Walkable City Rules

101 steps to Making Better Places

ISLAND PRESS

Contents

Part I SELL WALKABILITY SELLING WALKABILITY as a community goal is not as hard as it used to be, but there is always opposition, typically from the usual suspects: the automotive hordes, tinfoil-hat-wearing Agenda-21 conspiracy theorists, tea-baggers, and the like. Somehow, while a central government investing in highways and subsidizing oil companies constitutes freedom, any local investment in sidewalks and bike lanes smacks of a communist takeover.

The inevitability of some pushback, however ill-informed, means that walkability proponents need to be armed with the best arguments in its support. Five stand out: Economics, Health, Climate, Equity, and Community. The first three are discussed at great length in Walkable City; the last two are recent additions for more sophisticated audiences. All are helpful at winning converts.

1

Sell Walkability on Wealth

There are powerful economic reasons to invest in walkability.

IMPROVING WALKABILITY costs money, and budgets are tight. The first step in convincing community leaders to invest in walkability is to demonstrate that such investments pay off. Evidence abounds and can be mustered in support of a handful of powerful arguments.

Walkability powers property values. One of the clearest correlations in real estate is between walkability and home value. As a typical example, homes in Denver's walkable neighborhoods sell at a 150% premium over those in drivable sprawl. In Charlotte, each Walk Score point (on a scale of 100) translates into about a $2,000 increase in home value. Home values determine local property-tax revenue, justifying investments in walkability. Additionally, office space in walkable zip codes has a considerable leasing rate premium over suburban locations, and much lower vacancy rates.

Walkability attracts talent. Educated millennials value walkability, and are moving to more walkable places. 64% of them choose first where they want to live, and only then do they look for work; 77% say they plan to live in an urban core. According to a recent study, a full 63% of millennials (and 42% of baby boomers) want to live in a place where they don't need a car. Companies and cities that wish to attract young talent need to provide the walkable urban lifestyle they desire.

Investments in walkability create more, and better, jobs. A study of transportation projects in Baltimore found that, compared to highway investments, each dollar spent on pedestrian facilities created 57% more jobs, and each dollar spent on bicycle facilities created 100% more jobs. Once built, walkable places have stronger economies. One recent study documents that America's most walkable metros generate 49% more GDP per capita than its least walkable metros.

Car culture doesn't pay. It has been estimated that, between 1970 and 2010, we have doubled the amount of roadway in America. Over the same years, the typical American family has doubled the percentage of its income spent on transportation — from 10% to 20%. By burdening most Americans with mandatory car ownership, our suburban landscape has contributed markedly to the cash-strapped condition of contemporary life.

Walking creates positive externalities. All transportation is subsidized — the question is, how much? Walking and biking require sidewalks and bike lanes, but these represent little more than a rounding error when compared to the cost of our roads. Meanwhile, the externalities of driving are clear and huge, including the costs of policing, ambulances, hospitals, time wasted in traffic, and climate change. The externalities of walking and biking are principally those that come from a healthier population. The City of Copenhagen calculates that every mile driven by car costs the city 20 cents, while each mile biked earns the city 42 cents. While not all externalities can be monetized, their substantial long-term impacts — like sea-level rise — represent an economic future that cities ignore at their peril.

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RULE 1: When advocating for walkability, use the arguments of property value, talent attraction, job creation, transportation costs, and subsidies/externalities.

2

Sell Walkability on Health

There are powerful health reasons to invest in walkability.

THE BEST DAY TO BE A CITY PLANNER IN AMERICA was July 9, 2004, when Howard Frumkin, Lawrence Frank, and Richard Jackson came out with their book, Urban Sprawl and Public Health. In it, the authors made it clear that so much of American morbidity was a result of the fact that, in much of this country, we have designed out of existence the useful walk. That important book, and others that have been published since, document how the American health care crisis is largely an urban design crisis, with walkability at the heart of the cure.

The health benefits of having a more walkable community are measurable and huge, and include the following:

Americans are almost four times as likely to die in a car crash than Britons or Swedes.

Walkable communities are slimmer communities. America faces an obesity epidemic that can be linked directly to suburban sprawl. The lower a community's Walk Score, the more likely its residents are to be overweight. Any investment that makes a city more walkable is likely to make it less obese as well.

