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 just a different way --
he was the pointilist --

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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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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,
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 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,

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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.

NOTE Paragraph

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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.

NOTE Paragraph

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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.

NOTE Paragraph

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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.

NOTE Paragraph

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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,

00:11:19.842 --> 00:11:23.832
where they have an all four-lane
system, half one-way system.

00:11:23.856 --> 00:11:25.305
And it's a little hard to see,

00:11:25.329 --> 00:11:28.613
but what we've done -- what we're doing;
it's in process right now,

00:11:28.637 --> 00:11:30.241
it's in engineering right now --

00:11:30.265 --> 00:11:34.056
is turning an all four-lane
system, half one-way

00:11:34.080 --> 00:11:37.657
into an all two-lane system, all two-way,

00:11:37.681 --> 00:11:40.922
and in so doing, we're adding
70 percent more on-street parking,

00:11:40.946 --> 00:11:42.305
which the merchants love,

00:11:42.329 --> 00:11:43.749
and it protects the sidewalk.

00:11:43.773 --> 00:11:45.535
That parking makes the sidewalk safe,

00:11:45.559 --> 00:11:49.237
and we're adding a much more
robust bicycle network.

NOTE Paragraph

00:11:49.261 --> 00:11:51.842
Then the lanes themselves.
How wide are they?

00:11:51.866 --> 00:11:53.076
That's really important.

00:11:53.100 --> 00:11:56.266
The standards have changed
such that, as Andrés Duany says,

00:11:56.290 --> 00:11:58.384
the typical road
to a subdivision in America

00:11:58.408 --> 00:12:00.600
allows you to see
the curvature of the Earth.

NOTE Paragraph

00:12:00.624 --> 00:12:01.663
(Laughter)

NOTE Paragraph

00:12:01.687 --> 00:12:04.932
This is a subdivision
outside of Washington from the 1960s.

00:12:04.956 --> 00:12:07.277
Look very carefully
at the width of the streets.

00:12:07.301 --> 00:12:09.408
This is a subdivision from the 1980s.

00:12:09.432 --> 00:12:11.067
1960s, 1980s.

00:12:11.091 --> 00:12:13.115
The standards have changed
to such a degree

00:12:13.139 --> 00:12:15.092
that my old neighborhood of South Beach,

00:12:15.116 --> 00:12:18.275
when it was time to fix the street
that wasn't draining properly,

00:12:18.299 --> 00:12:20.843
they had to widen it
and take away half our sidewalk,

00:12:20.867 --> 00:12:22.606
because the standards were wider.

00:12:22.630 --> 00:12:26.085
People go faster on wider streets.

00:12:26.109 --> 00:12:27.266
People know this.

00:12:27.290 --> 00:12:30.416
The engineers deny it,
but the citizens know it,

00:12:30.440 --> 00:12:34.266
so that in Birmingham, Michigan,
they fight for narrower streets.

00:12:34.290 --> 00:12:36.812
Portland, Oregon, famously walkable,

00:12:36.836 --> 00:12:40.381
instituted its "Skinny Streets" program
in its residential neighborhood.

00:12:40.405 --> 00:12:42.255
We know that skinny streets are safer.

00:12:42.279 --> 00:12:45.325
The developer Vince Graham,
in his project I'On,

00:12:45.349 --> 00:12:47.165
which we worked on in South Carolina,

00:12:47.189 --> 00:12:51.104
he goes to conferences and he shows
his amazing 22-foot roads.

00:12:51.128 --> 00:12:53.541
These are two-way roads,
very narrow rights of way,

00:12:53.565 --> 00:12:55.564
and he shows this well-known philosopher,

00:12:55.588 --> 00:12:58.458
who said, "Broad is the road
that leads to destruction ...

00:12:58.482 --> 00:13:00.583
narrow is the road that leads to life."

NOTE Paragraph

00:13:00.607 --> 00:13:02.667
(Laughter)

NOTE Paragraph

00:13:02.691 --> 00:13:05.060
(Applause)

NOTE Paragraph

00:13:05.084 --> 00:13:07.143
This plays very well in the South.

NOTE Paragraph

00:13:07.167 --> 00:13:09.064
Now: bicycles.

00:13:09.929 --> 00:13:14.411
Bicycles and bicycling
are the current revolution underway

00:13:14.435 --> 00:13:16.118
in only some American cities.

00:13:16.142 --> 00:13:17.783
But where you build it, they come.

00:13:17.807 --> 00:13:21.816
As a planner, I hate to say that,
but the one thing I can say

00:13:21.840 --> 00:13:25.967
is that bicycle population
is a function of bicycle infrastructure.

00:13:25.991 --> 00:13:29.406
I asked my friend Tom Brennan
from Nelson\Nygaard in Portland

00:13:29.430 --> 00:13:32.010
to send me some pictures
of the Portland bike commute.

00:13:32.034 --> 00:13:34.542
He sent me this. I said,
"Was that bike to work day?"

