Susan Mack
Not only did I walk to work....but last week I was able to walk to the NYC bus station!
This University town does NOT encourage enough students to leave their cars at home....if they did, the buses would be more often, and then parking downtown wouldn't be such a problem.
What do those other University towns do to encourage walking? Ideas?

I think that most of us recall having walked a lot (or rode a bike a lot) during our college days.

One thing I haven't seen mentioned but that does make a difference:

Walking is fine when the weather is good. But what if you are halfway home and it starts raining?

The typical college campus will have lots of public buildings in which one can take temporary refuge from a storm. The larger ones will also have bus systems. Walking becomes a much more attractive proposition if one knows that one can hop on the bus along the way if the weather turns bad, or if one sprains an ankle, etc.

(I am also old enough to remember when hitch-hiking was very common amongst college-aged people, and even the entire population. Where hitch-hiking is commonplace, it can partially substitute for a bus service. Unfortunately, the contemporary US is not the sort of society where people feel safe either offering rides to or accepting rides from strangers. Too bad.)

Thus, two keys to creating walkable areas might be to: 1) Provide places along walkways and bike paths where people can temporarilly shelter from bad weather, to the extent that such places do not already exist; and 2) Find some way to create a hitch-hiking-friendly community, or else serve communities with a good bus service.

http://politics.reddit.com/info/60vc9/comments/

thanks for your support....

Good news: Bill has a job he can walk to.

Bad news: It's a nuclear bomb or bioweapon facility.

Many of us remember remember walking to elementary school. Few children do so today, in part because major arteries are too dangerous to cross.

Public officials are (or should be) stingy with our dollars. Walkability is a cost-effective program because those public dollars address (at least) three major social problems at once: energy/climate, obesity/health and crime/social bonds. There may be other benefits as well.

Schofield Barracks, island of Oahu, Hawaii: Nice, walkable, laid out in the 1920s and not changed much since. There are a few bicycles and mopeds were big with the officers - if you see a moped, salute it lol. I walked (no driver's license anyway) and then got my old Fuji bike from my great-aunt's and fixed it up, and started riding that. Got almost pulled over by the MPs too for speeding - speed limits on military bases are LOW and LOW for a reason - higher speeds mean more accidents and even the occasional death and the military's got no patience for that crap.

Prescott, Arizona: I live 25 miles outside of this small city. When I go to town, I generally park in one place and then just walk everywhere, it's great! You can wal everywhere in the area that's been around a while, there's sprawl too, sorry to say, but the main town which is stuff from 50-150 years ago is all walkable. Hell it's not even that bad a walk from downtown to the DES (welfare) office, it's a couple of miles but it's very pretty along there. There's a rarely-seen bus service too.

So, these are two places I know about.

Glenn -- What you are demonstrating here is a statistical artifact. Military bases score high because they have small administrative boundaries. There are many city neighborhoods that score as high or higher, but they are diluted because they are located within larger city boundaries that include essentially uninhabited, unwalkable areas (rivers, lakes, highways, storage and industrial facilities, etc.) and/or automobile-oriented areas.

In Ithaca, for example, the score is raised because the city boundaries are drawn tightly. The year 2000 population of the city proper was 29,287, but the surrounding Town of Ithaca had an additional population of 18,198, and the metropolitan area as a whole had a population of 100,135. So the percent of commuters on foot could be 13-25% depending on the boundaries you choose.

Compare to census tract 65 in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of D.C., with 25% of workers commuting on foot (and another 31% by subway).

The components of walkable neighborhoods, boiled down to the essentials, are:

1. Mix of land uses within walking distance
2. Well connected network of streets with short blocks
3. Pedestrian-oriented streetscapes and frontages (as defined by Jan Gehl, William H. Whyte, and others)

My neighborhood does not have the highest WalkScore (87, too far from a movie theater for one) but I find it perfectly acceptable.

I became interested in Urban Rail & TOD and the rest because I moved into a series of delightful neighborhoods and began to understand how they operated, and why they were so different from Standard post-WW II America.

