How to get America to walk

[dolanbaker]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-17107653

US cities built in the 20th Century have long catered for a population that prefers to take the car to shop, dine and work. But an ageing population and a young professional workforce looking for an urban lifestyle have forced city planners to reconsider the existing road and pavement infrastructure.

But how do you remake a city into a pedestrian dream, and how do you re-educate the public about its transportation choices?

The BBC's Franz Strasser went to Raleigh, North Carolina, where an unsanctioned street sign campaign called Walk Raleigh caught the attention of city officials and pedestrians alike.

Build footpaths and place signs for walkers.

[Beery1]

The sad fact is that the vast majority of Americans don't want to walk. Sure, they say they do. They also say they want to be fit, yet 2/3rds of them are overweight or obese. You can make as many sidewalks and place signs you want - they've done the equivalent of that for cyclists, yet cycling hasn't grown.

Americans are lazy slobs. Changing that will take decades, and it will be driven by economics, not sidewalks and signs.

[Roy]

Let the Israel-firsters goad the US into attacking Iran in a first strike. '

Then more people will be walking due to either their inability to afford gasoline, or the 'bags over the pumps' syndrome, as seen in the US in 2005 and 2008, after hurricanes hit the GOM region, and put a minor crimp in our oil production and our ability to import sufficient quantities of oil.

Take 2MBPD+ off the world market right now and watch what happens.

[bratticus]

We are very busy building walkable communities, just look at some of our accomplishments:

The Eyesore of the Month
Kunstler / November 2011

Take a honkin' good look at this crosswalk in Reading, Pennsylvania (North 5th Street Highway and South Temple Boulevard). Now just imagine the engineering effort that went into its design, with all the components – the retaining wall, the fence, the berm, the drainage, the street striping, the handicapped grading, the textured paving blocks.... Now imagine the politiical process – the design review, the code enforcement review, the DOT sign-off, the planning and zoning board approval. Okay, now tell me how the fuck could any civilized people arrive at such an outcome, not to mention laying out the money to pay for this exercise in idiocy? Here is further proof that the Law of Perverse Outcomes rules: People get what they deserve, not what they expect.

Another corner (below) of what is a four way intersection with eight corners.

Thanks to Michael Velik for sending this in!

When I saw that I was so incredulous that I had to go look it up on Google Streetview.
It is at these coordinates:
40.3969082879306 -75.9274747862339

http://g.co/maps/qrqrt

When you click on that link and the large image appears you can drag it around to change the camera view.

Notably the two "corners to noplace" are on the mall entrance side of the street, the other side of the street is more typical.

[Mesuge]

It goes way back than to 20th century (contrary to BBC story), apart from the very early pioneers for each given place of settlement boundary, the americans never much walked at all afterwards! That's the key 'missing' issue, the whole paradigm, why people left Europe in the first place: yep freedom of faith/religion, but also freedom to much higher personal consumption and resource exploitation, keeping large personal bubble, horses, cariagges, trains, streetcars, cars, airplanes.. etc.

Simply the ratio of school children and workers at any given point in time doing actual walking (and per range walked) was always less for the NA.
Large chunk of Europeans have no prob even today walk 5-10km daily (sun or snow), well guess what, because couple generations back, most of their ancestors naturaly did just that in order to get to and back from work/school/church and other activities.

It's like pushing the genie back into the bottle, can't fit.
To reverse the trend or we could say counter the 'over-specialization' of U.S. inhabitants has not been desirable, and is not likely possible now, only few exceptions to that rule apply, those various hipster 'new urbanism' city center revitalization projects here and there..

Is it possible to 'unlearn' such disease?, definately possible, but certainly not in the time frame of years or few decades..

[AgentR11]

Everytime I see the term "walkable" used; I know they mean well, but the results very much look like: I'm going to design something for other people to walk on while I watch them from the comfort of my BMW. The above pictures are just that, they look nifty as you drive by them and never have to contemplate using them for yourself.

Honestly, I don't think there is an improvement over the plain ole modest town's wide main drag and network of haphazardly connected residential streets. That's just how people get around when left to their own devices. eg Büdingen, Germany No great planning, no amazing, earth shattering design epiphany; just people doing what they do.

[Serial_Worrier]

Funny people in Manhattan walk a ton.

[AgentR11]

Funny people in Manhattan walk a ton.

Right, but its not a "special" area of walkability bliss; its just regular streets and regular sidewalks going everywhere.

[Plantagenet]

When US energy prices reach the same level as energy prices in Europe

and

When the US infrastructure is upgraded so we have high intercity trains and light rail commuter systems into cities just like they do in Europe

then

Americans will take the train and use mass transit for commuting and then walk to work and walk to do their shopping just like Europeans do.

[Pops]

I don't think the answer is sidewalks or high gas prices or signs. The answer is high density, mixed use zoning, the guy at the end of the piece shows it on his monitor. You need to have somewhere to walk to and it doesn't matter how nice the sidewalks are, a trek across a 40 acre blacktop parking lot in summer is enough to make you drive.

You are never going to make those 'burbs and strip malls into Manhattan and it doesn't have anything to do with streets on a grid as opposed to the windy, cul de sac-y 'burb plan. Homeowners have big investments into those single family detached houses with the little lawn and they go crazy when "developers" want to re-zone to multi-family use anywhere near their nestegg. Who can blame them, no one wants "apartments" near their American Dream.

The other thing is that land is cheap because we have a lot of it. Sprawl is encouraged because bigger is better in all things and leapfrog development is the norm. Anyone here old enough to remember "urban renewal"? We tore down thousands of exactly those mixed use neighborhoods in the 50's and 60s so we could build expressways (the joke's in the name) to the 'burbs.