00:13:34.566 --> 00:13:36.211
He said, "No, that was Tuesday."

00:13:36.235 --> 00:13:41.199
When you do what Portland did and spend
money on bicycle infrastructure --

00:13:41.223 --> 00:13:45.444
New York City has doubled the number
of bikers in it several times now

00:13:45.468 --> 00:13:47.505
by painting these bright green lanes.

00:13:47.529 --> 00:13:51.095
Even automotive cities
like Long Beach, California:

00:13:51.119 --> 00:13:55.198
vast uptick in the number of bikers
based on the infrastructure.

00:13:55.222 --> 00:13:56.913
And of course, what really does it,

00:13:56.937 --> 00:13:59.313
if you know 15th Street
here in Washington, DC --

00:13:59.337 --> 00:14:02.314
please meet Rahm Emanuel's
new bike lanes in Chicago,

00:14:02.338 --> 00:14:05.716
the buffered lane, the parallel parking
pulled off the curb,

00:14:05.740 --> 00:14:09.742
the bikes between the parked
cars and the curb --

00:14:09.766 --> 00:14:11.687
these mint cyclists.

00:14:11.711 --> 00:14:15.262
If, however, as in Pasadena,
every lane is a bike lane,

00:14:15.286 --> 00:14:17.247
then no lane is a bike lane.

00:14:17.271 --> 00:14:20.383
And this is the only bicyclist
that I met in Pasadena, so ...

NOTE Paragraph

00:14:20.407 --> 00:14:22.012
(Laughter)

NOTE Paragraph

00:14:22.036 --> 00:14:23.727
The parallel parking I mentioned --

00:14:23.751 --> 00:14:25.373
it's an essential barrier of steel

00:14:25.397 --> 00:14:29.183
that protects the curb and pedestrians
from moving vehicles.

00:14:29.207 --> 00:14:32.803
This is Ft. Lauderdale;
one side of the street, you can park,

00:14:32.827 --> 00:14:34.779
the other side of the street, you can't.

00:14:34.803 --> 00:14:36.828
This is happy hour on the parking side.

00:14:36.852 --> 00:14:39.543
This is sad hour on the other side.

00:14:39.567 --> 00:14:42.556
And then the trees themselves
slow cars down.

00:14:42.580 --> 00:14:44.866
They move slower when trees
are next to the road,

00:14:44.890 --> 00:14:47.445
and, of course, sometimes
they slow down very quickly.

00:14:48.119 --> 00:14:51.071
All the little details --
the curb return radius.

00:14:51.095 --> 00:14:52.757
Is it one foot or is it 40 feet?

00:14:52.781 --> 00:14:56.227
How swoopy is that curb to determine
how fast the car goes

00:14:56.251 --> 00:14:57.966
and how much room you have to cross.

00:14:57.990 --> 00:15:01.412
And then I love this,
because this is objective journalism.

00:15:01.436 --> 00:15:05.515
"Some say the entrance to CityCenter
is not inviting to pedestrians."

00:15:05.539 --> 00:15:07.997
When every aspect
of the landscape is swoopy,

00:15:08.021 --> 00:15:10.694
is aerodynamic, is stream-form geometrics,

00:15:10.718 --> 00:15:13.035
it says: "This is a vehicular place."

00:15:13.059 --> 00:15:18.134
So no one detail, no one speciality,
can be allowed to set the stage.

00:15:18.158 --> 00:15:19.722
And here, you know, this street:

00:15:19.746 --> 00:15:23.638
yes, it will drain within a minute
of the hundred-year storm,

00:15:23.662 --> 00:15:26.454
but this poor woman
has to mount the curb every day.

NOTE Paragraph

00:15:26.478 --> 00:15:29.424
So then quickly, the comfortable walk
has to do with the fact

00:15:29.448 --> 00:15:34.401
that all animals seek, simultaneously,
prospect and refuge.

00:15:34.425 --> 00:15:36.525
We want to be able to see our predators,

00:15:36.549 --> 00:15:39.068
but we also want to feel
that our flanks are covered.

00:15:39.092 --> 00:15:41.583
And so we're drawn to places
that have good edges,

00:15:41.607 --> 00:15:44.935
and if you don't supply the edges,
people won't want to be there.

00:15:44.959 --> 00:15:47.098
What's the proper ratio
of height to width?

00:15:47.122 --> 00:15:48.897
Is it one to one? Three to one?

00:15:48.921 --> 00:15:52.706
If you get beyond one to six,
you're not very comfortable anymore.

00:15:52.730 --> 00:15:54.049
You don't feel enclosed.

00:15:54.073 --> 00:15:57.218
Now, six to one in Salzburg
can be perfectly delightful.

00:15:57.242 --> 00:15:59.629
The opposite of Salzburg is Houston.

00:16:00.487 --> 00:16:04.087
The point being the parking lot
is the principal problem here.

