Steps to a Walkable City

As we try to reshape and remake our neighborhoods to be more human-scaled, walkable, and sustainable, there are specific and concrete things we can do to incrementally transform existing car-centric streets and neighborhoods into safer and more pleasant places that are conducive to commerce, civic engagement, health and happiness.

Jeff Speck, planner and author of Walkable City Rules, outlined 4 criteria that characterize walkable neighborhoods:

• There has to be a reason to walk – There have to be destinations worth going to
• It has to be safe – an atmosphere of civility, with other walkers and safe infrastructure
• It has to be comfortable, with shade, benches, and easy street crossings
• It has to be interesting, with a variety of shapes, colors, and intriguing places along the way

What works in one neighborhood may not be suitable in another, and the approaches taken to address safety and diversity of uses in one neighborhood may be unnecessary in a neighborhood that needs more consistent building form and better infrastructure.

• Allow a diversity of housing types: single family, duplex/triplex, low-rise apartments/condos; allow mid-rise and low-rise apartments/condos above and adjacent to commercial and service centers; simplify and streamline ADU development standards
• Decentralize schools
• Make it easy for businesses, services, and residences to concentrate in localized “nodes” so there are multiple destinations located within a 10 or 15 minute walk
• Use form-based rather than use-based codes

Ease of pedestrian and bicycle access

• Smaller blocks, or add pedestrian pass-throughs mid-block and at cul-de-sac ends
• Limit number of driveway crossings across sidewalks in areas of high pedestrian traffic
• Provide bike lanes, expecially to areas with higher concentration of destinations
• Prioritize pedestrian space and bike lanes; keep traffic lanes as narrow as practical
• Situate on-street parking on traffic side of bike lanes

Get parking right

• Decouple parking fees from rent/lease to incentivize reduced vehicle ownership and achieve lower parking demand
• Allow shared parking capacity between commercial (daytime peak) and residential (nighttime peak)
• Adjust parking fees to be reflective of actual costs
    + Price as close to actual costs as practical
    + Consider time-of-use pricing based on demand
• Adjust or eliminate parking requirements for new/renovated development
• Locate parking lots at rear of all new development to prioritize pedestrian, bicycle, and transit access and to eliminate need for pedestrians and cyclists to pass through parking lots
• Use on-street parking as a buffer between pedestrians, bikes & traffic

  Images below are before and after photos of Lancaster Boulevard Revitalization – courtesy Moule & Polyzoides

Increasing density with grace

The very idea of increased density triggers a lot of reactions from people rightly concerned that their neighborhood character might be overrun and local streets jammed with traffic. But what we are really talking about is appropriate scale of density. In order to have destinations worth walking to from almost any neighborhood, we have to have centers of activity. For those centers to be economically viable, there has to be sufficient density of population to be served. But what is sufficient density? It turns out that a one or two-block length of street with 2 or 3 story row houses with a few businesses tucked into first floor spaces is all it takes to give adjacent neighborhoods a reason to walk, because that much additional density enables a neighborhood to sustain a baseline of neighborhood shops and services. Having a school, clinic, or government service adjacent to such “village centers” enhances that further. As we move from more suburban to more urban neighborhoods, building heights might increase further in proportion to the scale of existing buildings and commercial activity, but by no means does increased density, done right, require 6-story buildings butting up against a neighborhood of predominantly single-family homes. Here are a handful of approaches to adding density to existing neighborhoods:

• Coordinate with transit development; concentrate higher-density development in locations with best transit access and mixed uses
• Allow highest densities adjacent to transit stops where transit has permanent or semi-permanent dedicated guideways (e.g. transit centers, BRT, rail, elevated transit)
• Make sure all major transit stops have mixed uses that include residential
• Minimum sidewalk widths based on building height and presence of businesses/services
• Parking should not front on transit routes; locate parking behind buildings
• Shared centralized parking and/or parking beneath residential space where needed
• Vary allowable building height based on lot depth
• Establish street height-to-width proportions
• Establish “daylight envelopes” to reduce shading of adjacent properties based on seasonal sun angles; vary maximum height between north and south edges of property and between properties with street frontage on north, east, west, south
• Share parking between commercial and residential occupants to limit total space dedicated to parking
• Do creative infill
  

  + Redevelopment that increases mixed uses and improves walkability
  + Replace surface parking with residential
  + Allow mixture of duplexes and triplexes along with single family dwellings
  + Facilitate ADUs and tiny houses
  + Where streets are excessively wide, dedicate portion of right-of-way to public space, affordable housing, and/or neighborhood services/commercial

Placemaking

• Uniform form-based standards for higher density “nodes”
• Creative use of surfaces, lighting, and props
• Define the nexus of pedestrian traffic
• Multiple destinations nearby
• Clear separation from traffic
• Interesting edges
• Permanent or temporary definition of space

Getting policies right to achieve walkability

• Designate “walkability zones” – street frontages intended for public interaction and commercial activity
• Determine pedestrian, bicycle and transit connections between zones; identify gaps and shortfalls and plan improvements accordingly
• Identify zones that need better balance of uses – is there enough residential for amount of commercial? How much employment potential in the zone?
• Improve street frontages: shallow or zero front setbacks, porches, windows/doors/varied facades, street trees, buffer between pedestrian area and vehicle traffic, limited vehicle crossings (garages in rear, parking lots outside main pedestrian zones)