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

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.

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

He subsequently conducted similar studies in New York and Los Angeles, and found the data tracking along almost identical curves. In each case, increasing density from two units per acre to twenty units per acre resulted in about the same savings as the increase from twenty to two hundred.22 To students of urban form, these outcomes are not that su

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

For people to choose to walk, the walk must serve some purpose. In planning terms, that goal is achieved through mixed use or, more accurately, placing the proper balance of activities within walking distance of each other. While there are exceptions, most downtowns have an imbalance of uses that can be overcome only by increasing the housing suppl

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

Placemaking and the Human Scale City

Stephen Burke pps.org

A focus on ‘missing middle’ housing: The plans feature housing that is fairly high density but not high rise — a combination of "row houses" between 2-4 stories high, and apartment buildings going up to 8 stories. This is the type of neighborhood that makes up the most beloved places in the world. Places like Amsterdam, Venice, Santa Monica, Lake C... See more

Devon Zuegel • Part 3: The first walkable city in America in a century

“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.”45

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

Back in 1991, the Sierra Club’s John Holtzclaw studied travel habits in twenty-eight California communities of widely varying residential density. He found, as expected, an inverse relationship between urbanity and driving miles. But, perhaps not expected, he also found his data points distributed around a pretty sharp curve, with most of the gains

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

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.