WEBVTT

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So I'm here to talk to you
about the walkable city.

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What is the walkable city?

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Well, for want of a better definition,

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it's a city in which the car
is an optional instrument of freedom,

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rather than a prosthetic device.

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And I'd like to talk about
why we need the walkable city,

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and I'd like to talk about
how to do the walkable city.

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Most of the talks I give these days
are about why we need it,

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but you guys are smart.

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And also I gave that talk
exactly a month ago,

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and you can see it at TED.com.

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So today I want to talk
about how to do it.

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In a lot of time thinking about this,

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I've come up with what I call
the general theory of walkability.

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A bit of a pretentious term,
it's a little tongue-in-cheek,

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but it's something
I've thought about for a long time,

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and I'd like to share
what I think I've figured out.

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In the American city,
the typical American city --

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the typical American city
is not Washington, DC,

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or New York, or San Francisco;

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it's Grand Rapids or Cedar
Rapids or Memphis --

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in the typical American city
in which most people own cars

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and the temptation
is to drive them all the time,

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if you're going to get them to walk,
then you have to offer a walk

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that's as good as a drive or better.

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What does that mean?

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It means you need to offer
four things simultaneously:

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there needs to be a proper reason to walk,

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the walk has to be safe and feel safe,

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the walk has to be comfortable

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and the walk has to be interesting.

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You need to do all four
of these things simultaneously,

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and that's the structure of my talk today,

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to take you through each of those.

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The reason to walk
is a story I learned from my mentors,

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Andrés Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk,

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the founders of the New Urbanism movement.

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And I should say half the slides
and half of my talk today

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I learned from them.

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It's the story of planning,

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the story of the formation
of the planning profession.

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When in the 19th century
people were choking

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from the soot of the dark, satanic mills,

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the planners said, hey, let's move
the housing away from the mills.

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And lifespans increased
immediately, dramatically,

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and we like to say

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the planners have been trying to repeat
that experience ever since.

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So there's the onset
of what we call Euclidean zoning,

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the separation of the landscape
into large areas of single use.

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And typically when I arrive
in a city to do a plan,

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a plan like this already awaits me
on the property that I'm looking at.

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And all a plan like this guarantees

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is that you will not have a walkable city,

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because nothing is located
near anything else.

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The alternative, of course,
is our most walkable city,

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and I like to say, you know,
this is a Rothko,

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and this is a Seurat.

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it's a different way of making places.

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And even this map of Manhattan
is a bit misleading

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because the red color
is uses that are mixed vertically.

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So this is the big story
of the New Urbanists --

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to acknowledge
that there are only two ways

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that have been tested by the thousands

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to build communities,
in the world and throughout history.

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One is the traditional neighborhood.

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You see here several neighborhoods
of Newburyport, Massachusetts,

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which is defined as being compact
and being diverse --

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places to live, work, shop,
recreate, get educated --

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all within walking distance.

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And it's defined as being walkable.

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There are lots of small streets.

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Each one is comfortable to walk on.

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And we contrast that to the other way,

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an invention that happened
after the Second World War,

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suburban sprawl,

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clearly not compact, clearly not diverse,
and it's not walkable,

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because so few of the streets connect,

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that those streets that do connect
become overburdened,

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and you wouldn't let your kid out on them.

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And I want to thank Alex Maclean,
the aerial photographer,

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for many of these beautiful pictures
that I'm showing you today.

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He's an architect as well.

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So it's fun to break sprawl down
into its constituent parts.

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It's so easy to understand,

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the places where you only live,
the places where you only work,

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the places where you only shop,

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and our super-sized public institutions.

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Schools get bigger and bigger,

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and therefore, further
and further from each other.

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And the ratio of the size
of the parking lot

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to the size of the school

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tells you all you need to know,

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which is that no child
has ever walked to this school,

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no child will ever walk to this school.

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The seniors and juniors are driving
the freshmen and the sophomores,

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and of course we have
the crash statistics to prove it.

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And then the super-sizing
of our other civic institutions

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like playing fields --

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it's wonderful that Westin
in the Ft. Lauderdale area

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has eight soccer fields
and eight baseball diamonds

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and 20 tennis courts,

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but look at the road
that takes you to that location,

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and would you let your child bike on it?

