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

In Miami, for example, people wonder why intersections in residential neighborhoods are often so fat: two relatively narrow streets will meet in a sweeping expanse of asphalt that seems to take hours to walk across. The answer is that the firefighters’ union once struck a deal that no truck would ever be dispatched without a hefty number of firemen

Cities whose economic-development strategy is a corporate-capture strategy are typically those whose economic development director and planning director don’t talk to each other. The smart cities, like Lowell, hire a director of planning and development, who is first charged with creating a city where people want to be. Rather than trying to land n

This point was pounded home in a recent EPA study, “Location Efficiency and Building Type—Boiling It Down to BTUs,”11 that compared four factors: drivable versus walkable location; conventional construction versus green building; single-family versus multifamily housing; and conventional versus hybrid automobiles. The study made it clear that, whil

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

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.

It turns out that there is a strong correlation between a metropolitan area’s average traffic speed and its fuel use. Cities with higher congestion use less fuel per capita, while cities with the least congestion use the most fuel.17

Ivan Illich, the multinational intellectual who in 1973 wrote the smartest thing that I have yet to read about transportation: “Beyond a certain speed, motorized vehicles create remoteness which they alone can shrink. They create distances for all and shrink them for only a few.”

In 2004, a meta-analysis of dozens of previous studies found that “on average, a 10 percent increase in lane miles induces an immediate 4 percent increase in vehicle miles traveled, which climbs to 10 percent—the entire new capacity—in a few years.”14

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.”