I can make groceries at Zara's 2.5 blocks away, Williams 4 blocks, Magazine 4 blocks, Robert's (closed post-K, 6 blocks), Stein's Deli (new) 5 blocks, WalMart 7 blocks and 24 hour essentials @ WalGreens 4.5 blocks away.

My tailor is 4 blocks away, insurance agent 4 blocks (pre-K), barber 3 blocks but too expensive, I take a streetcar to another. Bars & restaurants abound.

Major employment centers are 0.8 to 2 miles away. And this is where the streetcar comes in. It links a series of walkable neighborhoods (I take the streetcar to my preferred barber) and major destinations ! It is the "glue" in holding a string of vibrant walkable destinations together.

Best Hopes for more TOD,

Alan

Let us keep in mind that many of the highly walkable parts of the older inner cities are often places that you wouldn't want to find yourself walking alone in at any time, much less at night.

One of the main reasons for the rapid development of the suburbs during the Post-War economic boom was 'white flight', pure and simple. Second-generation immigrant families now had the money to move out, while at the same time many of the older cities began a long downward slide into decay. So migration to the suburbs was a logical move for many.

City living can be great if you have the means to insulate yourself from its harsher, seamier, and more dangerous side, but if you are a member of the lower-middle class, cities can be rather unpleasant places to live.

Thank you Glenn for this research. One of the things it makes apparent is that smaller, dense population areas have an inherantly easier time making daily life walkable.

There is an assumption in many PO discussions I have read on the web that
civilization will fall apart without high levels of personal transportation and machinery driven agriculture. Yet the obvious long term solution to this will NOT be plug in hybrids, but rather the ELIMINATION OF CARS. So it may be that a gradual shift away from Suburbia and the car may be exactly what is needed to offset most if not all of the expected negative effects predicted for the western worlds standard of living, often assumed within a declining energy environment. Mitigating these negatives may be far easier than most people have considered. I am reading a remarkable book. How to Build a Village, ISBN 978-0-473-12188-4. I like it because it is very upbeat on the Post Peak outlook.

Doom and Gloom scenarios are mostly based on the obvious concern
that business as usual will not be sustainable and that there is no
substitute. But who says we need business as usual? Maybe there is a better
way to live that also addresses the need for a low energy, low carbon living
arrangement. There is! The Village http://villageforum.com. It simply
requires us to change the places we live. Sound impossible? I think it very
possible. Naturally, this is a major shift in economic activity, and may
cause some temporary financial pain to the middle class like myself who have bought into suburban and city property, but the severity or mildness will be dependent in large part on how such a move is supported by local government, not big government. To summarize, a Village is 100 to 400 acres of high density mixed use living and working space (no more than 4-5 story buildings) for between 5000 and 10000 people. The closer to total passive heating/cooling the building structures are, the better. Cars are outright banned. No Cars at all! The physical layout of a village is such that you can walk to any place in the village in less than 10 minutes. Ideally, each village should be surrounded by at least an acre of farmland for each of it's inhabitants to minimize food transportation. Even better if there is additional
'natural' open space around as well. Villages can be inter-connected by
shared public transportation modes. At this density, villages would be only
about 8 miles apart, so even a walk or bike ride between villages would be
reasonable. But the point is that with proper village design, it can be
largely self sufficient, and only needs a little electricity to maintain
'high tech' status. The automobile may define current Western Culture, but
it does not define a modern technical society, electricity does. While the
space inside the village could be considered at least medium density, the
overall density is of course a much lower than most current metropolitan
areas, because a village space includes zoning control of the surrounding
farmland, and must be strictly maintained for that purpose. But the whole
point is that our current city designs are not sustainable. Villages would
be. Private automobiles would no longer be necessary. Even the majority of
long distance freight would be avoided because Villages can be designed for a localized economy.

