkability yields huge economic benefits for the region.
Section: 1, Chapter: 1
Book: Walkable City
Author: Jeff Speck
The Default Male in Urban Planning
Urban planning has historically catered to the default male - that is, plans are made around the travel and mobility patterns of men. This stems from a gender data gap, where the people (mainly men) designing transit systems don't think about women's differing needs. Women tend to make more frequent, shorter trips, often accompanying children or elderly relatives. Their mobility is constrained by their greater share of care-taking responsibilities.
However, city transit networks are often designed for commuters going to and from work, without accounting for women's trip-chaining to multiple destinations. Sánchez de Madariaga, an urban planning professor, notes that not collecting gender-disaggregated data leads to a male bias in infrastructure planning.
Section: 1, Chapter: 1
Book: Invisible Women
Author: Caroline Criado Perez
Gender-Sensitive Urban Planning Saves Lives and Money
Urban planners need to adopt a gender-sensitive approach that accounts for women's travel patterns and needs. Some ways to do this:
- Collect sex-disaggregated data on transit usage to identify differing patterns
- Prioritize pedestrian infrastructure like well-lit, obstacle-free sidewalks that make walking easier and safer
- Invest in buses and intermediate public transit that are more flexible than rail
- Develop mixed-use zoning that locates essential services, employment and childcare in proximity to shorten women's trips
Not only is this more equitable, but it has economic benefits in enabling women's workforce participation and reducing medical costs from injuries. It's a win-win to plan cities around women's lives.
Section: 1, Chapter: 1
Book: Invisible Women
Author: Caroline Criado Perez
Parking Is a Hidden Force That Shapes Our Cities
Parking is one of the biggest determinants of urban form and function, yet it is often an afterthought in planning and design - and is frequently done badly in ways that undermine walkability. Based on the research of Donald Shoup:
- Parking is the single largest land use in many cities. In some downtowns, parking lots and garages cover more than half of the land area, creating dead zones in the pedestrian environment.
- Most cities require a minimum number of off-street parking spaces for every land use, forcing a surplus of parking that spreads things apart and subsidizes driving. Even dense cities often have 2-3 times more parking than needed.
- "Free" parking is anything but - it is embedded in the price of almost everything we buy, imposing enormous hidden costs on society. A single structured parking space costs $20-60K to build and $500-2500/year to operate.
Section: 2, Chapter: 3
Book: Walkable City
Author: Jeff Speck
Make Friendly And Unique Faces
Speck provides some key rules for creating engaging ground floor facades:
- Ban blank walls and mirror glass windows. Mandate a minimum percentage of transparency.
- Prohibit parking lots in front of buildings. Tuck them behind or wrap them with habitable space.
- Limit storefront widths and require vertical articulation to create visual interest
- Encourage creativity and uniqueness in signage, awnings, merchandise displays
- Codify these rules into zoning to require them by right. Don't settle for conventional chain store designs - they can adapt to walkable formats if required.
Section: 2, Chapter: 9
Book: Walkable City
Author: Jeff Speck
Pick Your Winners
Speck outlines a process called "urban triage" to prioritize walkability improvements:
- Map out all streets and grade them based on their current pedestrian-friendliness, from "already great" to "needs major help". Ignore auto-centric metrics and focus on the pedestrian experience.
- Identify key nodes of activity that generate foot traffic (e.g. major employers, transit stations, universities, tourist attractions). Call these "anchors".
- Look for links between anchors and areas that are already walkable. Prioritize improvements on these "connector" streets, even if they aren't perfect yet. The goal is to expand and link walkable zones.
- As a lower priority, upgrade streets within already-walkable areas to make them even better.
- Avoid spending limited funds improving streets that have no hope of ever being truly walkable (e.g. highway strip malls).
Section: 2, Chapter: 10
Book: Walkable City
Author: Jeff Speck
A Diverse Mix of Housing Options Downtown Benefits Everyone
A robust supply of housing in a variety of types and price points is key to a healthy downtown:
- Having people from all walks of life and income levels makes downtown more vibrant and equitable. Restricting downtown living to only the wealthy is neither fair nor smart.
- In most cities, the majority of current downtown housing is subsidized "affordable housing" isolated in towers and complexes. There is often a "missing middle" of market-rate options for the workforce.
- Two effective tools for providing below-market-rate units are inclusionary zoning, which requires a % of new units to be affordable, and "granny flats" or accessory dwellings added to existing homes.
Section: 2, Chapter: 2
Book: Walkable City
Author: Jeff Speck
Plant Trees For Wealth, Health And Sustainability
Speck advocates for extensive tree planting as one of the most effective investments cities can make. He outlines many benefits:
- Increased property values and tax revenues. One study showed $1.1 billion in added property value from street trees.
- Reduced urban heat island effect and air conditioning costs
- Absorption of CO2, with street trees being 10x more effective than other vegetation
- Reduced stormwater runoff entering sewer systems
- Traffic calming and increased safety The author calculates a 12:1 ROI for street tree planting and maintenance. Cities must invest more to reap the incredible benefits.
