ANCESTRAL HUMANS DISCOVERED THE JOYS OF BIPEDAL WALKING something like four million years ago. The earliest known maps are about fourteen thousand years old. We started counting around twelve thousand years back, and writing things down maybe seven thousand years later. Which means that it only took about five millennia to come up with the term, “walk scores.”
Actually, I should have written Walk Scores™. The Seattle-based Internet entrepreneurs Matt Lerner, Jesse Kocher, and Mike Mathieu founded Walk Score, Inc., in 2007, convinced that the ease of walking in a particular neighborhood could be quantified as a single number. Walk Score’s scale ranges from 0 (Oro Grande, California, in the middle of the Mojave Desert, for example, is categorized by Walk Score as “car dependent,” which may understate the case) to 100 (322 Eighth Avenue, in New York, the main office of Sam Schwartz Engineering, is rated a Walk Score “Walker’s Paradise,” not that I’m bragging). Walk Scores are now a feature on the real-estate website Zillow as well as the websites of thousands of realtors. Millions of people access the service daily, using its mapping algorithm to discover how close a particular house or office is to amenities like parks, entertainment, and shopping.
The algorithm is a long way from perfect. Houses a block away from one another can have Walk Scores that are fifteen or twenty points apart. Though it’s constantly improving, Walk Score’s route calculations have sometimes assumed that pedestrians can literally walk on water to get to the nearest drugstore, and have a particularly hard time quantifying the difference between walking a quarter mile in flat-as-a-pancake Kansas City and along San Francisco’s Filbert Street, which climbs thirty feet in every hundred.
The larger point about Walk Score, though, isn’t its accuracy or even its methodology, but its success. Walk Score has demonstrated, if anyone needed further convincing, that walkability matters not just to urban planners and apostate traffic engineers, but to people looking for places to live and raise their families. Those people do so not just because a house or apartment in a walkable community makes for a pleasing lifestyle but because, since they’re so sought after, they’re also extremely good investments. Supply, meet demand.
And Walk Score is just the tip of the walkability-quantifying iceberg. The web-driven mapping company Maponics offers a tool called “Context Walkability” that provides walkability scores using data on everything from the complexity of intersections to crime, weather, and population density. Walkonomics and RateMyStreet are smartphone apps that quantify the walkability of hundreds of thousands of streets in the United States and United Kingdom based on user reviews. Walkability is also evaluated qualitatively using “walking audits” like PERS (for Pedestrian Environment Review System), which was developed by the UK’s Transport Research Laboratory as a way of collecting and analyzing all the elements of the streets on which people—Londoners, at first, but PERS is now used worldwide—record crossings, routes, intersections, the width of sidewalks, and even feelings of safety while walking. Walkability is hot. As the song says, “Something’s happening here.”a
What it is, though, ain’t exactly clear. About the only thing I know for sure about walking—other than that I like it myself—is that people want more of it. Survey after survey shows people want to live and work in walkable communities. They also want to shop there, which is why the people who sell them stuff are on board, too. A study of Toronto retailing showed that, in urban settings—that is, excluding covered malls and other retailing venues where virtually everyone arrives by car—the people who spend the most, and shop most frequently, arrive at their favorite stores on foot (and, occasionally, by bicycle). Another study demonstrated that, all other things being equal, walkable shopping areas in Los Angeles produced up to four times the sales of those in strip malls. There’s a reason that retailers pay a premium for corner locations, and it isn’t that drivers slow their cars down while turning: more pedestrians converging on your store equals more sales. Every way you slice the data confirms that what all the polls say is true: people want more walkability. Why, then, is there so little of it? Why is there such a mismatch between the supply of, and the demand for, walkable neighborhoods? Is it because, as one observer wrote, “Americans would like to live in places that don’t really exist”?
Not really. They want to live in places that do exist, but there are far too few of them. This is one of the reasons that housing in San Francisco or New York or Washington, DC, is so expensive, and it’s definitely the reason that living in the coolest—I mean the most walkable—parts of any city or town is the most expensive of all. Every point added to a Walk Score address correlates to an increase in property value of between $700 and $3,000, which can mean a bump of more than $30,000 even between those parts of town that are merely “very walkable” and those that qualify as “pedestrian paradises.”
Which is a problem, but also an opportunity. By definition, only a few neighborhoods can be the coolest places to live. But that doesn’t mean that we can’t make everywhere cooler. All we have to do is change the way we think about streets.
Portland, Oregon, is the poster child for what has become known as active transportation in America—not just walking but bicycle commuting or even rollerblading, any kind of mobility that depends on human muscle power. This can make Portland’s residents a little smug about the Rose City, but they’ve earned the right. Vehicle miles traveled have fallen 20 percent further in Portland than the US average, and the typical Portlander drives four miles less and eleven minutes less than the average American daily. Exhibit A (there will be more) is the Portland Bureau of Transportation’s “Skinny Streets” program.
Skinny streets are just what they sound like: a reduction in the dimensions of roadways by modifying municipal standards. There are dozens of benefits for putting streets on this sort of diet, including increased safety, lower resurfacing costs, and even a reduction in heat re-radiation, which is one of the causes of what are known as “urban heat islands”: metropolitan areas that are warmer than the areas surrounding them because of surfacing materials. Since the stuff used to pave roads and parking lots stores short-wave radiation from the sun, and then returns it with interest as heat, cities get hotter than they would otherwise be, which is not something we really need more of in an era of underlying global warming. But the best thing about skinny streets is that they promote active transportation, both by slowing down cars and by permitting the widening of sidewalks.
The campaign to put America’s streets on a diet dates back to 1999, when a pedestrian advocate named Dan Burden published a fifty-two-page document titled Street Guidelines for Healthy Neighborhoods and set out, with illustrations and maps, recommendations for reducing the width of residential streets from the typical thirty-six feet (or more) recommended by the American Association of Highway and Transportation Officials to no more than twenty-eight feet, with parking on both sides.
A year later, in November 2000, the state of Oregon published their own version, Neighborhood Street Design Guidelines: An Oregon Guide for Reducing Street Width, complementing their adoption in 1991 of a Transportation Planning Rule that obliged governments to minimize street width wherever possible. And they did. A twenty-eight-foot-wide street with parking on both sides has room for only one traffic lane, which sounds crazy, but not in Portland, which has literally hundreds of miles of two-way streets on which drivers have to wait their turn to pass. These aren’t farm roads; the Portland ordinance allows skinny streets in residential areas with densities of nearly nine homes per acre.
Road diets are not just a Portland obsession. San Francisco has completed the most road diet programs in the country—more than forty as of this writing. That includes Valencia Street, which was a four-lane road until 1999, when the traffic authorities got out their paint buckets and restriped the street with two traffic lanes, a center median that permitted left turns but no through traffic, and, for the first time, bike lanes.b In 2012, San Jose started implementing its own version of a road diet, part of a new plan for pedestrian safety, that turned half a dozen streets from one-way to two-way. The reason? For any given street width, traffic will be slower if it travels in two directions rather than one, and anything that slows traffic enhances walkability. As a bonus, two-way streets improve connectivity as well.
Well, of course, you might say. Portland and San Francisco are just the kind of places where you’d expect an irrational zeal for walk-and bike-ability. But that doesn’t really explain Batesville, Arkansas, population a little more than 10,000. That’s where Mayor Rick Elumbaugh, a one-time phys ed teacher in the Batesville Public Schools, is transforming the small town’s Main Street by narrowing it to one lane with angled parking, and replacing traffic signals with curb extensions—building out the sidewalk at intersections, both to reduce pedestrian crossing distance and, because extensions prohibit parking, improve driver visibility—all on the advice of Dan Burden’s Walkable and Livable Communities Institute.
