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

It is fascinating to talk to blind people about push-button walk signals. They push the button and wait for a lull in the noise. But then they can’t tell if what they hear is a red light, or just a gap in the speedy traffic. The alternative are those annoying chirping signals that now mark the pace of daily life in crunchy towns like Northampton, M

Finally, and most essentially: The main problem with traffic studies is that they almost never consider the phenomenon of induced demand. Induced demand is the name for what happens when increasing the supply of roadways lowers the time cost of driving, causing more people to drive and obliterating any reductions in congestion.

This subsidy could perhaps be justified if it produced some greater good for society, but it only produces one benefit: cheaper parking. How does it perform in terms of other important measures? Well, it worsens air and water quality, speeds global warming, increases energy consumption, raises the cost of housing, decreases public revenue, undermin

Through the 2000s, the Dallas Area Rapid Transit (DART) system has continued to grow, and transit ridership has continued to drop.17 A few billion dollars later, despite escalating gasoline costs, a greater percentage of Dallas residents are driving to work than at any time in the past quarter century.

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.”

First: The computer model is only as good as its inputs, and there’s nothing easier than tweaking the inputs to get the outcome you want. When we were working in Oklahoma City, the local traffic engineer’s “Synchro” computer model said that our pro-pedestrian proposals would cause gridlock. So we borrowed that engineer’s computer model and handed 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.

These findings align with a recent Environmental Protection Agency study that found, state by state, an inverse relationship between vehicle travel and productivity: the more miles that people in a given state drive, the weaker it performs economically.● Apparently, the data are beginning to support the city planners’ bold contention that time wast

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