Slimmer communities have lower health care costs. While a concern in its own right, obesity is most costly due to the diseases that it causes or makes worse. These include diabetes, coronary disease, hypertension, gallstones, osteoarthritis, and a variety of cancers. Treating these maladies is extraordinarily expensive, and most of these costs are borne by society and by municipalities themselves. When cities become more walkable, we all benefit.

Walkable communities save lives. Car crashes kill a remarkable 1.25 million humans each year. In 2017, more than 40,000 of these were Americans — a new record. While most of us take such deaths for granted, it is eye-opening to compare the United States to other developed nations that are less car-dependent. Americans are almost four times as likely to die in a car crash as Britons or Swedes. This is due principally to the design of our cities: the more walkable, the fewer deaths. For this same reason, you are almost four times as likely to die on the road in Memphis or Orlando as in New York or Portland. Year after year, the evidence shows us that it is the cities shaped around automobiles that are the most effective at smashing them into each other.

Air pollution deaths are also an outcome of community design. Approximately 40 million Americans — 13% of us — suffer from asthma, and its economic cost is estimated at $56 billion in the United States alone. But asthma is responsible for only a fraction of the 200,000 annual "premature deaths" that are attributed to air pollution. One M.I.T. study found that the leading cause of these deaths was vehicle emissions. Unlike a generation ago, most air pollution now comes not from factories, but from driving. To the lives potentially saved by reducing car crashes, we can add even a larger number saved by reducing auto exhaust. Both are outcomes of making more walkable cities.

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RULE 2: When advocating for walkability, use public health arguments including those related to obesity, health care costs, and the death rates from car crashes and air pollution.

3

Sell Walkability on Climate Change

There are powerful environmental reasons to invest in walkability.

AS LOVERS OF CITIES, most urban planners have had their challenges dealing with environmentalists, because, in America, the environmental movement has historically been an anti-city movement. From Thomas Jefferson, who called cities "pestilential to the health, the morals, and the liberties of man," through much of the history of the Sierra Club, being green in the United States has often meant regarding cities as the principal villains in the despoilment of our planet.

Torontans use one quarter the gasoline of Atlantans, and five times as much as Hong Kongers.

This anti-city message only became more shrill with the rising awareness of climate change and the popularization of carbon mapping. For many years, the typical carbon map of the United States looked like a night-sky satellite photo: hot around the cities, cooler in the suburbs, and coolest in the countryside. Wherever there are lots of people, there is lots of pollution, after all.

It took a while for a few smart people to realize that these maps were based on an unconsidered assumption, which is that the most meaningful way to measure carbon is by the square mile. It isn't.

The best way to measure carbon is per person. Places should be judged not by how much carbon they emit, but by how much carbon they cause us to emit. There are only so many people in the United States at any given time, and they can be encouraged to live where they have the smallest environmental footprint. That place turns out to be the city — the denser the better.

When you replace carbon-per-square-mile maps with carbon-per- household maps, surprisingly, the colors simply flip. The coolest areas become the hottest, and vice versa, with the greenest part of every city finding itself smack-dab in the center of town. The EPA calls this "location efficiency."

As might be expected, most of the red in these images comes from tailpipe emissions. This is appropriate, since, for most of us, driving is by far the largest contributor to our personal carbon footprint. The more walkable we make our cities, the less they make us pollute. Torontans use one quarter the gasoline of Atlantans, and five times as much as Hong Kongers.

This circumstance would lead us to believe that electric vehicles present a happy solution, but the data so far are not encouraging, for several reasons. First, in much of the United States and the world, an electric car is basically a coal-powered car. Second, as the suburbs have taught us, all of our other, non-automotive consumption patterns expand when we drive. As David Owen notes in Green Metropolis:

The critical energy drain in a typical American suburb is not the Hummer in the driveway; it's everything else the Hummer makes possible — the oversized houses and irrigated yards, the network of new feeder roads and residential streets, the costly and inefficient outward expansion of the power grid, the duplicated stores and schools, the two-hour solo commutes.

The first thing one learns in city-planning school is that how we move determines how we live. If our society is going to slow climate change, it will be by reorienting our cities around transit, biking, and walking.

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RULE 3: When advocating for walkability, use climate change arguments and stress location efficiency.

4

Sell Walkability on Equity

There are powerful equity reasons to invest in walkability.