Then there’s Barcelona.
In June 2014, I got to cross Barcelona off my bucket list, when business brought me to the Catalonian city—yes, I know it’s in Spain, but no one I met there seemed to identify themselves as Spanish—on the northeast corner of the Iberian peninsula. Like most Americans, I first saw Barcelona up close and personal on television, during the 1992 Olympics. It’s probably a good thing for Catalonian tourism that most of us waited until then; everyone I met reminded me that it was a lot less attractive twenty-five years ago. The small beach was ugly, poorly maintained, and not used very much. Now? It’s four times bigger, and the pride of the city.
The transformation of the city began with the slogan “Barcelona Posa’t Guapa” (BPG) which translates as “Barcelona Be Pretty.” Most slogans don’t do much more than sell T-shirts, but this one was different. The Catalans had determined to beautify not only their capital city’s physical appearance but their collective state of mind. Before the campaign, as one Barcelonés said to me, citizens would show their tempers as they drove: honking horns, yelling at each other, as if to reinforce every negative stereotype of Latin behavior. BPG enjoined them to calm down, to treat each other with civility. It may have succeeded, though you couldn’t prove it by my experience; at least one driver did get out of his car and berate my cabbie for who knows what.
The infrastructure, though, was transformed.
While I was in Barcelona I met with Adria Civit, the city’s equivalent of a transportation commissioner. In Barcelona, as everywhere, names matter, so when, a dozen years ago, they renamed the “Traffic” department as the department of “Mobility,” it was a sign of a larger change. In Barcelona, walking (which is rarely considered a mode of transport anywhere) is considered “mobility,” and it’s monitored, measured, and reported in a Sustainable Mobility Plan that is issued every two years. In 2012, about half of trips in Barcelona longer than ten minutes were on foot or by bike, and only 26 percent of all travel was by car or motorbike. By 2018, Mr. Civit told me, they want to reduce that to 21 percent by increasing walking, biking, and transit, while simultaneously making car travel less attractive.
When I asked him how he intended to make cars less appealing, he answered with a three-part plan. First, lower speed limits. All one-way streets in Barcelona (and most of the others) have a speed limit of thirty kilometers per hour (not quite nineteen mph). Second, limit where cars can drive. The Portal de l’Àngel, in the Ciutat Vella shopping district, was converted into a pedestrian street thirty years ago. The initial reaction was less than enthusiastic, with residents and retailers panicking about lost business, but the neighborhood is now so popular that it has the highest rents in the entire country. “Then,” he said, “threatening letters were sent to planners; now, if cars should come again, they’d shoot you.”
For strategy number three, aimed at making the streets safer and more attractive to pedestrians, Adria leaned in and barely above a whisper said, “One of the secrets is this: narrow lane widths make people drive slower. I make the lanes very, very narrow.”
Barcelona likes narrow lanes—and when I say narrow, I mean narrow: typically less than nine feet wide, and sometimes, when they really want to slow things down, less than eight. In the United States engineers typically press for traffic lanes that are twelve feet wide even in urban areas, though a few brave ones might get away with the occasional eleven- or even ten-foot width. Bus lanes in Barcelona are less than ten feet wide. Parking lanes are even narrower: six feet, seven inches. It made me feel vindicated for making the case back in 1986 for narrow nine-foot lanes on Williamsburg Bridge.
As always, programs intended to improve pedestrian and cyclist safety resulted in increasing active transportation. Those narrow lanes don’t just make the sidewalks wider, they make the streets safer for everyone. But it isn’t just about the lanes in Barcelona; crosswalks are set back ten to twenty feet from intersections so that turning vehicles can get a better look at pedestrians, and a flashing yellow light is angled so that drivers see it as they turn, reminding them the pedestrians have the right-of-way. In 2013, 168 pedestrians died in traffic collisions in New York City, population 8.4 million. In the same year, in the city of Barcelona, with a population of 1.6 million, the number was 10.
There are obviously a lot of important reasons to want to reduce collisions between pedestrians and cars, including saving hundreds of lives, and thousands of trips to emergency rooms. But one of them is improving walkability. Any initiative intended to promote walking or biking is a non-starter so long as pedestrians and cyclists don’t feel safe. As a result, measures to slow cars down are a necessary part of any active transportation program. It’s almost a law: the more you slow down cars, the more you increase walking. There is such a strong connection that when I talk about designing roads to slow down cars, I frequently get asked why we don’t just lower the speed limit. That’s when I get to explain the “85th percentile rule.”
In traffic engineering, the 85th percentile rule holds that posted speed limits should be set to a speed that 85 percent of the drivers are at or below, based on clocking actual traffic movement. Or, put another way, if traffic engineers monitor a particular street that carries a hundred cars an hour, and eighty-five of them are traveling at or below thirty-five miles an hour, then that should be the posted speed limit. This also means, of course, that fifteen cars could be racing down the street at fifty mph. The 85th percentile rule (which has been around at least since 1964) is not just another way of ignoring the needs of everyone except motorized traffic; it’s a way of letting drivers themselves decide what the posted speed limit ought to be, by their own behavior.
As you’ve already figured out, the 85th percentile rule virtually guarantees that one car in seven will be exceeding the speed limit at any time. And it strongly argues that just crossing out a sign’s speed limit and replacing it with another won’t get the job done. If 85 percent of the cars were traveling at or below thirty-five miles per hour before you changed the speed limit, they won’t start traveling at twenty-five miles per hour just because the signs changed.
Nonetheless, there are proven ways to slow traffic down, using a suite of techniques known as traffic calming.c Drivers just naturally drive more slowly on a narrow street than on a wide one, similarly on narrow lanes versus wide lanes, and they slow down when they approach a roundabout or chicane (an unnecessary curve in the road) or when a speed hump is placed in their way, or when the curb is extended into traffic lanes at pedestrian crossings. That’s why traffic-calming measures don’t just reduce crashes—though they do, as much as 70 percent—but are associated with a 20 percent increase in walking. Traffic calming is a way of making the 85th percentile rule work on behalf of more than just lead-footed drivers. By changing driver behavior, it can change the speed limit, as well.
Calming traffic isn’t the only tactic used to reduce the anxiety of pedestrians and so get them to walk more. Refuge islands, which are protected areas in the middle of multilane, two-way streets that allow pedestrians to cross one direction of traffic at a time, do the same thing, as do raised medians and even countdown timers at crosswalks, though they’re usually insufficient. The most dangerous metropolitan areas in America for pedestrians—in order, Orlando, Tampa–St. Petersburg, Jacksonville, Miami–Fort Lauderdale, and Memphis—have some refuge islands and raised medians (to be fair, not very many) but there’s only so much you can do to make a road carrying six to eight lanes of traffic traveling at more than forty miles per hour safe to cross, and these cities have a lot of them.
In any case, while making walking safer (both actually safer and perceptibly safer) is a necessary requirement for maximizing active transportation, it isn’t really the entire story. It’s like sidewalks themselves: people who live in neighborhoods with sidewalks are 47 percent more likely to meet the recommended exercise guideline of thirty minutes a day than those who don’t. But to really put the activity back into transportation, the sidewalks need to be both purposeful and pleasurable. The best kind of active transportation promotes walking to places with some practical significance—shops, for example—and is designed so that people enjoy themselves getting there.
