Notes on Jeff Speck's - Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time

Jeff Speck's paean to walkable, bike-able cities makes me want to plan a city. The only place they allow someone like me to plan cities is Minecraft and I don't even have the patience of my tween who is the resident Minecraft architect-planner. Therefore the easiest way to pay respect to the author and try out his ideas is to walk downtown, which I try to do a few times a week. 

Walkable City is full of interesting facts and statistics. Did you know that car crashes have killed 327 million Americans (up to this point in time), that is more than all our wars combined and is the leading cause of death for Americans between the ages of 1 and 34? 

Speck also says pollution is not what it used to be, American smog now comes principally from tailpipes not factories. Asthma related hospitalization reduced by a full 30% during the '96 Olympic games in Atlanta as more residents started walking and took public transit to downtown because of the impossibility of motoring around downtown during the Games.

As any walking enthusiast would have found out from his/her first few walking outing in American downtowns, block sizes affect walkability. Quoting verbatim from the book, "generally speaking the cities with the smallest blocks are the ones best known for walkability, ones with the largest blocks are places without street life. The pre-industrial neighborhoods of downtown Boston and Lower Manhattan like their European counterparts have blocks that averaged less than 200 feet long. Philadelphia's and San Francisco's blocks averaged less than 400 feet in length. And then there a pedestrian free cities like Irvine, California where many blocks are 1000 feet long."

I remember walking infinite blocks that seemed to extend forever flanking wide 3-4 lane roads in Anaheim, California with four kids in tow because I had a booked a hotel a "couple of blocks" away from the Disneyland entrance. Since it was only 2-3 blocks I was also trying to save money by not renting a car or using a rideshare app. Before this I had only driven in southern California, had never walked. That trip made me realize that southern California's cities and suburbs are one of the unfriendliest urban areas for walking.

The book provides an insight to how the human form and our physical limits affects urban planning, if urban planners would take heed. For example, we walk just under 3 mph hour in warm weather and around 2 mph in cold weather. We bow our heads 10 degrees while walking and we can see a person's movement at 100 yards and recognized and hear them at about 50. If we want to make our cities walkable, they should reflect our physical capabilities and limitations. We should design our public streets and squares smaller. Some of America's most famous public  squares like New York's Rockefeller Center, San Francisco's Ghirardelli Square and  San Antonio's Riverwalk are small - only very few are much broader than  60 yards across.

Instead what many of the 'unwalkable' US downtowns have is what is called the missing teeth phenomenon  - where every block of construction is surrounded by three blocks of empty lots or parking  thus rendering otherwise promising pedestrian environments uninviting. 

Speck also warns that smaller cities need to be aware that some big city practices are not made for them,  like the Barnes Dance intersection in big cities where all the pedestrians wait for a full cycle for all  the cars to stop and then are briefly given free reign over the entire intersection including diagonally. In smaller cities this would mean that the pedestrians will have to wait an inordinate amount of time before they get a chance to cross or there are no pedestrians to cross and traffic just idles unnecessarily, during hours of low volume foot traffic.

Speck points out that the planning of streets is as important block-sizes when it comes to walkability. No one prefers walking on the side of 4 lane road where vehicles are hurtling past at 60 mph. Increase in lane sizes result in approximately nine hundred additional traffic fatalities yearly (I forgot the get the reference for this from the book.) He says that increasing lane sizes in the name of safety (for motorists) is like distributing handguns to deter crime.

This is because humans always adjust their behavior to accommodate changes in risk patterns. The behavior is called risk homeostasis or risk compensation - becoming more careful where we sense greater risk and less careful if we feel more protected (wikipedia) It explains why poisoning deaths went up after child proof caps were introduced and people stopped hiding their medicines.

The best risk homeostasis report comes from Sweden a nation obsessed with traffic safety. In a single year in 1967 traffic fatalities dropped 17%. It turns out that March 9th 1967 Sweden switch driving on the left hand side of the road to drive right hand side of the road. Therefore Speck argues that the safest roads for both pedestrian and the motorists are those that feel the least safe demanding more attention from their drivers.

I was reading that while Walkable City pointed out the problems in U.S downtowns it didn't offer any real world solutions. So Jeff Speck came out with a follow up - a resource book of steps or rules to follow to make better urban places for people called Walkable City Rules : 101 Steps to Making Better Places. Maybe I will check that out next.