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And this is why we have
the soccer mom now.

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When I was young, I had one soccer field,

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one baseball diamond and one tennis court,

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but I could walk to it,
because it was in my neighborhood.

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Then the final part of sprawl
that everyone forgot to count:

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if you're going to separate everything
from everything else

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and reconnect it
only with automotive infrastructure,

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then this is what your landscape
begins to look like.

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The main message here is:

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if you want to have a walkable city,
you can't start with the sprawl model.

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you need the bones of an urban model.

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This is the outcome
of that form of design,

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as is this.

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And this is something
that a lot of Americans want.

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But we have to understand
it's a two-part American dream.

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If you're dreaming for this,

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you're also going to be dreaming of this.

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That would be your nightmare, I suppose.

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Often to absurd extremes,

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when we build our landscape
to accommodate cars first.

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And the experience
of being in these places --

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(Laughter)

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This is not Photoshopped.

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Walter Kulash took this slide.

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It's in Panama City.

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This is a real place.

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And being a driver
can be a bit of a nuisance,

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and being a pedestrian
can be a bit of a nuisance

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in these places.

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This is a slide that epidemiologists
have been showing for some time now,

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(Laughter)

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The fact that we have a society
where you drive to the parking lot

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to take the escalator to the treadmill

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shows that we're doing something wrong.

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But we know how to do it better.

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Here are the two models contrasted.

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I show this slide,

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which has been a formative document
of the New Urbanism now

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for almost 30 years,

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to show that sprawl and the traditional
neighborhood contain the same things.

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It's just how big are they,

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how close are they to each other,

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how are they interspersed together

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and do you have a street network,
rather than a cul-de-sac

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or a collector system of streets?

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So when we look at a downtown area,

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at a place that has a hope
of being walkable,

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and mostly that's our downtowns
in America's cities

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and towns and villages,

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we look at them and say
we want the proper balance of uses.

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So what is missing or underrepresented?

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And again, in the typical American cities
in which most Americans live,

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it is housing that is lacking.

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The jobs-to-housing balance is off.

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And you find that when
you bring housing back,

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these other things start to come back too,

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and housing is usually first
among those things.

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And, of course, the thing
that shows up last and eventually

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is the schools,

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because the young pioneers
have to move in, get older, have kids

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and fight, and then the schools
get pretty good eventually.

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The other part of this,
the useful city part,

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is transit,

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and you can have a perfectly
walkable neighborhood without it.

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But perfectly walkable cities
require transit,

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because if you don't have access
to the whole city as a pedestrian,

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then you get a car,

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and if you get a car,

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the city begins to reshape itself
around your needs,

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and the streets get wider
and the parking lots get bigger

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and you no longer have a walkable city.

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So transit is essential.

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But every transit experience,
every transit trip,

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begins or ends as a walk,

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and so we have to remember to build
walkability around our transit stations.

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Next category, the biggest one,
is the safe walk.

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It's what most walkability
experts talk about.

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It is essential, but alone not enough
to get people to walk.

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And there are so many moving parts
that add up to a walkable city.

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The first is block size.

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This is Portland, Oregon,

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famously 200-foot blocks,
famously walkable.

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This is Salt Lake City,

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famously 600-foot blocks,

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famously unwalkable.

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If you look at the two,
it's almost like two different planets,

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but these places were both built by humans

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and in fact, the story is that when
you have a 200-foot block city,

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you can have a two-lane city,

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or a two-to-four lane city,

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and a 600-foot block city
is a six-lane city, and that's a problem.

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These are the crash statistics.

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When you double the block size --

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this was a study
of 24 California cities --

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when you double the block size,

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you almost quadruple
the number of fatal accidents

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on non-highway streets.

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So how many lanes do we have?

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This is where I'm going to tell you
what I tell every audience I meet,

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which is to remind you
about induced demand.

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Induced demand applies
both to highways and to city streets.