Practicality first. Walking and cycling are prevalent in cities with the highest Walk Scores—places like San Francisco or New York—less because of safety than utility. It’s not just that these cities were built out before the automobile became the country’s dominant form of transportation, which meant that their streets were built to a different scale than those of newer cities and suburbs. It’s that they have constantly refreshed the number and quality of useful destinations within walking distance of where people live and work. The destinations change over the years—diners become wine bars, for example; peep shows on Broadway turn into Crate & Barrel outlets—but they usually don’t disappear.
When they do disappear, however, or where they were never there in the first place, opportunities to improve walkability don’t vanish. A lower starting point means greater potential for improvement. Pasadena, California, was once so car-centric that in 1915 it had the highest rate of automobile ownership in the world. But the city just northwest of Los Angeles is now planning to narrow portions of Colorado Boulevard—the route of the Tournament of Roses Parade, and where the Beach Boys’ “little old lady from Pasadena” terrorized both pedestrians and other drivers. The plan is to shrink the boulevard, which carries up to twenty thousand cars daily, to as little as two lanes, with the space created used to widen sidewalks and build mini parks. Next door, in Eagle Rock, two lanes of Colorado Boulevard have already been converted into three miles of bicycle lanes and landscaped meridians. Results? The kind of development that attracts people to live in denser communities—theaters, restaurants, and shopping—is increasing so fast that three thousand new residential units have been built within two blocks of Colorado Boulevard in the last decade alone.
And Pasadena isn’t the only place in Southern California with encouraging news about walkability.
More than fifty years after Walter O’Malley and the Dodgers moved west, I finally accepted that Los Angeles wasn’t the enemy of all that was good and virtuous in the world. Or, more accurately, I realized why it wasn’t, as I had originally thought, a bloodsucking vampire luring its victims with the promise of a carefree, sunny, and auto-centric culture. LA wasn’t the vampire. It was the victim.
Eventually, even I figure things out.
My “aha!” moment came on a visit to the Los Angeles Department of Transportation in 2010 to meet with General Manager Rita Robertson. Hanging on the wall of the GM’s office was a photograph of Broadway and 7th Street in downtown Los Angeles. The caption read: “The busiest intersection in the world.” And I always thought it was another Broadway—the one in Times Square.
Broadway and 7th was once widely, and accurately, known as the crossroads of the entire western United States. Los Angeles’s version of Broadway, then and now, was the only direct route into downtown Los Angeles from the north, and 7th Street the city’s only direct east-west route. As a result, images of the intersection over the decades are an especially useful visual record of the modern history of traffic and transportation. A photo taken around 1910 shows sidewalks full of pedestrians, two streetcars, a horse-drawn cab, a steam-powered truck, and a single car, probably (it’s hard to make out) a Model T Ford, which had been introduced only two years before. Another picture, from fourteen years later, is full to bursting with streetcars, dozens of cars, and even more pedestrians—not a surprise, since in 1924, when that photo in the general manager’s office was taken, Broadway and 7th had 504,000 people crossing it every day. (For comparison’s sake: 5th Avenue and 42nd Street in New York City then had about 400,000 crossings daily and Paris’s Place de l’Opera, 384,000.) By 1930, the daily number in the LA intersection was more than 750,000.
It never hit that level again. Photos taken in 1938 and 1958 show a marked decrease in the number of pedestrians, and even cars. By the time someone took a picture in 1974, the overhead wires for LA’s streetcars had vanished, as indeed had the street’s foot traffic. The intersection that had once housed the city’s landmark theaters and retailers was the next thing to a ghost town: made, and unmade by the automobile.
A century later, though, it just might find itself competing again for the title of the busiest pedestrian intersection in the world. With more than 3.8 million people spread over nearly five hundred square miles, and another 15 million in the Long Beach/Anaheim/Los Angeles County metropolitan area, LA is now the second most populous city in the country—and it has rediscovered walking. With a vengeance.
Eric Garcetti, the city’s forty-second mayor, is certain of it.
The evolution of Los Angeles, from the archetype of a car-loving metropolis without walkable communities or even a real downtown to what might be the most forward-thinking transportation municipality in the United States, had been under way for some time before Mayor Garcetti took the oath of office in July of 2013. The largest public transit supplier in the metropolitan area, the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Agency and its Metro Rail subsidiary—the third largest such agency in the country, providing 1.6 million trips daily—runs seventy-three miles of light and heavy rail through eighty stations in three aboveground and two belowground lines, and has been doing so since 1990.d It is now the sixth busiest urban rail system in the country, measured by passengers per route mile.
LACMTA is a county agency, though. The Los Angeles Department of Transportation, the one with the 1924 photograph of the intersection of Broadway and 7th, reports to the mayor of the city of Los Angeles. And while the new mayor took office with a very long to-do list, including negotiating contracts with the city’s municipal employees and fixing a huge number of budget problems, he also had transportation on the brain. Which was why I returned to Los Angeles in 2014. He had hired my firm to help write a strategic transportation plan, one that would remake the streets of the City of the Angels.
It was a massive challenge. Los Angeles has more car-friendly asphalt than any city in the world: 7,500 miles of roads, nearly 15 percent of the city’s 486 square miles (and that’s without counting the city’s nearly twenty freeways, eight of them part of the Interstate Highway System). Mayor Garcetti wanted those streets to be smarter, so he decided to make them walkable.
The demand was there. Where Angelenos could walk, they walked a lot. Santa Monica’s Third Street Promenade had been closed to automobile traffic since the 1960s. Farmer’s Market in LA’s Fairfax district, since the 1930s. Both were packed with people shopping, strolling, and hanging out seven days a week. The heart of Los Angeles’s downtown—yes, Broadway and 7th—is a Walk Score “walker’s paradise.” So is the West Hollywood area around Melrose Boulevard. Pasadena’s Colorado Boulevard and Los Angeles’s Echo Park neighborhood aren’t far behind. Garcetti wanted to provide the same level of walkability found in Los Angeles’s most pedestrian-friendly locales in as many other neighborhoods as he could.
As we’ve seen, walkability can’t happen until streets are safe—and LA’s weren’t. The project we began working on in 2013, and which became the mayor’s signature transportation program, started by recognizing that nearly half of Los Angeles’s traffic fatalities were pedestrians and cyclists. Even worse, the number of children and the elderly who were killed by cars while walking was double the national average.
The answer? Vision Zero, a commitment to reducing pedestrian traffic fatalities by 100 percent—to making them vanish. We redesigned a Safe Routes to School program, proposed a system of retimed signals, and introduced Los Angeles to “continental (or ‘zebra’) crosswalks”: prominent two-foot-wide stripes parallel to the traffic flow, alerting drivers that they are approaching a pedestrian crossing. All of the proven traffic-calming measures, from extended sidewalks to skinny streets, are now being implemented in different LA neighborhoods. At a few locations, the city is even reintroducing diagonal crossings: “scrambles” that allow pedestrians at all corners of an intersection to cross simultaneously and in any direction, including diagonally across the center of the intersection. Because diagonal crossings stop traffic from all directions, they can reduce crashes by as much as 50 percent.