Another tool in our adaptation toolkit would be the abandonment of most of our current mono-cropping agriculture, to be replaced with Edible Forest Gardening http://www.edibleforestgardens.com/. Edible Forests may not have as high a per acre yield for a particular crop as does modern 'green revolution' techniques, but there are indications that the 'overall' useful products yield may actually be higher in an Edible Forest, so we may not need any more arable land than is currently in cultivation even without chemicals and mechanization. This could keep most of our current population from hunger as the green revolution gradually fails, providing you can still distribute the food to where it is needed, and offer a 'soft landing' for population decline. This would also involve more of the population with direct food production, rebuild soil fertility, and go a long way towards re-establishing ecological diversity within human engineered space. If a Village promotes and encourages Forest Gardening in its surrounding agricultural support lands, some portion of the population would undoubtedly also live within the Edible Forest to own and manage it. From my own experimentations with it, I would judge that you might see a farm house for every three to ten acres.

It appears to me that rebuilding our lives around villages is certainly
doable, given that there are plenty of example of villages in old Europe
that where built long before the use of oil for energy As you imply in your article. These old world villages have survived in their current forms for up to a thousand years. I would call that a reasonable definition of sustainable. In fact, many of them are now tourist destinations because they are feel good places to be. Better yet, you don't need massive steel industries to build them. Hand labor and tools, local materials, and a little skill are the minimum
required. Some kind of incentive program or property swap function, along
with changes in zoning laws could help move people into villages and return
suburban land to productive farming, but not necessary. People will likely
choose to live in villages if they have a choice, once energy decline starts
and they see the obvious benefits. Of course, we will actually need a
Village or two as living examples here in the U.S. before 'suburbanites'
start to get the big picture. This de-suburbanization will become especially
important as time passes, as some of the most productive soils in the world
are currently buried under concrete and asphalt. The idea of villages might
be a hard sell to established powers. Most people don't like change. They
even become accustomed to things that hurt. People that resist the changes
to come may loose their savings, or their personal belongings, but as long
as they can eat, life will go on. What will we make of this spare labor when
the 'service economy' dries up? The beauty of Villages is that you don't
need anyones approval for them, outside of local county zoning, and anyone
with the money for land can start the process of building one. We just need
to rethink how we want to live. Sure, it will take a lot of money and effort, but my basic point is that there are plenty of people out there that do have the money if they so choose, otherwise we would not see new sprawling housing developments replacing our farms en mass. While it would be foolish to think we could rebuild a nation overnight, trends can be started from small roots. The entire "Village" does not have to be completed overnight either, but the plan needs to be complete before starting, even if you fill it out gradually. Given the premise of tight mixed use in a Village, the plan could easily be modular for building in stages. But a thorough plan is the most likely way to avoid "Unintended Consequences" in the words of Mark E. Eberhart, author of Why Things Break. The world is currently suffering from numerous unintended consequences, but most notably the start of severe climate change, soon to be superseded by Peak Oil. However, one or two successful examples of a better way to live could have a profound effect on a nation's collective psyche. So laying down in the ring before the first punch is thrown is not the answer I would propose. Claude Lewenz is trying to bring people together to manifest an idea (http://www.villageforum.com/). An organized group of people can accomplish things that an individual's lifespan will not accommodate. The first step in any manifestation is spreading the idea, which is probably the strongest force humans can wield. So the more people that know of the idea, the more likely it will eventually come to be. The world currently full to the brim with bad ideas. It would be nice to have a little positive balance. Personally, the thought of a life that does
not require a car at all, and is a walk away from where my food is grown,
sounds ideal. Why can't we build a place that we would actually LIKE living
in? I estimate that it would only take three or four years to have some
Villages up and running if we really want it. All it would really take is a
sufficient number of investors to have the common goal. It certainly would
be no more challenging than building yet another suburban sprawl
sub-division. Then people all over would say, "Gee, they have it good. We
can do that too!"

The numbers for Avalon, California really have me confused. I've only been to Catalina once but it wasn't hard to see that the city is tiny and there really isn't anywhere to drive to. The number of cars on the island is fixed and there is a long waiting list to be allowed to import a car.

