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

               In Walkable City, Jeff Speck, an urban planning consultant, lays out lots of different techniques cities can use to improve their walkability and why that is a worthwhile effort. For example, in a city without walking, the social scene is only accessible by invitation. There are no chance encounters on the street when you’re in a car. Many people want ow live in walkable downtowns but cannot afford to. Speck cites on study that finds that 47% of people would prefer to live in a city or in a city or a suburban neighborhood with a mix of houses, shops, and businesses and only one in ten say they would want to live in a neighborhood with houses only. Clearly, walkable spaces are very desirable. Speck quotes the former mayor of Bogota, Enrique Peñalosa, who says, “God made us walking animals—pedestrians. As a fish needs to swim, a bird to fly, a deer to run, we need to walk, not in order to survive, but to be happy.

               Speck lays out “The Ten Steps of Walkability” and spends over half the book explaining them. They are organized as The Useful Walk (Rules 1-4), The Safe Walk (5-6), The Comfortable Walk (7-8), and The Interesting Walk (9-10):

• Put Cars in their Place
• Car ownership means a lot of fixed costs. Just getting the car is the most expansive part and even with high gas prices, $4.00 a gallon will just never feel as much as the $18,000 you just spent on the car. The cost of an individual trip will not really keep a driver home since they already are paying up front, so a city that wants to be walkable just needs to make certain areas off-limits from drivers and/or stop trying to fight congestion. The more you fight congestion the more people drive.
• Mix the Uses
• There needs to be a balance in cities of housing to shopping to working so that people can reach the gym, the park, their kids’ school, and their job within maybe a half an hour walking or using public transit.
• Get the Parking Right
• Speck quotes one of his friends who says that, “parking is destiny.” If a city builds lots of parking, people will drive. If it doesn’t, they won’t. It takes up a lot of land and kills walkability since no one likes walking across a big parking lot.
• Let Transit Work
• Without good transit you can only have a few good walkable neighborhoods. A walkable city needs to invest in its transit to get people out of cars and around the city on foot. Something kind of disappointing is that better transit doesn’t reduce traffic. The only way to reduce traffic is to reduce the size of roads, making it worse and getting people off the road.
• Protect the Pedestrian
• It is very obvious, but protecting pedestrians means shortening the size of blocks, cutting down the width of car lanes, changing the geometry of roads when possible, and putting barriers between drivers and walkers like cement bollards, trees, or a row of parallel-parked cars.
• Welcome Bikes
• Bikeability makes driving less necessary and goes hand in hand with walkability.
• Shape the Spaces
• There needs to be balance in public spaces. People want to be able to see a long way but to also fee enclosed. Think of Central Park- in a park that big, it’s nice to have tall buildings around it. In a smaller park, those buildings would feel like a cage, but not so in a bigger park.
• Plant Trees
• Trees have huge value as barriers that protect pedestrian, actors against the urban heat island effect, and just look beautiful in a city.
• Make Friendly and Unique Faces
• The enemies of lively streetscapes, says Speck, are parking lots, drugstores, and star architects, all of whom favor blank walls. Beautiful and detailed facades invite more walking.
• Pick Your Winners
• Cities should be realistic about which streets and neighborhoods to make walkable. No city is 100% walkable and there are always uninviting neighborhoods. Cities should not try to make everywhere walkable but rather focus on the few places with the most potential.

In sum, this is a great book with really amazing facts and interesting ideas for changing cities for the better. For example, Washington, D.C. gives pedestrians five second head start on lights so that they can claim the crosswalk. Some cities are paring down roads with two driving, one left turn, and one right turning lanes down to three because it is actually no more efficient to have the second driving lane. This opens up more space on the sides. I would highly recommend this book to anyone interested in cities, transit, and psychology.