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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,
-
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,
-
but it's something
I've thought about for a long time,
-
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,
-
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,
-
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,
-
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 Euclidian 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,
-
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 just a different way --
he was the pointilist --
-
it's a different way of making places.
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And even this map of Manhattan
is a bit misleading
-
because the red color
is uses that are mixed vertically.
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So this is the big story
of the New Urbanists --
-
to acknowledge that there
are only two ways
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that have been tested by the thousands
-
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,
-
because so few of the streets connect,
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that those streets that do connect
become overburdened,
-
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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So it's fun to break sprawl down
into its constituent parts.
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It's so easy to understand,
-
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
-
tells you all you need to know,
-
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
-
like playing fields --
-
it's wonderful that Westin
in the Ft. Lauderdale area
-
has eight soccer fields
and eight baseball diamonds
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and 20 tennis courts,
-
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:
-
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,
-
you're also going to be dreaming of this,
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,
-
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
-
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
-
for almost 30 years,
-
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,
-
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,
-
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 people have to move in,
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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 part,
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the useful city part,
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is transit,
-
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,
-
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,
-
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,
-
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,
-
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,
-
but what we've done -- what we're doing;
it's in process right now,
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it's in engineering right now --
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is turning an all four-lane
system, half one-way
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into an all two-lane system, all two-way,
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and in so doing, we're adding
70 percent more on-street parking,
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which the merchants love,
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and it protects the sidewalk.
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That parking makes the sidewalk safe,
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and we're adding a much more
robust bicycle network.
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Then the lanes themselves.
How wide are they?
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That's really important.
-
The standards have changed
such that, as Andrés Duany says,
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the typical road
to a subdivision in America
-
allows you to see
the curvature of the Earth.
-
(Laughter)
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This is a subdivision
outside of Washington from the 1960s.
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Look very carefully
at the width of the streets.
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This is a subdivision from the 1980s.
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1960s, 1980s.
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The standards have changed
to such a degree
-
that my old neighborhood of South Beach,
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when it was time to fix the street
that wasn't draining properly,
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they had to widen it
and take away half our sidewalk,
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because the standards were wider.
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People go faster on wider streets.
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People know this.
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The engineers deny it,
but the citizens know it,
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so that in Birmingham, Michigan,
they fight for narrower streets.
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Portland, Oregon, famously walkable,
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instituted its "Skinny Streets" program
in its residential neighborhood.
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We know that skinny streets are safer.
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The developer Vince Graham,
in his project I'On,
-
which we worked on in South Carolina,
-
he goes to conferences and he shows
his amazing 22-foot roads.
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These are two-way roads,
very narrow rights of way,
-
and he shows this well-known philosopher,
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who said, "Broad is the road
that leads to destruction ...
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narrow is the road that leads to life."
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(Laughter)
-
(Applause)
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This plays very well in the South.
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Now: bicycles.
-
Bicycles and bicycling
are the current revolution underway
-
in only some American cities.
-
But where you build it, they come.
-
As a planner, I hate to say that,
but the one thing I can say
-
is that bicycle population
is a function of bicycle infrastructure.
-
I asked my friend Tom Brennan
from Nelson\Nygaard in Portland
-
to send me some pictures
of the Portland bike commute.
-
He sent me this. I said,
"Was that bike to work day?"
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He said, "No, that was Tuesday."
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When you do what Portland did and spend
money on bicycle infrastructure --
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New York City has doubled the number
of bikers in it several times now
-
by painting these bright green lanes.
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Even automotive cities
like Long Beach, California:
-
vast uptick in the number of bikers
based on the infrastructure.
-
And of course, what really does it,
-
if you know 15th Street
here in Washington, DC --
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please meet Rahm Emanuel's
new bike lanes in Chicago,
-
the buffered lane, the parallel parking
pulled off the curb,
-
the bikes between the parked
cars and the curb --
-
these mint cyclists.
-
If, however, as in Pasadena,
every lane is a bike lane,
-
then no lane is a bike lane.
-
And this is the only bicyclist
that I met in Pasadena, so ...
-
(Laughter)
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The parallel parking I mentioned --
-
it's an essential barrier of steel
-
that protects the curb and pedestrians
from moving vehicles.