We also proposed a number of ways of making bicycles more useful for Los Angeles’s millions of bus riders, not just by extending the city’s longest existing bike path along the Los Angeles River but by adding bike racks to the buses operated by the LA Department of Transportation, including the DASH (fifty cents a ride, twenty-five cents for seniors), Commuter Express, and CityRide systems, responsible for twenty-five million trips a year. Our plan also called for bike racks at transit hubs.e
But the big deal, to the mayor, the media, and to us, was the Great Streets Initiative. Part of it was literally that: identifying fifteen different LA streets that weren’t—yet—Pasadena’s Colorado Boulevard or Santa Monica’s Third Street Promenade, and adding the kind of traffic-calming architecture and zoning improvements that will make them appealing as places to work and play, not merely drive through. Garcetti understands that street-level improvements don’t just improve the streets themselves but revitalize the entire surrounding neighborhood. By investing in a one-mile stretch of Lankershim Boulevard in LA’s San Fernando Valley, the city can expand the existing—and successful—NoHo Arts District. “Great Streeting” Crenshaw Boulevard pushes the vitality of the Hyde Park neighborhood farther south. The program that targets Central Avenue in the heart of Los Angeles’s South Central district is intended to revive the city’s historic Jazz Corridor, and the Dunbar Hotel, where Chico Hamilton and Charlie Mingus used to play.
Another component of Great Streets, the mayor’s “People St” initiative, may turn out to be the most successful of all. Residents can now, by simple application, ask the city to build three different sorts of public spaces on existing streets. Plazas, for example, convert underused street space into public areas furnished with tables and seating. Parklets are smaller versions of the same idea: liberating two or three street parking spaces, and transforming them into twenty-foot-long (or longer) spaces, each the width of a parking space, complete with benches, planters, tables, and even shade trees or umbrellas. Bike corrals use the same footprint as parklets for bike racks, which encourage cycling, and preserve sidewalks for walking. All of the People St initiatives remake LA’s streets and punctuate the city’s sidewalks with potentially hundreds, or eventually even thousands, of spaces for people-friendly seating.
A number of commentators have noted the resemblance between Mayor Garcetti’s Great Streets (or, at least, his vision for them) and the traditions of street life in Latin America. Latino Urbanism (a phrase coined by James Rojas, a city planner from East Los Angeles) is a catchall term for the ways in which public and private space get blurred in Mexican, Central American, and South American cities, and Great Streets is seen by some as a norte-americano version of the same thing. There are even those who see Garcetti, the mayor of a city that’s half Latino, and a man whose paternal grandfather was born in Mexico, as especially hospitable to that kind of streetscape.
I’m not sure they shouldn’t also recognize that Eric Garcetti’s other grandfather was a Russian Jewish immigrant, who took a similar route to America as the fathers and mothers in my own stick-ball-playing, street-peddler-welcoming neighborhood in Brooklyn.f
Los Angeles trying to look more like Brooklyn? Walter O’Malley must be rolling in his grave. Which is just one more reason to like Eric Garcetti.
Twenty-two hundred miles east of Los Angeles, and light-years away in climate, economy, and lifestyle, Columbus, Ohio, is joining the same street smart revolution.
Ohio’s capital is also the state’s most populous city, though that still doesn’t crack the country’s top ten. Home to about eight hundred thousand people in the city proper, with another million-and-a-half in the surrounding suburbs, Columbus is, in the words of one local business leader, “big enough to have scale, and small enough to do something with it.” It’s a prosperous and pretty place, with a dozen neighborhoods crisscrossed by half a dozen rivers and creeks, lots of local employment from large and small corporations, and, of course, Ohio State University. It consistently wins awards from magazines like Forbes, and organizations like Relocate America. And, for anyone who believes that active transportation is happening only in the usual suspects on either coast, Columbus is a powerful counterargument.
For one thing, Columbus has embraced the gospel of Complete Streets, an umbrella term for transportation policies that invert the old order that gave first (usually the only) priority in street design to the speed and convenience of automobile travel. Complete Streets are streets where the needs of pedestrians and cyclists are just as important as those of automobiles and buses. As with so much else in the world of active transportation, Oregon was the first state to pass a policy explicitly promoting Complete Streets back in 1971. Fifteen more states (and more than five hundred cities and towns) have followed. The basics of Complete Streets should sound familiar by now: sidewalks, crosswalks, curb cuts, traffic calming, dedicated bike lanes and bike parking, dedicated bus lanes.
In 2008, Columbus jumped into the Complete Streets movement with both—you should excuse the expression—feet. In fact, they were halfway there already, with extensive support for the city’s smallest pedestrians through programs like “Walk Smart to School” and “Safe Routes to School,” plus a bikeways plan, a repaving program for the city’s sidewalks, curb ramps called “Operation Safewalks,” and many others. Since then, they’ve been aggressively converting streets from one-way to two-way as part of the region’s own road diet and improving both bikeways and pedestrian routes.
But the most interesting thing Columbus is doing to promote active transportation is the Columbus Healthy Places program, CHP for short.
CHP was established in 2006 explicitly to use the tools of active transportation to address Columbus’s obesity problem—a substantial one, with higher levels of dangerous obesity than the US average, and far fewer than the average percentage of residents walking to work, or even walking at all. One source of the problem was the city’s growth history. The old city, about forty-two square miles of dense, relatively walkable neighborhoods, started to annex surrounding land in the 1950s. As a result, most of its current 227 square miles are made up of cul-de-sacs, other low-density streets that don’t connect, and even farms. One of the best-documented positive correlations in the world of public health is the one between sprawl and a higher average Body Mass Index—the number that measures the relative relationship between height and weight, a kind of Walk Score for obesity. Columbus was no exception. Growing larger led to, well, growing larger: 59 percent of the city’s adults are obese or overweight, as are 38 percent of its third-graders.
CHP was created to increase active transportation in Columbus. The transportation and public health officials responsible for implementing it decided early on that the low-hanging fruit for Columbus walkability wasn’t improving safety, so much as usefulness: the city needed to make it more practical to walk or bike to somewhere useful, and figured out a way to enlist the city’s buildings department in the effort. They persuaded the department to grant them an opportunity to comment on all requests from developers to rezone a particular bit of land. They used that opportunity to propose that any new development that contained trip generators—shopping centers, bus stops, schools, parks, libraries, drugstores, or supermarkets—within half a mile of homes or apartments also include a suite of active transportation elements: bike racks, for example, connections to existing bikeways, and wider sidewalks connecting the trip generator to Columbus residences. And it worked. When the program began, only 7 percent of applications included active transportation structures before a Columbus Healthy Places review; afterward the number jumped to 64 percent. The greater the proximity of a desirable destination to an existing residence, the wider the sidewalks proposed. After sixty years of sprawl, Columbus is embracing density and promoting walkability.
And not just within the city proper. More than a thousand acres in the middle of Dublin, a suburb seventeen miles from Columbus, have been rezoned to create something called the Bridge Street district. In the middle of it is Bridge Street Park, which not only includes a pedestrian bridge across the Scioto River (cost: $14 million; value for pedestrian safety: priceless) but connects 150 condominiums and 650 apartments with two hundred thousand square feet of office space, ten restaurants, and sixty thousand feet of retail space, all within less than half a mile of one another, explicitly intended to persuade thousands of people to get where they’re going on foot.
Using active transportation policies to combat obesity is the social version of all those individual health benefits from walking and cycling you got tired of reading about back in Chapter 4. In all industrialized countries, but particularly in the United States, the leading causes of death aren’t infections or accidents, but non-communicable diseases like diabetes, stroke, and cardiovascular disease, which are responsible for something like thirty-six million deaths annually, and probably 80 percent of all preventable deaths. A sizeable chunk of those preventable deaths is due to inadequate exercise; that is, not achieving thirty minutes of moderate exercise a day.