Section: 2, Chapter: 8
Book: Walkable City
Author: Jeff Speck
Figural Space Vs. Figural Object - Buildings Should Shape Public Realm
Speck outlines two competing paradigms in urban design and architecture:
- Figural space - buildings shape the public realm and streets, sometimes at the expense of the building form. Focus is on creating defined, walkable spaces.
- Figural object - buildings are sculptural objects floating in undefined space. Creates poor pedestrian realm as remnant space is unpleasant.
The author argues that figural space must take precedence to create walkable cities, but many starchitects prioritize figural objects, leading to poor urbanism.
Section: 2, Chapter: 7
Book: Walkable City
Author: Jeff Speck
Walkability Depends On Getting Cars Under Control in Cities
For most of human history, cities were built around people. But for the past century, most American cities have been redesigned around the needs of the automobile, with disastrous results for walkability. Pedestrians cannot thrive in cities where cars are given priority in the allocation of space, speed, and subsidies.
While cars are useful and necessary in cities, they must be tamed and controlled, not given free reign, if walkers are to flourish. This isn't about being "anti-car", but about balance. Great walking cities like New York, London and Paris have plenty of cars, but have established rules that keep them from dominating the environment and harming pedestrians.
Section: 2, Chapter: 1
Book: Walkable City
Author: Jeff Speck
Walkability Requires Putting Homes, Shops, Offices Within Close Proximity
The overriding purpose of cities is to bring many uses and activities close together to facilitate interaction and exchange. But for most of the 20th century, planners segregated different uses from each other across the city, following a misguided theory that housing should be isolated from commerce and industry to protect health.
For walking to be a viable transportation option, a wide variety of uses need to be located within close proximity of each other - ideally no more than a 5-10 minute walk. Having a "critical mass" and mixture of housing, jobs, retail, parks, schools and other daily destinations nearby provides people with the access and options they need to get around on foot.
Section: 2, Chapter: 2
Book: Walkable City
Author: Jeff Speck
How Overbuilt Streets and Roads Designed for Speed Make Walking Dangerous and Unpleasant
In addition to freeways, many of the streets in our cities and towns have also been overengineered for automobile speed at the expense of pedestrian safety and comfort:
- The hierarchy of street types has largely been replaced by a one-size-fits-all approach using highway design standards, leading to oversized streets where fast traffic dominates.
- Wide streets with multiple lanes induce speeding, as drivers jockey to get ahead and pass each other. More than 3 lanes is particularly dangerous for pedestrians.
- Many traffic engineers insist on wide "clear zones" along roadsides, making streets feel like speedways and increasing risks to pedestrians and cyclists.
All these design factors communicate to drivers that pedestrians are unexpected and unimportant. Overbuilt streets are the enemy of walkability.
Section: 2, Chapter: 1
Book: Walkable City
Author: Jeff Speck
Obesity Rates Have Skyrocketed As America Has Rebuilt Itself Around The Car
Over the past 40 years, the US has undergone an unprecedented obesity epidemic fueled largely by our development patterns:
- In the mid-1970s, only 1 in 10 Americans was obese. By 2007, that number had risen to a shocking 1 in 3 adults, with another third clinically overweight.
- The childhood obesity rate has more than tripled since 1980. 25% of young men and 40% of young women are now too overweight to enlist in the military.
- As recently as 1991, no state had an obesity rate above 20%. By 2007, only one state (Colorado) was still under 20%. Several states now exceed 30% of adults.
- Numerous studies have directly linked time spent driving with increased risk of obesity. One study found a 6% rise in likelihood of obesity for each additional hour spent in a car per day.
Section: 1, Chapter: 2
Book: Walkable City
Author: Jeff Speck
Almost Every City Has Streets That Were Built Too Wide and Fast
Engineers measure street quality using an arcane concept called "Level of Service" (LOS) that prioritizes free-flowing traffic above all else. Streets are graded from A to F, and engineers aim to keep LOS high by:
- Adding turn lanes, both left and right, to prevent thru-vehicles from slowing. But these encourage high-speed turns and make crossings longer
- Widening lanes well beyond what's needed for the travel speed. 12-ft lanes are standard even on 25-30 mph streets, inducing speeding.
- Removing on-street parking, trees and other "obstacles" to create wide clear zones, despite evidence this encourages reckless driving.
- Avoiding bike lanes, bulb-outs, medians and other features that might "impede" vehicle flow but make streets safer. The result is that most American cities have streets that feel dangerous and uninviting to walk along.
Section: 2, Chapter: 5
Book: Walkable City
Author: Jeff Speck
Walkability and Transit Go Hand-in-Hand
Walkability and transit are inextricably linked. In most cities, every transit trip begins and ends with a walk, so the quality of the pedestrian experience to and from transit stops is critical. At the same time, transit dramatically extends the distance people can travel without a car, enabling a lifestyle where most trips can be taken on foot and occasional longer trips made by bus or train.
Cities with the highest transit ridership also have the highest walking rates - the two modes are mutually reinforcing. Likewise, cities that neglect their buses and trains inevitably succumb to automobile dominance and unwalkable landscapes. Investing in transit is investing in walkability.
Section: 2, Chapter: 4
Book: Walkable City
Author: Jeff Speck