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And induced demand tells us
that when we widen the streets

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to accept the congestion
that we're anticipating,

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or the additional trips
that we're anticipating

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in congested systems,
it is principally that congestion

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that is constraining demand,

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and so that the widening comes,

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and there are all of these latent trips
that are ready to happen.

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People move further from work

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and make other choices
about when they commute,

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and those lanes fill up
very quickly with traffic,

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so we widen the street again,
and they fill up again.

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And we've learned that
in congested systems,

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we cannot satisfy the automobile.

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This is from Newsweek Magazine --
hardly an esoteric publication:

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"Today's engineers acknowledge

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that building new roads
usually makes traffic worse."

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My response to reading this was,
may I please meet some of these engineers,

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because these are not the ones that I --

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there are great exceptions
that I'm working with now --

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but these are not the engineers
one typically meets working in a city,

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where they say, "Oh, that road
is too crowded, we need to add a lane."

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So you add a lane, and the traffic comes,

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and they say, "See, I told you
we needed that lane."

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This applies both to highways
and to city streets if they're congested.

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But the amazing thing
about most American cities that I work in,

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the more typical cities,

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is that they have a lot of streets
that are actually oversized

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for the congestion
they're currently experiencing.

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This was the case in Oklahoma City,

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when the mayor came running
to me, very upset,

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because they were named
in Prevention Magazine

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the worst city for pedestrians
in the entire country.

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Now that can't possibly be true,

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but it certainly is enough
to make a mayor do something about it.

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We did a walkability study,

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and what we found, looking
at the car counts on the street --

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these are 3,000-, 4,000-, 7,000-car counts

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and we know that two lanes
can handle 10,000 cars per day.

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Look at these numbers --
they're all near or under 10,000 cars,

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and these were the streets
that were designated

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in the new downtown plan

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to be four lanes to six lanes wide.

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So you had a fundamental disconnect
between the number of lanes

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and the number of cars
that wanted to use them.

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So it was my job to redesign
every street in the downtown

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from curb face to curb face,

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and we did it for 50 blocks of streets,

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and we're rebuilding it now.

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So a typical oversized street to nowhere

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is being narrowed, and now
under construction,

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and the project is half done.

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The typical street like this, you know,

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when you do that,
you find room for medians.

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You find room for bike lanes.

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We've doubled the amount
of on-street parking.

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We've added a full bike network
where one didn't exist before.

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But not everyone has the money
that Oklahoma City has,

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because they have an extraction
economy that's doing quite well.

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The typical city is more
like Cedar Rapids,

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where they have an all four-lane
system, half one-way system.

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And it's a little hard to see,

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but what we've done -- what we're doing;
it's in process right now,

00:11:42.247 --> 00:11:43.851
it's in engineering right now --

00:11:43.875 --> 00:11:47.666
is turning an all four-lane
system, half one-way

00:11:47.690 --> 00:11:51.267
into an all two-lane system, all two-way,

00:11:51.291 --> 00:11:54.532
and in so doing, we're adding
70 percent more on-street parking,

00:11:54.556 --> 00:11:55.915
which the merchants love,

00:11:55.939 --> 00:11:57.359
and it protects the sidewalk.

00:11:57.383 --> 00:11:59.145
That parking makes the sidewalk safe,

00:11:59.169 --> 00:12:02.375
and we're adding a much more
robust bicycle network.

00:12:03.951 --> 00:12:06.532
Then the lanes themselves.
How wide are they?

00:12:06.556 --> 00:12:07.766
That's really important.

00:12:07.790 --> 00:12:10.956
The standards have changed
such that, as Andrés Duany says,

00:12:10.980 --> 00:12:13.074
the typical road
to a subdivision in America

00:12:13.098 --> 00:12:15.290
allows you to see
the curvature of the Earth.

00:12:15.314 --> 00:12:16.353
(Laughter)

00:12:16.377 --> 00:12:19.622
This is a subdivision
outside of Washington from the 1960s.

00:12:19.646 --> 00:12:21.967
Look very carefully
at the width of the streets.

00:12:21.991 --> 00:12:24.098
This is a subdivision from the 1980s.

00:12:24.122 --> 00:12:25.757
1960s, 1980s.