Lots of things determine any individual’s level of activity. One person might be a devoted runner, another a couch potato. Some families live in a climate where everyone spends most of the year outdoors; others are snowbound for months at a time. Some sixty-seven-year-olds spend two hours a day playing tennis and doing yard work (I just do the tennis); some teenagers spend six in front of a computer screen. But one thing that is almost certain to determine a society’s level of activity is the kind of environment that it builds. As my friend and colleague Karen Lee puts it, “Individual decisions and society’s choices are complementary.”
She should know. Karen is about the smartest person I know on how what we choose to build affects our health. A physician and an epidemiologist with advanced degrees and scholarly research that take pages to list, she spent seven years directing New York’s Built Environment Program, and is now senior advisor of Built Environment and Healthy Housing at the city’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. There she, along with Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan, a bona fide transportation rock star, led the work on the city’s 2010 Active Design Guidelines, which have become a model for designing buildings, roads, and neighborhoods that promote activity, especially active transportation.g
The guidelines should sound familiar by now, recommending, among other things, “accessible, pedestrian-friendly streets with high connectivity, traffic calming features, lighting, benches, and water fountains [and] developing continuous bicycle networks and incorporating infrastructure like safe indoor and outdoor bicycle parking.” There is such broad consensus on these sorts of things that, as Karen Lee reminded me, “not doing anything is a contradiction of every bit of evidence we have.”
The Guidelines don’t limit themselves to urban design—those portions of the built environment in public spaces like roads, sidewalks, and bikeways. They also address the “micro” side of active transportation, which is something that transportation engineers tend to forget: the way we design the interiors of our buildings. Thus, the Active Design Guidelines also call for “providing a conveniently located stair for everyday use, posting motivational signage to encourage stair use, and designing visible, appealing, and comfortable stairs . . . [locating] appealing, supportive walking routes within buildings . . . showers, locker rooms, secure bicycle storage, and . . . exteriors that contribute to a pedestrian-friendly urban environment . . . [with] multiple entries, stoops, and canopies.”
The document is as specific as a blueprint: in order to qualify for full credit—similar to the kind of LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) credits for Physical Activity Innovation that builders get for environmentally sustainable elements like solar panels—an Active Design Guidelines building should “position at least one stair before access to elevators from the main building lobby, along the principal path of travel [and] a maximum of 25 feet travel and no turns should be required to reach stairs from the building’s main entrance.” The Cable Building in New York’s SoHo, where I had my office for seventeen years, was a fine example: it had a grand wide staircase just inside the entrance, but you had to walk to the back of the building to find the elevators.
It’s easy to make fun of the obsessive precision used in writing any kind of design guidelines, but in this case they’re really on to something. In study after study, researchers have found that people choose between stairs and elevators (or escalators) based on how easily they see them in their peripheral vision—or, as the academic research puts it, “the area of visibility in the horizontal plane opposite to the direction of travel.”h A systematic review of eleven different studies on prompts for choosing stairs over elevators or escalators—signs on the health or weight-loss benefits of stair climbing—showed an average relative increase in stair use of nearly 50 percent everywhere prompts were used, from shopping malls to bus stations, airports, office buildings, and university libraries. It turns out that active transportation doesn’t just happen outdoors; it can be successfully promoted indoors, too.
New York’s success at promoting walking and biking wasn’t achieved without friction. This is New York we’re talking about, after all, though the action-reaction sequence is so universal that it’s practically a law of transportation engineering. Step one: a pedestrian plaza is proposed. Step two: local merchants and residents object, sometimes ferociously. Step three: the street is pedestrianized. Step four: the merchants’ businesses are not destroyed, but enhanced. Step five: hardly anyone can remember what the original objections were, and even fewer of them would willingly return to the status quo. It happens just about everywhere: before the sheepish smiles, the violent shouting. Like most things in New York, it just happened at a slightly higher volume.
Luckily, though, the shouters had a formidable voice responding to them.
In 2009 a colleague of mine, Charlie Komanoff, asked if I was jealous of Janette Sadik-Khan, the transportation commissioner appointed by then-mayor Michael Bloomberg. Without hesitation I said, “Damn straight, I am.” She was doing things I had just dreamed about or had to abort: creating pedestrian plazas, adding physically separated bicycle lanes on Manhattan avenues (mine, implemented in September 1980, were ordered removed in November after Mayor Ed Koch, riding in President Jimmy Carter’s limousine, watched as Governor Hugh Carey told the president to look out the window at the unused bike lanes, saying, “See how Ed is pissing away your money”) and speeding buses through the densest parts of the city with a form of Bus Rapid Transit.i I swallowed my jealousy and helped and supported Janette throughout. And she needed the support.
Before her appointment in 2007, Janette had already spent fifteen years preparing for the job. She was a member of the Mayor’s Office of Transportation during the administration of David Dinkins, had served as deputy administrator at the Federal Transit Administration, and as a globe-trotting executive for the engineering firm Parsons Brinckerhoff.
I knew we had something in common when she hit the front pages in 1993 for cracking down on UN diplomats over—what else?—unpaid parking tickets. During her tenure as transportation commissioner she was an advocate for all forms of active transportation (building more than 285 miles of bike lanes, among other things) and for congestion pricing. Others have noted that she was generally regarded as a very capable public servant with a gift for abrasiveness, which doesn’t remind me of anyone in particular. But it’s her signature achievement that is closest to my heart. In 2007, she began the process of turning Times Square—Broadway between 42nd to 47th Streets—into a pedestrian mall.
It’s impossible to overstate the level of vitriol leveled at this idea specifically, and Janette generally. Cindy Adams, the gossip columnist at The New York Post, started reflexively referring to her as the “wacko nutso bike commissioner.” She was reviled as a Trotskyite and a Nazi. She had run-ins with the police commissioner, state legislators, and virtually every member of the New York City Council. Dire predictions piled up: Traffic congestion would reach nightmarish proportions. The theaters, restaurants, and shops on or near Times Square would be destroyed. Putting hundreds of thousands of pedestrians and tens of thousands of cars on the same half acre of asphalt at the same time would fill every emergency room in the city.
Instead, however, the disaster predicted for what both its supporters and opponents called “Broadway Boulevard” never occurred. Just the opposite, in fact:
• Traffic didn’t slow down. It sped up. Cars traveling northbound through West Midtown (where the pedestrian plaza was) got where they were going 17 percent faster than they did when they tried the same trip through East Midtown (where the pedestrian plaza wasn’t). Same deal southbound, eastbound, and westbound. Same deal for buses as for cars.
• Times Square didn’t get more dangerous, but safer. A lot safer. Injuries to motorists and passengers dropped 63 percent. Injuries to pedestrians declined by 25 percent, probably because a whopping 80 percent fewer pedestrians were now walking in the Times Square roadway.
• Even so, pedestrian volume was way up. So were restaurant, entertainment, and souvenir dollars. So are rents. The Times Square Alliance surveyed its members, primarily the area’s local merchants, and found that 74 percent of them said that the pedestrian mall improved the quality of life in the neighborhood.
• It definitely improved the quality of the air. The two pollutants most closely associated with automobile traffic—nitrogen oxide and nitrogen dioxide—were measured before and after Janette’s pedestrian mall opened. Before, the concentrations of the two pollutants were among the highest in the city. After? Nitrogen oxide levels fell by 63 percent, nitrogen dioxide by 41 percent.
But don’t take my word for it. Tim Tompkins of the Times Square Alliance is just one of “the employees and New Yorkers who are here every single day, eighty percent of whom support the Broadway plazas.”
My hometown may lead the way in using active transportation policies to address obesity (thank you, Michael Bloomberg and Janette Sadik-Khan) but it’s not alone. Another, even higher-profile attempt to use transportation policy to combat obesity is under way somewhere wildly different from both Columbus and New York: Oklahoma City.