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This is Ft. Lauderdale;
one side of the street, you can park,
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the other side of the street, you can't.
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This is happy hour on the parking side.
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This is sad hour on the other side.
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And then the trees themselves
slow cars down.
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They move slower when trees
are next to the road,
-
and, of course, sometimes
they slow down very quickly.
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All the little details --
the curb return radius.
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Is it one foot or is it 40 feet?
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How swoopy is that curb to determine
how fast the car goes
-
and how much room you have to cross.
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And then I love this, because this
is objective journalism.
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"Some say the entrance to CityCenter
is not inviting to pedestrians."
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When every aspect
of the landscape is swoopy,
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is aerodynamic, is stream-form geometrics,
-
it says: "This is a vehicular place."
-
So no one detail, no one speciality,
can be allowed to set the stage.
-
And here, you know, this street:
-
yes, it will drain within a minute
of the hundred-year storm,
-
but this poor woman
has to mount the curb every day.
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So then quickly, the comfortable walk
has to do with the fact
-
that all animals seek, simultaneously,
prospect and refuge.
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We want to be able to see our predators,
-
but we also want to feel
that our flanks are covered.
-
And so we're drawn to places
that have good edges,
-
and if you don't supply the edges,
people won't want to be there.
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What's the proper ratio
of height to width?
-
Is it one to one? Three to one?
-
If you get beyond one to six,
you're not very comfortable anymore.
-
You don't feel enclosed.
-
Now, six to one in Salzburg
can be perfectly delightful.
-
The opposite of Salzburg is Houston.
-
The point being the parking lot
is the principal problem here.
-
However, missing teeth, those empty lots
can be issues as well,
-
and if you have a missing corner
because of an outdated zoning code,
-
then you could have a missing nose
in your neighborhood.
-
That's what we had in my neighborhood.
-
This was the zoning code that said
I couldn't build on that site.
-
As you may know, Washington, DC
is now changing its zoning
-
to allow sites like this
to become sites like this.
-
We needed a lot of variances to do that.
-
Triangular houses
can be interesting to build,
-
but if you get one built,
people generally like it.
-
So you've got to fill those missing noses.
-
And then, finally, the interesting walk:
-
signs of humanity.
-
We are among the social primates.
-
Nothing interests us more
than other people.
-
We want signs of people.
-
So the perfect one-to-one ratio,
it's a great thing.
-
This is Grand Rapids,
a very walkable city,
-
but nobody walks on this street
-
that connects the two
best hotels together,
-
because if on the left,
you have an exposed parking deck,
-
and on the right,
you have a conference facility
-
that was apparently designed
in admiration for that parking deck,
-
then you don't attract that many people.
-
Mayor Joe Riley, in his 10th term,
Mayor of Charleston, South Carolina,
-
taught us it only takes
25 feet of building
-
to hide 250 feet of garage.
-
This one I call the Chia Pet Garage.
It's in South Beach.
-
That active ground floor.
-
I want to end with this project
that I love to show.
-
It's by Meleca Architects.
It's in Columbus, Ohio.
-
To the left is the convention center
neighborhood, full of pedestrians.
-
To the right is the Short North
neighborhood -- ethnic,
-
great restaurants,
great shops, struggling.
-
It wasn't doing very well
because this was the bridge,
-
and no one was walking
from the convention center
-
into that neighborhood.
-
Well, when they rebuilt the highway,
they added an extra 80 feet to the bridge.
-
Sorry -- they rebuilt the bridge
over the highway.
-
The city paid 1.9 million dollars,
-
they gave the site to a developer,
-
the developer built this
-
and now the Short North
has come back to life.
-
And everyone says -- the newspapers,
not the planning magazines --
-
the newspapers say
it's because of that bridge.
-
So that's it. That's the general
theory of walkability.
-
Think about your own cities.
-
Think about how you can apply it.
-
You've got to do all four things at once.
-
So find those places where you
have most of them
-
and fix what you can,
-
fix what still needs fixing
in those places.
-
I really appreciate your attention,
-
and thank you for coming today.
-
(Applause)