I'm not really sure what most of the people on the island even do for a living. There is the tourist trade and a few shops that cater to locals but that's about it for most of the population. Perhaps they don't walk to work because either they don't work, work remotely, or take the boat to the mainland.

Whatever the case may be, it seems silly to move to some place like Avalon and maintain an automobile unless you're one of the few who ranches on the island or works for the local government. Hard to believe that could account for almost 50% of the population that makes up the not walking to work population. Maybe they all bike (though the city is quite hilly) or hitch a ride on the tourist tram.

I would encourage you to examine the percentage of non-car commutes, in lieu of only pedestrian. I can understand why the college campuses, military bases, and the like had such high pedestrian percentages, but that's because people could reliably live right next to their destination. These days, many jobs are so mobile that one often doesn't know if they will be at the same site location or even same employer 2 or 3 years down the line. In larger population centers (not so frequently mixed use), finding work within walking distance is tricky at best, even without considering the job change factor.

So I believe biking, vanpooling, buses, and subways/trams are legitimate substitutes for single occupant car travel, especially in larger population centers.

I read somewhere be darn if I can remember. Pedalling a bicycle uses more energy than it is worth. Apparently the body is not that good at converting energy. If you count all of the fertilizer necessary to provide the food, I wonder if we are saving anything.

Montgomery County MD support TOD in new Zoning Rules

"The key development issue is getting more housing near Metro," he said. "If you build residential development in close, walking distance to Metro, people are going to use it."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/18/AR200711...

Best Hopes for TOD,

Alan

Something I haven't seen addressed here: the fact that some local governments actually discourage walkable mixed use neighborhoods by the use of building and/or zoning restrictions. Where I live now there are no longer residents in any of the apartments that still exist above the stores downtown, they've been zoned right out of their homes except for a few that got grandfathered in. The only places legally livable are areas zoned "R". As far as I can find there isn't any local zoning that allows mixed use other than business/commercial/industrial. With residential areas effectively segregated from businesses by major highways, there simply is no way to walk from one to the other except on a few isolated places. I wonder just how much this pattern has been repeated across the country ?

One thing you left out - the weather.

I've lived in Ithaca and in Seattle; I've visited Pullman WA and New York City many times and always enjoyed walking in them because - *the weather was never too hot*.

In contrast I've tried walking in Chicago, in Houston, in Los Angeles, and by the time I've gone a couple of miles (in summer time in Chicago) I'm drenched in sweat. Those cities aren't laid out for walking, that's true, but the weather also makes it almost impossible even if you try.

Extreme cold is no barrier. I've walked in Ithaca in winter storms where the steep hills were coated in ice; you just have to dress warmly and wear proper boots and you're fine. But there's no solution to heat that you can take with you on a walk.

And that's, incidentally, why Bjorn Lomborg is so wrong about the relative impacts of heat and cold in the future, when he's claiming heat will be great for us. It'll certainly cut back on walking!

Hi, I live in Wilmington, NC, a car-dependent future disaster in the making. I own a Bikes-At-Work trailer. This thing rocks. I've carried over 300lbs on it and taken it off-road on trails. I can carry a lot of groceries and I have used it for grocery shopping, until being run off the road by rednecks and then blocked when they built a new bypass and put a guardrail along it that cuts off my route. When I did park it at the grocery store, I got looks from people like I was from another planet, and those sort of pity looks like they're thinking I lost my license to a dui or something. I want to smash their faces. But I don't, because I'll be having the last laugh as they put one bag of groceries in their humongous SUVs and drive off - one occupant per vehicle.

Glenn, you asked what kind of walking towns we want. Here's what I would like:
Walking towns with wide bike lanes that safely guide me across intersections. And I would like the city governments to stop actively discouraging cyclists. I just found out last week that my daily commute in LA county is actually illegal: I go through the city of San Marino, which requires cyclists to PURCHASE a LICENSE if they use public city streets/sidewalks! No joke (There is some more about this on my blog: ecomorons.org).

As far as the discussion about shelter from rain goes: There is some (but only some) truth in what the Germans say: "There is no bad weather. Just bad clothing."