Mick Cornett took office as mayor of Oklahoma City in March of 2004, but it wasn’t until the end of 2007 that he put his entire city, then ranked as the eighth most obese city in the country, on a diet. Literally. The website thiscityisgoingonadiet.com launched in early 2008, shortly after Mayor Cornett had lost more than forty pounds himself.
It was, as they say, only the beginning.
The mayor’s signature program, announced in mid-2007, was MAPS 3, the third in a series of Metropolitan Area Projects that had previously included building a basketball arena, a fifteen-thousand-seat minor-league baseball park, a new library, and dozens of new school buildings. MAPS 3 was the same, only more so. And most of the “more so” was intended to promote active transportation. MAPS 3 included two new parks, one of forty acres, the other thirty, connecting downtown Oklahoma City with the Oklahoma River; between twenty-five and thirty-six miles of new sidewalks; and nearly thirty-five miles of bike paths and walking trails. And, while I’m not sure this actually qualifies as active transportation, MAPS 3 upgraded the banks of the Oklahoma River to accommodate both rowing and kayaking facilities.j
It also called for a state-of-the-art streetcar system running on five miles of rails through Oklahoma City’s downtown, which isn’t, strictly speaking, a form of active transportation. However, a meta-analysis—a research technique that combines multiple investigations, giving different statistical weights to each one depending on its findings—of fifty different studies found that one of the most important factors in walkability was connectivity: the ease with which walkers could get from one street to another. Streetcars that run regularly on routes perpendicular to walking routes make it a lot easier for pedestrians to get where they need to go.
One of the more satisfying things about MAPS 3—to me, anyway—is that most of it is being built on space that used to be occupied by an Interstate highway, in this case the portion of I-40 known as the Oklahoma City Crosstown Expressway, which was built in the early 1960s and ran right through the city’s downtown. When it was demolished and rerouted out of the city center in the 1990s, more than 750 acres were made available for remaking one of the most auto-centric cities in the country in a more pedestrian-friendly way—or, as Mayor Cornett told StreetsBlog USA, Oklahoma City was designed, perversely, as a city where no one ever has to walk anywhere. “In fact,” he said, “you can’t walk anywhere!”
Here’s another thing about MAPS 3. Though Mayor Cornett is probably best known for promoting the active transportation features of MAPS 3 as an anti-obesity program, the way he actually makes the case to his mostly suburbanite constituents is telling them, “We’re creating a city where your kid and grandkid are going to choose to live.” He understands, as every mayor and city manager in the country is starting to discover, that if places like Oklahoma City—or Columbus or Portland—don’t build the kind of city that Millennials want to live in, they’re going to leave.
The same phenomenon is at work just about everywhere. In late 2014, I joined about five hundred people in Tampa at a group ride celebrating the inauguration of its bikeshare system, Coast Bikes. (Full disclosure: we are consultants to Coast.) After riding with Tampa’s mayor, Bob Buckhorn—we’d met before, accidentally, while walking (of course) in downtown Tampa, before Bob was even a candidate for mayor—we chatted, and he told me that he wants his two daughters to remain in Tampa after they are grown, which is why he’s making Tampa into the kind of city that is adapting to the Millennial generation. Whenever I’m brought into a mostly car-dependent community to improve transportation, this argument is my most powerful weapon. A few people in my typical audience seem moved by talk of a healthier city. Some—not too many—act like they care about clean air or the joys of walking and biking. But when I say, “I’m not here to get you to change your behavior. But, if you don’t want to lose your children you had better change your town’s streetscape,” everyone wakes up. They don’t applaud—this is scary—but they start to nod in agreement.
Which is why this is another place to remind ourselves that the relationship between active transportation and the built environment—all those sidewalks, traffic-calming measures, streetcars, parks, and even dense multiuse communities—is complicated. People still walk and bike in places that are dangerous and unpleasant, and they drive in places where they seemingly don’t need to. Some Millennials can’t wait to park their pickup trucks in front of a suburban house, and lots of their parents are moving to inner cities. But the greater the number of people choosing to live in more compact communities, the better for everyone. In the same way that the Oklahoma City suburbs are better places to raise children when downtown Oklahoma City is more attractive to young adults, the whole country enjoys a better quality of life when it improves the walkability of as many neighborhoods as possible.
Just as there’s a science of walkability, there’s a science of walking. If you thought people just put one foot in front of another, think again. There’s a lot of empirical research on walking, and not just the way in which the thighbone is connected to the knee bone, a subject that was on my mind a lot after I had arthroscopic knee surgery in the summer of 2014. People have been measuring, analyzing, and modeling the way people walk ever since the original gurus of scientific management, Frederick Winslow Taylor and the husband-and-wife team of Frank and Lillian Gilbreth,k performed the first time-motion studies to see how best to organize assembly-line work at the end of the nineteenth century.
Decades later, William H. Whyte—“Holly” to everyone who knew him—graduated from reporting on business organizations for Fortune and writing business bestsellers like The Organization Man (this million seller from 1956 is where the term groupthink was coined) to discover his true calling: describing the way people behaved and moved in public places. In the 1960s, under contract to the New York City Planning Commission, he ran something called the Street Life Project, eventually documenting his findings in two terrific books: The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces (1980) and especially City: Rediscovering the Center (1988).
Both his books, and the time-lapse photography that accompany them, are full of insights about walking. Twenty years of close observation, notebook in hand and photographic team alongside, produced familiar gems like what Holly Whyte called “the false goodbye,” which is what happens when one person starts to leave an encounter, only to return to it (this is also known as “getting the last word in”), or the way people will start a stationary conversation in the middle of a busy sidewalk. One of Holly’s disciples, a one-time urban geographer turned marketing consultant named Paco Underhill, made a huge name for himself advising retailers how best to organize the aisles of their stores, based on quantifying the results from dozens of Whyte-like hidden cameras (sample insight: “The faster people walk, the narrower their field of peripheral vision becomes”).
Holly visited me quite a few times when I was traffic commissioner. He would show me slides of Fifth Avenue and Lexington Avenue. The photos showed congested streets with lots of pedestrians. It didn’t look like much could be done about improving the avenues without sacrificing someone. Then he produced a graph showing people moved on foot versus people moved by car. The bar graph for pedestrians was several times higher than the one for cars even though the area for pedestrians was only a fraction of that reserved for cars. Then he pointed out that the curb lane was occupied by parked cars—all were of an official nature belonging to government, diplomats, or clergy. That number was a small fraction compared to the occupants in moving cars and paled next to walkers. It was obvious: there was a way for almost everybody to win. Holly said, “Get rid of the parkers, widen the sidewalks by the width of a lane and you still have the same number of moving lanes so the traffic moves as well or as poorly as before.”
I took his advice to heart. I eliminated all the “free” parking on Fifth Avenue, including the military, a score of diplomats (which got me invited to the UN), some government workers, and a cardinal of the Catholic Church. This did not win me many friends. I planned to widen the sidewalks on Fifth and create a Champs-Élysées-like boulevard. Alas, my time at the NYC DOT ran out as a new mayor, David Dinkins, did not reappoint me.
At around the same time that people like Holly Whyte were applying the tools of anthropology to studying the way people walked, the world of transportation engineering took an interest. It was a long time coming, probably because people on foot are a whole lot harder to quantify than they are when in automobiles, buses, or trains. To this day, most of the engineering standards for foot traffic lead back to the work of a single guy, John J. Fruin, an engineer working for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, who wrote half a dozen books and monographs on pedestrian planning and design during the 1970s.
