Jeff Speck on how to make your town more walkable

Noted urbanist and planner Jeff Speck shares his views on how to create a more walkable city.

Points covered include:

-Euclidean zoning (separation of uses) started by moving housing away from dirty soot-producing mills with the result that life expectancy immediately improved… (the one and only success of urban planners, Ed)

-large areas of single uses guarantee you will not have a walkable city because nothing is near anything…

-new urbanism—means creating traditional neighborhoods are walkable versus suburban sprawl, streets don’t connect so a few roadways get all the traffic and become congested

–also, we super size schools and playgrounds so every kid has to be taken there in a car; can’t even bike (safely) there

-to develop a walkable place, you can’t start with the bones of a suburb made for cars with mono cultured zones and overloaded collector roads connected by multi-lane freeways

-if you want that suburban home on a street that looks like this (see below left), Jeff says, then be prepared for its companion (on the right):

-the above is guaranteed to produce absurd results like from these non-photo shopped pics:

-mono use suburbs like the one on the left (below) generate sprawl while a neo-urbanist MIXED-USE neighborhood model looks the one on the right—

-perfectly walkable cities require transit so folks can access the entire conurbation by “walking” instead of buying a car

-block size must be 200-feet long (Portland Oregon, left hand side) not 600-feet long (Salt Lake City) for your town to be walkable… 200-foot blocks generate a two lane city; 600-feet means you’ll need six lanes to accommodate car traffic because it’s basically unwalakble

-when you double block size, you nearly quadruple fatal accidents—people simply drive faster on wider streets

-when we widen streets and lengthen blocks and make towns less walkable, you increase car trips in a form of “induced demand” so no matter how big our roadways are constructed, they will always fill up with more traffic because extra marginal trips become more feasible or, for example, it becomes possible to move even further away from work… it’s a downward spiral

-on the other hand, congestion limits demand

-2 lanes can handle 10,000 vpd so many 4-lane roadways can be redesigned and narrowed to make them more walkable without negatively impacting on the ability to move car traffic (see left hand side (existing condition) and Jeff’s redesign on the right-hand side):

-so, an overwide street like this in Oklahoma City:

becomes:

-makes room for more on-street parking (which protects the curb and sidewalks pedestrians from tons of fast-moving metal) and bike lanes too

-note, curbside trees also slow down cars 😊

-people like animals are drawn to places with good edges; ie, the public room must be contained

-must develop streetscapes where signs of humanity are abundant to create a truly walkable neighborhood; people need to be with people and be able to see people to feel conformable.

Prof Bruce

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