[JohnRM]

We are very busy building walkable communities, just look at some of our accomplishments:

The Eyesore of the Month
Kunstler / November 2011

Take a honkin' good look at this crosswalk in Reading, Pennsylvania (North 5th Street Highway and South Temple Boulevard). Now just imagine the engineering effort that went into its design, with all the components – the retaining wall, the fence, the berm, the drainage, the street striping, the handicapped grading, the textured paving blocks.... Now imagine the politiical process – the design review, the code enforcement review, the DOT sign-off, the planning and zoning board approval. Okay, now tell me how the fuck could any civilized people arrive at such an outcome, not to mention laying out the money to pay for this exercise in idiocy? Here is further proof that the Law of Perverse Outcomes rules: People get what they deserve, not what they expect.

Another corner (below) of what is a four way intersection with eight corners.

Thanks to Michael Velik for sending this in!

When I saw that I was so incredulous that I had to go look it up on Google Streetview.
It is at these coordinates:
40.3969082879306 -75.9274747862339

http://g.co/maps/qrqrt

When you click on that link and the large image appears you can drag it around to change the camera view.

Notably the two "corners to noplace" are on the mall entrance side of the street, the other side of the street is more typical.

Rofl. That's my hometown. I know exactly where that is at.

[Loki]

How to get America to walk?

Put a Twinkie on a stick held just out of reach?

I walked my butt off when I lived in Portland. It's all about density, lots of people packed into a small space. Walkable, yes, but too crowded for my tastes. Lots of people love that kind of “urban energy,” though. I'd rather live in downtown Portland than the gawdawful part of Houston my mother lived in briefly, strip malls and billboards as far as the eye could see, but not a sidewalk in sight. Bleak.

Not sure how to make my part of rural Oregon more walkable. I'd be happy if there was a bridge across the creek that separates the farm from the village. Be easier to stumble home from the pub.

Bratticus, wow. How on earth does something so profoundly stupid happen?

[pstarr]

Kunstler. Eyesore of the Month. He' made nice living of documenting the current stupidity of the this once-great country. His tagline; suburbia is the "the greatest misallocation of resources the world has ever known."

[The Practician]

it doesn't matter how nice the sidewalks are, a trek across a 40 acre blacktop parking lot in summer is enough to make you drive.

So True. I probably walk a bit more though suburban wasteland than most people here, and, belive me, it is a bummer.

[careinke]

My son, who is a cement mason, makes a pretty good living building those things. A lot of his work is re-doing handicap access at sidewalk corners, and making traffic circles (The latest rage in Western Washington).

A lot of the stuff gets done twice. The engineers give him the specs and he builds it. A number of times he has told them that it was not going to work. But he is not allowed to argue, if they say go ahead and build to speck after being warned, he does it. Then he gets to fix it after they see it does not work.

He just did a fix in Bremerton (not his original work) where the genius engineer decided a traffic circle could be in a teardrop shape. Not a lot of happy truckers with that decision.

[AgentR11]

a trek across a 40 acre blacktop parking lot in summer is enough to make you drive.

hehe, one of my dirty little secrets about cycling; even when the parking lot is near full, and the nearest spot is like a half mile away; I park within a few yards of the doorway. I almost felt guilty during Christmas shopping season... almost.

You are of course right though, that a lot of what we've designed and built serves as a physical prohibition against walking. Smaller towns, at least in Texas, are less difficult to get around by walking than one might imagine, but 300+ million people can't all live in small towns.

[Beery1]

We are very busy building walkable communities, just look at some of our accomplishments:

The Eyesore of the Month
Kunstler / November 2011
.

And the interesting thing I've discovered, from my years as a cycling advocate, is that abortions like this, whether they're installed for pedestrians or cyclists, receive virtually no criticism from those who are expected to use them. The standard attitude is "Well at least they're doing something" and "Yeah, this one's not optimal, but it's better than nothing". But no - it's not 'better than nothing'. Nothing would be better, because money doesn't get wasted on 'nothing'.

But when you criticize stuff like this, you get attacked for being 'anti-cyclist' or 'anti-pedestrian', because you don't mindlessly and slavishly fawn over even the incompetent and dangerous infrastructure the shaved monkeys the government hires as transportation engineers design.

[dinopello]

The picture above makes no sense. There is no sidewalk on the other side and no access to the building shown so why have a crossing designed like this ? Rightfully critiqued.

Our county has slowly been rebuilding its transportation infrastructure to mostly repair what had been done in the 50's-80's. Mostly narrrowing lanes and crossing distances, adding crosswalks and bike lanes (always an argument between bikers whether bike lanes are good or bad) and a real controversial one is the removal of slip-lanes or free right turns. This tends to get the car people worked up. They always say that requiring cars to slow down to make a right turn will lead to all these rear-end collisions and/or frustrate drivers so that they purposfully drive in a dangerous manner.

A recent slip-lane debate.

Most of the streets here are already 25 MPH so mostly as far as cars, it is about designing the infratructure to support the speed limit (which is the opposite of the way conventional traffic engineers were trained to think).

[Beery1]

The picture above makes no sense. There is no sidewalk on the other side and no access to the building shown so why have a crossing designed like this ?

I think it's supposed to be a deconstructivist scenic rest area. The pedestrian crosses the street here and rests in the protected alcove while viewing the building ahead, whose inaccessibility is reinforced by the concrete wall and the railing, which is also out of reach. In order to move beyond the artist's vision, the viewer's only option is to go back across the road. It is a work of postmodernist genius, in which the artist denies the viewer any sense of fulfillment of his vision or of the viewer's aspiration to transcend the artwork.