Almost everyone who followed Fruin used his numbers, both for pedestrian and walkway size. To Fruin, humans weren’t complicated assemblies of trillions of highly evolved cells, but ellipses roughly thirteen inches deep by twenty-three inches wide. That dimension is why we need about two-and-a-half square feet of space to avoid unwanted contact, and prefer a bubble of personal space of between five and ten square feet. For the same reason, people in motion need an additional seven inches of lateral space—thirty inches in total—to allow walking abreast without touching, and between eight and ten feet longitudinally. That is, if you’re walking on an unimpeded street and following a stranger at a distance of six feet, or alongside at a distance of less than two-and-a-half feet, both of you will start to feel uncomfortable.
Fruin also showed that pedestrians, when they don’t have something in the way, move at between 150 and 250 feet per minute, which means that walking at the preferred speed, all other things being equal, demands around thirty-five square feet per person. This is what we prefer, but isn’t actually the maximum flow that a path can carry. “When there’s only around five square feet per person, we’re forced into a staggering walk, moving at less than 100 feet per minute—but there are so many of us that a sidewalk full of shuffling pedestrians is moving at full, though uncomfortable, capacity.
This can be expressed in a fairly simple set of equations.l However, they aren’t just simple, they’re simplistic. They assume that people on foot behave like water in a hose. But uniform flow isn’t the norm for pedestrians. Stopping and queueing is inevitable. Swerving to avoid collision is constant, as are the fits and starts caused by crosswalks and traffic lights. Short-term fluctuations of flow—what engineers call platooning, which is what occurs when pedestrians cluster either voluntarily (as in tour groups or school field trips) or circumstantially (as when a bus discharges passengers onto a sidewalk)—can turn a nice even flow into an unmoving crush.m Which is one reason that these density equations are not just important but can be a matter of life and death. At some densities a mass of pedestrians becomes dangerous, even deadly. This wasn’t just a matter of intellectual interest; “human stampedes” at places like soccer stadiums, train stations, and concert halls kill hundreds of people annually. As Fruin was one of the first to realize, when crowd densities are great enough to compress bubbles of personal space to something below about two square feet per person, a crowd of individuals is transformed into a solid mass, capable of transmitting shock waves that have enough compressive force to literally tear clothing off and even to kill, usually by asphyxiation. In April of 1989, for example, ninety-six people were killed (and nearly eight hundred injured) as tens of thousands of fans crowded into a tunnel during a soccer match at Hillsborough Stadium in Sheffield, England.
Calculating speed-density relationships for both safety and convenience is complicated. A bunch of people walking on a sidewalk is what physicists call a self-organizing system. Pedestrians in such systems can oscillate between chaotic masses and relatively organized “lanes” of foot traffic that are nearly as vulnerable to traffic jams as automotive roadways, depending on dozens of factors, including the composition of the pedestrian population; commuters, for example, walk at different speeds than tourists. People walk faster when they’re wearing headphones, but slower when talking on cell phones (or smoking), and they are likely to stop traffic when they check their phones before entering a building. Even culture matters. Given the same density, Indians and Germans walking on the same sidewalks move at different speeds, probably because members of societies where no one minds bumping into another walker are untroubled by very high densities. This doesn’t mean that it’s impossible to model pedestrian behavior with any accuracy, but it does mean that it’s not for amateurs.
One of the real pros, probably the world’s best-known anthropologist of walking, is another of Whyte’s followers, my friend Jeff Zupan. Jeff has been one of the go-to guys on pedestrian behavior ever since he and his colleague Boris Pushkarev wrote a book entitled Urban Space for Pedestrians in 1975. If talking with Jeff is the best introduction imaginable to the nuances of pedestrian behavior, walking with him is a master class. The latest version of the Highway Capacity Manual of the Transportation Research Board tries to quantify so-called shy distance—a concept from the automobile world referring to the space between vehicles as they pass—in order to calculate the appropriate level-of-service for a properly designed sidewalk. (I said the engineers had finally taken an interest in walking.) According to the HCM, the proper shy distance on a sidewalk is between twelve and eighteen inches, and two-and-a-half feet should be allowed between a curb and an obstacle in order to let a pedestrian pass between them. But as Jeff demonstrates, people will start to swerve as much as seventeen feet before they are about to hit an obstacle. He can explain how many people will cross to a shady side of the street, or to a sunny side, depending on the temperature. Or how they will form a mass while crossing a street, and how soon they will disperse into lanes afterward. He knows how long a queue will remain organized without crowd-control stanchions. Jeff is, literally, a walking encyclopedia.
A few years back, some very smart computer types got the idea that the insights and knowledge inside the heads of people like John Fruin and Jeff Zupan could be turned into software programs that could analyze and illustrate the effect of different design choices on pedestrian behavior. As engineers, we use such programs to simulate everything from five hundred people arriving at a hospital to ten thousand people walking down a suburban street, from a hundred thousand people attending a football game to a million evacuating a city in the event of a disaster.n This is not an exaggeration: these programs can simulate a million pedestrians who remember previous routes, learn which ones offer the best compromise among directness, comfort, and speed, and adapt accordingly. They can assign individual tasks to (potentially) hundreds of thousands of animated “avatars.” Some stop for a cup of coffee, or to check a smartphone. Some are fast, some slow; some have a preference for escalators, others for stairs (or elevators). Once our engineers input data on origins and destinations, thousands of avatars appear to decide on their own routes through multilevel landscapes like transit stations or sports stadiums.
They’re as mesmerizing as any video game ever invented. And they’re extremely effective in designing walkable environments. But, maybe even more important, they’re a great way of explaining to the people who will be deciding on those environments how they’ll encourage the best and safest pedestrian experience. As, for example, in the city of Chicago.
In 2011, Sam Schwartz Engineering was selected to be lead consultant on the Chicago Pedestrian Plan, a full-court press on active transportation in one of the world’s largest cities, led by the Chicago Department of Transportation (CDOT). We began by recognizing that literally everyone is a pedestrian at some point during the day, and that they probably knew as much (or more) as we did about the pedestrian needs of the city. We conducted WalkshopsTM, which are combination workshops conducted as we walk a particular site. I find these to be invaluable, since they occur at the point that we, the community and the engineers, are seeing the same thing at the same time. And we, along with the CDOT, hosted seven neighborhood meetings at which we asked participants to let us know what they thought about the positives and negatives of being a pedestrian in Chicago. Ask and ye shall receive; in our case, more than five hundred ideas for improving the lives of pedestrians, from safer street crossings, to sidewalks that would permit pedestrian access to shopping centers without walking through parking lots, to more footbridges over the Chicago River.
We got to work. A year later, we had a plan.
Some of the sixteen tools that emerged for improving the safety and livability of Chicago’s streets won’t come as a surprise: refuge islands; pedestrian countdown clocks; marking crosswalks with painted bars or, where affordable, brick; road diets and skinny streets; horizontal traffic-calming tools like chicanes and traffic circles, and vertical ones like speed humps and speed tables. Others included changing the electronic signals that tell drivers when to stop and pedestrians when to go. We proposed adding something that transportation engineers call leading pedestrian intervalso—walk signals that give pedestrians a head start by flashing “WALK” three to seven seconds before the accompanying traffic light turns green (with an accompanying prohibition on turns when the light is red). We recommended the installation of innovative signals and beacons, such as pedestrian-activated rapid-flash beacons that don’t depend on timers. Pedestrians who want to cross a street where these beacons are installed just press a button or step on a pad on the sidewalk, and yellow lights embedded in the street flash on and off, alerting drivers to their presence.
