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

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

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.”

Over the past decade, there has been a series of studies that attribute obesity and its related illnesses directly to the automotive lifestyle and, better yet, to the automotive landscape.● One effort found that for every additional five minutes Atlanta-area residents drove each day, they were 3 percent more likely to be obese.13 Another showed tha

Walkability is both an end and a means, as well as a measure. While the physical and social rewards of walking are many, walkability is perhaps most useful as it contributes to urban vitality and most meaningful as an indicator of that vitality.

The lesson we learn from these places is that walking down a narrow, shop-lined street in icy Boston or sweltering Savannah is a vastly superior experience to walking down an arterial between parking lots and car dealerships on San Diego’s best day. Get the design right and people will walk in almost any climate.

2009 article in Newsweek, hardly an esoteric publication: “Demand from drivers tends to quickly overwhelm the new supply; today engineers acknowledge that building new roads usually makes traffic worse.”

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

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

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