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

According to Adam Baacke, Lowell’s assistant city manager for planning and development, achieving this transformation was essentially a three-step process that could perhaps be best described as politics, permitting, and pathfinding. Politics refers to changing attitudes (and people) on the city council, where most members shunned downtown housing

It would seem that only one thing is more destructive to the health of our downtowns than welcoming cars unconditionally and that is getting rid of them entirely. The proper response to obesity is not to stop eating, and most stores need car traffic to survive. With autos reintroduced, most failed pedestrian malls, like Monroe Place in Grand Rapids

Enrique Peñalosa, the former mayor of Bogotá, Colombia, sees things in a much simpler light: “God made us walking animals—pedestrians. As a fish needs to swim, a bird to fly, a deer to run, we need to walk, not in order to survive, but to be happy.”

Portland’s system was instituted hand in hand with a commitment to “a host of other strategies and policies, including higher density, neighborhood-based urban design, elimination of minimum parking requirements, and basically the whole list of things that add up to walkability,” says Hales. “You can’t just drop in a streetcar.”

The conventional wisdom used to be that creating a strong economy came first, and that increased population and a higher quality of life would follow. The converse now seems more likely: creating a higher quality of life is the first step to attracting new residents and jobs.

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

In another poll, the devoutly nonideological Consumer Preference Survey, respondents favored public transportation over road building as a solution to congestion by almost three to one.● The actual funding allocation currently favors roads four to one over transit,9 so it would seem that a major correction is in order.

Which leads us to Shoup’s second key recommendation, that on-street parking be priced at a level that results in an 85 percent occupancy rate at all times.44 This number may seem a bit low, but it corresponds with roughly one empty space per block face, just the right amount to ensure Daddy Warbucks a spot near the furrier. Because it is precisely

The first step to understanding how parking works is to get a grasp of how much it costs and who pays for it. Because it is so plentiful and often free to use, it is easy to imagine that it costs very little. But this is not the case. The cheapest urban parking space in America, an 8½-by-18-foot piece of asphalt on relatively worthless land, costs

The General Theory of Walkability explains how, to be favored, a walk has to satisfy four main conditions: it must be useful, safe, comfortable, and interesting.