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

The cities with the most congestion are often the cities that provide the best alternatives to being stuck in congestion. Of the ten cities ranked worst for traffic in the 2010 Urban Mobility Report,18 all but three—Houston, Dallas, and Atlanta—have excellent public transit and a vast collection of walkable neighborhoods. Indeed, these seven cities

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whatever they are used for, these savings are more likely to stay local than if spent on driving. Almost 85 percent of money expended on cars and gas leaves the local economy22—much of it, of course, bound for the pockets of Middle Eastern princes. A significant amount of the money saved probably goes into housing, since that is a national tendency

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Abolishing the off-street parking requirement is one of the three cornerstones of Shoup’s theory, because it would allow the market to determine how much parking is needed. He notes that “removing off-street parking requirements will not eliminate off-street parking, but will instead stimulate an active commercial market for it.”37 This would bring

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What was certainly missing, among all the parking policy, was a parking plan, and such a comprehensive plan is ultimately what every “over-parked” place in America needs. This plan must include on-street pricing, off-street pricing, in-lieu payments supporting a collective supply, parking benefit districts, and residential permits where needed. Abo

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This creative leap leads us to Shoup’s third cornerstone, the institution of “parking benefit districts” that put meter revenues to work locally.60 In addition to improving sidewalks, trees, lighting, and street furniture, these districts can bury overhead wires, renovate storefronts, hire public service officers, and of course keep everything spic

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Happily, there is no evidence that granny flats lower property values and it’s easy to see why. First, they are almost invisible. Second, they provide the homeowners with an income stream that allows them to live in their own home more comfortably. Third, they are of course carefully regulated to avoid the tenement-style use contemplated by my Ange

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What’s most interesting—and perhaps a bit frustrating—about this solution is that it does not address the parking supply directly. Every one of these cities still has a downtown parking requirement, some quite high.35 But instead of providing parking, businesses are only required to pay for it, which allows the parking to be located in the right pl

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For large employers, California has pioneered a second powerful strategy for managing parking, called “parking cash-out.” The California Health and Safety Code requires many businesses that offer free employee parking to give their workers the option of trading that parking space for its cash equivalent. This is an ingenious law, because it is all

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A lucky few, larger cities—some of the heroes of this book—have already attracted so many well-off people into their downtowns and close-in neighborhoods that these places are in danger of becoming social monocultures. Despite their wealth, these can also be detrimental to street life, since yuppie overachievers tend to spend less time in the publi

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The most comprehensive effort remains the one completed in 1998 by the Surface Transportation Policy Project, which looked at fully seventy different metropolitan areas over fifteen years. This study, which based its findings on data from the annual reports of the conservative Texas Transportation Institute, concluded as follows: Metro areas that i

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