Obviously, in a city the size of Chicago—really, anywhere—you don’t just change the geometry of the streets overnight. The plan started, as they always do, with pilot programs. One of them—a traffic-calming plan for the densely populated Humboldt Park neighborhood on Chicago’s west side, where fifty-six thousand people live in about three-and-a-half square miles—called for putting the neighborhood’s main drag, Humboldt Drive, on a strict diet. The results weren’t surprising, but they were extremely positive: traffic declined by a quarter, and, even better, the average traffic speed dropped by two mph, which doesn’t sound like much, but reducing the average speed from thirty to twenty-eight mph drops the median driver’s “stopping sight time” from 197 feet to 178. This is, by any measure, a lifesaving distance.
However, as with Barcelona, Columbus, and Portland, safety was important but it wasn’t everything (though, as you probably guessed, the more people walk, the safer they are, and not just from things like cardiovascular disease; as VMT declines, so do crashes). Our town meetings, observations, and algorithms told us that connectivity was equally significant: initiating programs that maintained space on sidewalks for pedestrian traffic by limiting the structures that block them, such as newspaper kiosks, tree pits, and sidewalk cafes. Or making it a lot easier to cross the 1,732 points where roads in the Chicago metropolitan area intersect railroads at grade, a heritage of the city’s history as the center of America’s freight network.p Or reducing the crossing distance of the city’s many, shall we say, eccentric, intersections: diagonal streets that intersect north-south and east-west streets creating (deep breath) six-way intersections. The plan called for reconfiguring the city’s parking lots to make them as safe and convenient for pedestrians as sidewalks, and adding digital wayfinding, such as interactive maps at transit stations and bus stops.q
Which was all good and necessary stuff. But sometimes it seems to me that we—and by “we” I mean not just engineers but everyone involved in transportation—assume that once we figure out how to make walking and biking safer and more useful, our job is done. This isn’t quite accurate. Even in the most active-transportation-friendly neighborhoods of San Francisco or New York, or even Portland, we still walk and bike a whole lot less than demographically similar communities in Copenhagen or Amsterdam, or even Sydney, Australia. After all, Americans are notoriously fond of not walking. One study that placed pedometers on people all over the world showed just how fond: the average Japanese adult walks 7,168 steps daily, and the median Australian an even more impressive 9,965. Americans: 5,117.
One reason, I think, is that we don’t spend nearly as much time and effort making walkways and bikeways pleasant as well as secure and practical. We were determined not to forget this in the Chicago plan, which included quality-of-life elements like a “Make Way for People Program” that temporarily closes at least three streets each year to automobile traffic, and transforms them into public plazas: truly complete streets. It also called for placing original artworks—temporary (or permanent) outdoor galleries, video projections, and sound installations—on sidewalks and other walkways.
Even better: one of my favorite moments while working on the Chicago plan was the discovery that the Chicago Municipal Code of 1922—back in the days when the battle for the streets was still ongoing and hadn’t yet resulted in complete victory for the automobile—actually provided for something called “Play Streets.” This was a policy of regularly closing roads to cars so that kids could play in them. We added Play Streets to the plan, as well as three even more elaborate traffic-barring “Open Street” events for 2013.
Streets, it turns out—play streets, open streets, skinny streets: Complete Streets—are the answer to the question I posed earlier in this chapter, the one about the mismatch between the demand for walkability and the supply of it. A century ago we started building streets exclusively as machines for getting an automobile from place to place as quickly and safely as possible.r Sixty years ago, we kicked it up a gear, enlisting a generation of very skilled engineers and the most sophisticated tools of analysis and management in service of this goal. Because building a street is a very enduring decision, we’ve lived with a huge number of consequences ever since. Like the narrator of Robert Frost’s poem “The Road Not Taken,” we chose a road without really knowing whether it would take us where we wanted to go or even if it would be any better than another choice.
As it turned out, the road we usually chose was the one that almost totally ignored the pedestrian. But unlike Frost’s narrator, we have a chance to retrace our route and follow the road not taken. That’s what’s going on in Barcelona, and Columbus, and Pasadena, and Chicago. They’re completing their streets, a critical step in encouraging more active transportation.
But active transportation is only one aspect of a street smart city. Making sidewalks and bikeways useful and connected is necessary, but not sufficient. Other modes of travel, and other ways of knitting them into a connected and navigable network, matter too.
a For readers too young to have more than a vague familiarity with the phrase “something’s happening here,” it comes from the Buffalo Springfield song “For What It’s Worth,” which commemorates the 1966 curfew riots on one of the most walkable, and famous, streets in all of Los Angeles: the Sunset Strip.
b The naysayers predicted an increase in bike collisions. They actually declined, despite a 144 percent increase in bicycle riding on the street.
c It’s actually a literal translation of the German word Verkehrsberuhigung, which is evidence for the European origins of both the term and most traffic-calming measures themselves.
d Everything that goes around, comes around. Most of those lines follow routes once taken by the Pacific Electric Red Car and LA Railway Yellow Car streetcars, which were purchased and closed down in the Los Angeles version of the National City Lines conspiracy.
e Our work on the strategic plan wasn’t exclusively devoted to walkability. The plan also proposed improving the city’s use of Transportation Demand Management computer systems; transformation in the city’s systems for truck freight management, including designated routes and parking for trucks; and an advanced modeling simulation system for special events. However, all of them were intended to improve the safety and appeal of the city’s streets.
f It could be that a liking for pedestrian-friendly streetscapes is a heritable characteristic—except, of course, that just about everywhere we build streets that are as friendly to walkers as they are to cars, people embrace them, no matter where their grandparents came from.
g New York’s success story is one worth spreading, which is why Karen founded Dr. Karen Lee Health+Built Environment Consulting, which advises local and state governments and other organizations on using environmental interventions and policies to address the global epidemics of obesity and chronic disease. See www.drkarenlee.com.
h The technical term for the space visible from a given point is the isovist. You have now learned your word for the day.
i The term is a little imprecise, but true BRT systems are distinguished from traditional bus lines when they feature some or all of the following: dedicated right-of-way, onboard fare collection, and priority at signaled intersections. In the best of them, stations are placed in the middle of the roadway rather than at the curbsides, and have raised platforms, level with the bus floors.
j A stretch? Agreed. But kayaking is certainly transportation, and definitely muscle-powered.
k Yup: the same couple who inspired the original Cheaper by the Dozen.
l The so-called fundamental equation (sometimes the fundamental diagram) for traffic flow is usually expressed as f=s/a where f is the volume of pedestrians per square foot, s is their average speed, and a is the area used by the pedestrians within the traffic stream.
m Engineers who are hired to figure out how much space is needed in the real world often use a different model, the time-space method, in which the supply of time and space is divided by the time/space demand, that is, the total number of pedestrians using the space—for walking, waiting, window shopping, ticket purchasing, you name it—in a given amount of time, such as fifteen minutes.
n Two very popular programs are Legion (“Science in Motion”) and MassMotion (“Your Ideas Brought to Life”).
o These were actually invented around 1982, when I was New York City’s traffic commissioner, as we tried to solve a pedestrian-vehicle conflict at 59th Street and Third Avenue in Midtown.
p A 2002 study found that the railroads, by closing crossings to traffic for more than 1,500 hours on a typical weekday, delayed nearly half a million travelers an aggregate of more than 11,000 hours a day.
q For more on digital wayfinding, see Chapter 7.
r Safely for drivers and passengers, anyway.