00:12:25.781 --> 00:12:27.805
The standards have changed
to such a degree

00:12:27.829 --> 00:12:29.782
that my old neighborhood of South Beach,

00:12:29.806 --> 00:12:34.115
when it was time to fix the street
that wasn't draining properly,

00:12:34.139 --> 00:12:36.683
they had to widen it
and take away half our sidewalk,

00:12:36.707 --> 00:12:38.354
because the standards were wider.

00:12:38.378 --> 00:12:41.075
People go faster on wider streets.

00:12:41.099 --> 00:12:42.256
People know this.

00:12:42.280 --> 00:12:45.406
The engineers deny it,
but the citizens know it,

00:12:45.430 --> 00:12:49.256
so that in Birmingham, Michigan,
they fight for narrower streets.

00:12:49.280 --> 00:12:51.802
Portland, Oregon, famously walkable,

00:12:51.826 --> 00:12:55.371
instituted its "Skinny Streets" program
in its residential neighborhood.

00:12:55.395 --> 00:12:57.245
We know that skinny streets are safer.

00:12:57.269 --> 00:13:00.315
The developer Vince Graham,
in his project I'On,

00:13:00.339 --> 00:13:02.155
which we worked on in South Carolina,

00:13:02.179 --> 00:13:05.791
he goes to conferences and he shows
his amazing 22-foot roads.

00:13:05.815 --> 00:13:08.531
These are two-way roads,
very narrow rights of way,

00:13:08.555 --> 00:13:10.554
and he shows this well-known philosopher,

00:13:10.578 --> 00:13:13.448
who said, "Broad is the road
that leads to destruction ...

00:13:13.472 --> 00:13:15.573
narrow is the road that leads to life."

00:13:15.597 --> 00:13:17.657
(Laughter)

00:13:17.681 --> 00:13:20.050
(Applause)

00:13:20.074 --> 00:13:21.866
This plays very well in the South.

00:13:21.890 --> 00:13:23.787
Now: bicycles.

00:13:24.709 --> 00:13:29.039
Bicycles and bicycling
are the current revolution underway

00:13:29.063 --> 00:13:30.898
in only some American cities.

00:13:30.922 --> 00:13:32.563
But where you build it, they come.

00:13:32.587 --> 00:13:36.596
As a planner, I hate to say that,
but the one thing I can say

00:13:36.620 --> 00:13:40.747
is that bicycle population
is a function of bicycle infrastructure.

00:13:40.771 --> 00:13:44.186
I asked my friend Tom Brennan
from Nelson\Nygaard in Portland

00:13:44.210 --> 00:13:46.790
to send me some pictures
of the Portland bike commute.

00:13:46.814 --> 00:13:49.322
He sent me this. I said,
"Was that bike to work day?"

00:13:49.346 --> 00:13:50.991
He said, "No, that was Tuesday."

00:13:51.015 --> 00:13:55.979
When you do what Portland did and spend
money on bicycle infrastructure --

00:13:56.003 --> 00:14:00.224
New York City has doubled the number
of bikers in it several times now

00:14:00.248 --> 00:14:02.285
by painting these bright green lanes.

00:14:02.309 --> 00:14:06.575
Even automotive cities
like Long Beach, California:

00:14:06.599 --> 00:14:10.678
vast uptick in the number of bikers
based on the infrastructure.

00:14:10.702 --> 00:14:12.393
And of course, what really does it,

00:14:12.417 --> 00:14:15.093
if you know 15th Street
here in Washington, DC --

00:14:15.117 --> 00:14:18.344
please meet Rahm Emanuel's
new bike lanes in Chicago,

00:14:18.368 --> 00:14:21.746
the buffered lane, the parallel parking
pulled off the curb,

00:14:21.770 --> 00:14:25.772
the bikes between the parked
cars and the curb --

00:14:25.796 --> 00:14:27.717
these mint cyclists.

00:14:28.041 --> 00:14:31.592
If, however, as in Pasadena,
every lane is a bike lane,

00:14:31.616 --> 00:14:33.577
then no lane is a bike lane.

00:14:33.601 --> 00:14:36.713
And this is the only bicyclist
that I met in Pasadena, so ...