BECAUSE IT FAVORS URBANISM, walkability is prey to charges of elitism. Such claims gain momentum as our nation's limited number of walkable neighborhoods, desired by more and more people, become increasingly unaffordable to all but the wealthy. In the face of these sentiments, it pays to be armed with the most persuasive arguments about why walkability and bikeability are among the most effective tools available for helping to level the playing field in our increasingly inequitable society.

Remarkably, cities with more transit choice demonstrate less income inequality and less overspending on rent.

One third of Americans can't drive. As of 2015, more than 103 million of America's 321 million people did not possess a driver's license. Many more had licenses, but did not feel comfortable driving. When faced with unwalkable environments — the majority of the American landscape — these people have only two choices: to burden others who drive, or to stay home.

Walkability gives the elderly a new lease on life. In unwalkable places, the elderly lose independence much earlier, and end up warehoused in institutions. When they can satisfy most of their daily needs on foot, seniors remain self-sufficient many years beyond the age at which they should no longer drive.

Walkability gives children independence. Most of us would like our children to exercise independence well before they turn sixteen. Walkable environments give children almost a decade of increased self-sufficiency and liberate the soccer mom (or dad) that much sooner.

Transit disproportionally serves the poor and minorities. Almost two thirds of transit riders have a household income of less than $50,000. For more than 20%, that number is less than $15,000. Transit riders are 60% nonwhite. Remarkably, cities with more transit choice demonstrate less income inequality and less overspending on rent.

Walking and bicycling disproportionally serve the poor and minorities. There is a misperception that bike lanes serve principally elite intellectual workers. In reality, a bicyclist (or pedestrian) is more likely to be a minimum-wage laborer than a well- off professional.

Poor, elderly, and non-white pedestrians are disproportionally killed in traffic. African Americans and Native Americans make up 12.9% of the population, but they represent 22% of pedestrian deaths. In all, people of color (including Latinos) are 54% more likely to be struck and killed while walking in the United States. Pedestrians over seventy-five are 68% more likely to be killed than those under sixty-five. And pedestrian deaths are much more common in low-income areas. For these reasons, investments in pedestrian safety are investments in social equity.

Walkability improvements disproportionately help the differently abled. Most visually impaired people can move independently only while walking, and they are effectively disabled by communities that mandate cars for getting around. And every investment in walkability is also an investment in rollability; wheelchair users are among those who benefit most when sidewalks become safer.

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RULE 4: When advocating for walkability, use data to prove its social equity benefits.

5

Sell Walkability on Community

There are powerful community reasons to invest in walkability.

ANY PLANNER WHO HAS SPENT TIME surveying a range of communities can tell you the difference between more traditional walkable neighborhoods and automotive sprawl: In walkable places, it is impossible to spend more than a few minutes sneaking around without being approached by an inquisitive resident. In a modern suburbia of cul-de-sacs and garage-fronted snout-houses, a planner can measure streets all day and not elicit a single interaction. Where nobody walks, nobody supervises the public realm, and nobody gets to know their neighbors.

It is only when we are outside of vehicles, and relatively safe from them, that the bonds of community can form.

When we walk we are called pedestrians, and when we drive we are called motorists. Based on the way these two characters behave, it is hard to believe that the same people can be both of them, or even that they belong to the same species. Most pedestrians are by nature ready to engage others, or at least to acknowledge them in some way. Even looking away from another person as you pass is a form of acknowledgement, a behavior caused specifically by the other's presence. Our paths on the sidewalk are a subtle dance of communication and accommodation.

In contrast, most motorists are profoundly antisocial, and often even sociopathic. We are at our most selfish while driving, and often at our most aggressive. Only behind the wheel do we see Sunday school teachers and church deacons flipping each other the bird. Why is this?

The answer is no mystery. To be a motorist is to pilot a private space in deadly competition with other private spaces. Every other motorist on the road has only two roles: competing for asphalt, and endangering your life. Because you are in competition, you are adversaries. Because they might, with one mistake, kill you (and perhaps your entire family), you are enemies.

It is only when we are outside of vehicles, and relatively safe from them, that the bonds of community can form. This point was probably best made by Donald Appleyard's now classic book, Livable Streets, which compiled his research in San Francisco about the relationship between social capital and traffic. Comparing streets that were essentially identical but for the number of cars they carried, Appleyard found that most people living on light-traffic streets considered their entire street to be their "home territory," while most people on heavy-traffic streets only felt at home within their own buildings or apartments. More remarkably, while people on light- traveled streets counted on average 3.0 friends, people on busy streets averaged only 0.9 friends.