00:16:04.111 --> 00:16:07.686
However, missing teeth, those empty lots
can be issues as well,

00:16:07.710 --> 00:16:10.955
and if you have a missing corner
because of an outdated zoning code,

00:16:10.979 --> 00:16:13.887
then you could have a missing nose
in your neighborhood.

00:16:13.911 --> 00:16:15.748
That's what we had in my neighborhood.

00:16:15.772 --> 00:16:18.848
This was the zoning code that said
I couldn't build on that site.

00:16:18.872 --> 00:16:22.599
As you may know, Washington, DC
is now changing its zoning

00:16:22.623 --> 00:16:25.753
to allow sites like this
to become sites like this.

00:16:25.777 --> 00:16:27.943
We needed a lot of variances to do that.

00:16:27.967 --> 00:16:30.251
Triangular houses
can be interesting to build,

00:16:30.275 --> 00:16:32.977
but if you get one built,
people generally like it.

00:16:33.001 --> 00:16:35.454
So you've got to fill those missing noses.

NOTE Paragraph

00:16:35.478 --> 00:16:37.436
And then, finally, the interesting walk:

00:16:37.460 --> 00:16:39.132
signs of humanity.

00:16:39.156 --> 00:16:40.971
We are among the social primates.

00:16:40.995 --> 00:16:43.183
Nothing interests us more
than other people.

00:16:43.207 --> 00:16:44.701
We want signs of people.

00:16:44.725 --> 00:16:47.728
So the perfect one-to-one ratio,
it's a great thing.

00:16:47.752 --> 00:16:49.956
This is Grand Rapids,
a very walkable city,

00:16:49.980 --> 00:16:51.622
but nobody walks on this street

00:16:51.646 --> 00:16:53.757
that connects the two
best hotels together,

00:16:53.781 --> 00:16:58.149
because if on the left,
you have an exposed parking deck,

00:16:58.173 --> 00:17:00.657
and on the right,
you have a conference facility

00:17:00.681 --> 00:17:04.110
that was apparently designed
in admiration for that parking deck,

00:17:04.134 --> 00:17:06.641
then you don't attract that many people.

00:17:06.665 --> 00:17:10.639
Mayor Joe Riley, in his 10th term,
Mayor of Charleston, South Carolina,

00:17:10.663 --> 00:17:12.840
taught us it only takes
25 feet of building

00:17:12.864 --> 00:17:15.158
to hide 250 feet of garage.

00:17:15.182 --> 00:17:17.902
This one I call the Chia Pet Garage.
It's in South Beach.

00:17:17.926 --> 00:17:19.370
That active ground floor.

NOTE Paragraph

00:17:19.394 --> 00:17:22.113
I want to end with this project
that I love to show.

00:17:22.137 --> 00:17:24.648
It's by Meleca Architects.
It's in Columbus, Ohio.

00:17:24.672 --> 00:17:28.362
To the left is the convention center
neighborhood, full of pedestrians.

00:17:28.386 --> 00:17:31.050
To the right is the Short North
neighborhood -- ethnic,

00:17:31.074 --> 00:17:33.771
great restaurants,
great shops, struggling.

00:17:33.795 --> 00:17:36.349
It wasn't doing very well
because this was the bridge,

00:17:36.373 --> 00:17:38.840
and no one was walking
from the convention center

00:17:38.864 --> 00:17:40.213
into that neighborhood.

00:17:40.237 --> 00:17:44.530
Well, when they rebuilt the highway,
they added an extra 80 feet to the bridge.

00:17:44.554 --> 00:17:47.028
Sorry -- they rebuilt the bridge
over the highway.

00:17:47.052 --> 00:17:49.425
The city paid 1.9 million dollars,

00:17:49.449 --> 00:17:51.695
they gave the site to a developer,

00:17:51.719 --> 00:17:53.110
the developer built this

00:17:53.134 --> 00:17:55.453
and now the Short North
has come back to life.

00:17:55.477 --> 00:17:58.693
And everyone says, the newspapers,
not the planning magazines,

00:17:58.717 --> 00:18:00.938
the newspapers say
it's because of that bridge.

NOTE Paragraph

00:18:00.962 --> 00:18:03.582
So that's it. That's the general
theory of walkability.

00:18:03.606 --> 00:18:05.626
Think about your own cities.

00:18:05.650 --> 00:18:08.067
Think about how you can apply it.

00:18:08.091 --> 00:18:10.045
You've got to do all four things at once.

00:18:10.069 --> 00:18:12.378
So find those places
where you have most of them

00:18:12.402 --> 00:18:14.307
and fix what you can,

00:18:14.331 --> 00:18:17.015
fix what still needs fixing
in those places.

NOTE Paragraph

00:18:17.039 --> 00:18:18.807
I really appreciate your attention,

00:18:18.831 --> 00:18:21.507
and thank you for coming today.

NOTE Paragraph

00:18:21.531 --> 00:18:24.079
(Applause)