00:14:36.737 --> 00:14:38.342
(Laughter)

00:14:38.366 --> 00:14:40.057
The parallel parking I mentioned --

00:14:40.081 --> 00:14:41.703
it's an essential barrier of steel

00:14:41.727 --> 00:14:45.513
that protects the curb and pedestrians
from moving vehicles.

00:14:45.637 --> 00:14:49.233
This is Ft. Lauderdale;
one side of the street, you can park,

00:14:49.257 --> 00:14:51.209
the other side of the street, you can't.

00:14:51.233 --> 00:14:53.258
This is happy hour on the parking side.

00:14:53.282 --> 00:14:55.973
This is sad hour on the other side.

00:14:55.997 --> 00:14:58.986
And then the trees themselves
slow cars down.

00:14:59.010 --> 00:15:01.296
They move slower when trees
are next to the road,

00:15:01.320 --> 00:15:03.875
and, of course, sometimes
they slow down very quickly.

00:15:05.089 --> 00:15:08.041
All the little details --
the curb return radius.

00:15:08.065 --> 00:15:09.727
Is it one foot or is it 40 feet?

00:15:09.751 --> 00:15:13.197
How swoopy is that curb to determine
how fast the car goes

00:15:13.221 --> 00:15:15.686
and how much room you have to cross.

00:15:15.710 --> 00:15:19.132
And then I love this, because this
is objective journalism.

00:15:20.266 --> 00:15:24.345
"Some say the entrance to CityCenter
is not inviting to pedestrians."

00:15:24.369 --> 00:15:26.827
When every aspect
of the landscape is swoopy,

00:15:26.851 --> 00:15:29.524
is aerodynamic, is stream-form geometrics,

00:15:29.548 --> 00:15:31.865
it says: "This is a vehicular place."

00:15:31.889 --> 00:15:36.964
So no one detail, no one speciality,
can be allowed to set the stage.

00:15:36.988 --> 00:15:38.552
And here, you know, this street:

00:15:38.576 --> 00:15:42.468
yes, it will drain within a minute
of the hundred-year storm,

00:15:42.492 --> 00:15:45.284
but this poor woman
has to mount the curb every day.

00:15:45.308 --> 00:15:48.254
So then quickly, the comfortable walk
has to do with the fact

00:15:48.278 --> 00:15:53.231
that all animals seek, simultaneously,
prospect and refuge.

00:15:53.255 --> 00:15:55.355
We want to be able to see our predators,

00:15:55.379 --> 00:15:57.898
but we also want to feel
that our flanks are covered.

00:15:57.922 --> 00:16:00.413
And so we're drawn to places
that have good edges,

00:16:00.437 --> 00:16:03.765
and if you don't supply the edges,
people won't want to be there.

00:16:03.789 --> 00:16:05.928
What's the proper ratio
of height to width?

00:16:05.952 --> 00:16:07.727
Is it one to one? Three to one?

00:16:07.851 --> 00:16:11.636
If you get beyond one to six,
you're not very comfortable anymore.

00:16:11.660 --> 00:16:12.979
You don't feel enclosed.

00:16:13.103 --> 00:16:16.248
Now, six to one in Salzburg
can be perfectly delightful.

00:16:16.372 --> 00:16:18.759
The opposite of Salzburg is Houston.

00:16:19.917 --> 00:16:23.517
The point being the parking lot
is the principal problem here.

00:16:23.541 --> 00:16:27.116
However, missing teeth, those empty lots
can be issues as well,

00:16:27.140 --> 00:16:30.385
and if you have a missing corner
because of an outdated zoning code,

00:16:30.409 --> 00:16:33.317
then you could have a missing nose
in your neighborhood.

00:16:33.341 --> 00:16:35.178
That's what we had in my neighborhood.

00:16:35.202 --> 00:16:38.278
This was the zoning code that said
I couldn't build on that site.

00:16:38.302 --> 00:16:42.329
As you may know, Washington, DC
is now changing its zoning

00:16:42.353 --> 00:16:45.483
to allow sites like this
to become sites like this.

00:16:45.507 --> 00:16:47.673
We needed a lot of variances to do that.

00:16:47.697 --> 00:16:49.981
Triangular houses
can be interesting to build,

00:16:50.005 --> 00:16:53.107
but if you get one built,
people generally like it.

00:16:53.131 --> 00:16:55.584
So you've got to fill those missing noses.

00:16:55.738 --> 00:16:57.696
And then, finally, the interesting walk:

00:16:57.720 --> 00:16:59.392
signs of humanity.

00:16:59.416 --> 00:17:01.231
We are among the social primates.

00:17:01.255 --> 00:17:03.443
Nothing interests us more
than other people.

00:17:03.467 --> 00:17:04.961
We want signs of people.

00:17:04.984 --> 00:17:07.988
So the perfect one-to-one ratio,
it's a great thing.

00:17:08.012 --> 00:17:10.215
This is Grand Rapids,
a very walkable city,

00:17:10.240 --> 00:17:12.082
but nobody walks on this street

00:17:12.106 --> 00:17:14.217
that connects the two
best hotels together,

00:17:14.241 --> 00:17:18.608
because if on the left,
you have an exposed parking deck,

00:17:18.633 --> 00:17:21.117
and on the right,
you have a conference facility

00:17:21.141 --> 00:17:24.569
that was apparently designed
in admiration for that parking deck,

00:17:24.594 --> 00:17:27.101
then you don't attract that many people.

00:17:27.125 --> 00:17:31.099
Mayor Joe Riley, in his 10th term,
Mayor of Charleston, South Carolina,

00:17:31.123 --> 00:17:33.300
taught us it only takes
25 feet of building

00:17:33.324 --> 00:17:35.618
to hide 250 feet of garage.

00:17:35.642 --> 00:17:38.362
This one I call the Chia Pet Garage.
It's in South Beach.

00:17:38.386 --> 00:17:39.830
That active ground floor.

00:17:39.854 --> 00:17:42.573
I want to end with this project
that I love to show.

00:17:42.597 --> 00:17:45.108
It's by Meleca Architects.
It's in Columbus, Ohio.

00:17:45.132 --> 00:17:48.822
To the left is the convention center
neighborhood, full of pedestrians.

00:17:48.846 --> 00:17:51.510
To the right is the Short North
neighborhood -- ethnic,

00:17:51.534 --> 00:17:54.231
great restaurants,
great shops, struggling.

00:17:54.255 --> 00:17:56.809
It wasn't doing very well
because this was the bridge,

00:17:56.833 --> 00:17:59.300
and no one was walking
from the convention center

00:17:59.324 --> 00:18:00.533
into that neighborhood.

00:18:00.557 --> 00:18:04.850
Well, when they rebuilt the highway,
they added an extra 80 feet to the bridge.

00:18:04.874 --> 00:18:07.348
Sorry -- they rebuilt the bridge
over the highway.

00:18:07.372 --> 00:18:09.745
The city paid 1.9 million dollars,

00:18:09.769 --> 00:18:12.015
they gave the site to a developer,

00:18:12.039 --> 00:18:13.430
the developer built this

00:18:13.454 --> 00:18:15.773
and now the Short North
has come back to life.

00:18:15.797 --> 00:18:19.013
And everyone says, the newspapers,
not the planning magazines,

00:18:19.037 --> 00:18:21.258
the newspapers say
it's because of that bridge.

00:18:21.282 --> 00:18:23.902
So that's it. That's the general
theory of walkability.

00:18:23.926 --> 00:18:25.946
Think about your own cities.

00:18:25.970 --> 00:18:28.387
Think about how you can apply it.

00:18:28.411 --> 00:18:30.365
You've got to do all four things at once.

00:18:30.389 --> 00:18:32.698
So find those places
where you have most of them

00:18:32.722 --> 00:18:34.627
and fix what you can,

00:18:34.651 --> 00:18:37.335
fix what still needs fixing
in those places.

00:18:37.359 --> 00:18:39.127
I really appreciate your attention,

00:18:39.151 --> 00:18:41.215
and thank you for coming today.

00:18:41.239 --> 00:18:45.793
(Applause)