Pedestrian Friendly
| Tue Sep. 9, 2008 4:45 PM PDT
PEDESTRIAN FRIENDLY....Atrios has a couple of links today to (a) a new suburban development somewhere in Indiana and (b) his own Philadelphia neighborhood. The Indiana burb was chosen specifically because it was fairly extreme in the sense of being completely isolated and therefore 100% car-centric, about which he says:
Suburban development is inevitably going to be automobile-centric....However, being automobile-centric and being designed in a way which almost entirely excludes the potential for other modes transportation are very different things. The car and the light rail can coexist. Sidewalks can run to areas with retail. One could even allow a corner store and a pub within a residential neighborhood! Maybe, just maybe, there can be small corridors of street level retail without giant parking lots, small town style. Places like this do exist, mostly but not just in older suburbs.
Developo-blogging is pretty far outside my wheelhouse, but I want to wade into this momentarily. Not because I have any huge point to make, but just to provide an illustration of how hard it can be to create genuinely non-car-centric spaces outside of small towns and urban cores.
I live in a subdivision of Irvine, California, called Woodbridge. It's actually fairly famous as one of the original master planned communities of the 60s, and believe you me, it's master planned to within an inch of its life. This has its drawbacks (lots and lots of beige houses), but there are also benefits. The main one is that it really was planned as an integrated community of sorts.
To get an idea of what I mean, here's a Google Earth picture of Woodbridge. It's the piece inside the yellow oval loop plus the strip just outside it, and the total population is about 30,000. There are houses and apartments on the north and south, with the central section reserved mostly for shopping, churches, schools, medical offices, parks, and so forth. There are sidewalks everywhere, of course, and also bike lanes.
The central section is actually pretty handy. There are six separate areas designed for shopping (outlined in red), and those areas include four supermarkets, a couple dozen restaurants, three department stores (though one is shutting down), a bookstore, two movie theaters, two drugstores (with one more about to open), several banks, a hardware store, two Blockbusters, and lots of other miscellaneous shops. Every single one of these places is safe, easily accessible, brightly lit, and a maximum of 1.5 miles from every single point within Woodbridge. Short of being downtown, this is about as walkable as it gets.
And walk it I do. All the time. (This isn't out of environmental altruism, it's because I shop for food daily as a way of forcing myself to get out of the house and get some minimal exercise.) And here's the thing: aside from occasional dog walkers, I have the place to myself. Despite the fact that it's about as pedestrian friendly as a suburb can be, nobody walks anywhere. They don't bike either — the only cyclists I see are biking for exercise. Woodbridge is, as near as I can tell, about 99.9% car-centric despite having a design that's about as pedestrian friendly as you'll find in a suburb.
Like I said, I don't have any big axe to grind here — except to say that as important as pedestrian-friendly design is, it's also possible to overstate that importance. Something more has to happen to reduce our dependence on cars. Maybe the price of gas just needs to double a couple more times. Maybe better mass transit is the key. Maybe something else. But here in Woodbridge, anyway, we built it and they did not come. Not on foot, anyway.
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Submitted by Conor Friedersdorf (not verified) on Wed Sep. 10, 2008 11:08 PM PDT.
If I might establish my credentials for a moment, I grew up in Southern California not far from Irvine, a place I've spent a ton of time. As an 18 year old I wouldn't have ever walked a mile to get to a supermarket. The car-centric culture of California came as second nature, so much so that although I'd routinely cycle for 30 or 40 miles recreationally, I'd never have thought to ride my bike to the supermarket.
I've since lived in a number of walkable cities ? the three that come to mind are Seville, Paris and New York City. I loved walking in those cities. I'd walk an hour to get to a restaurant for lunch. I'd walk 90 minutes at night to get home from a bar. In between stints in these cities, I'd go back to Southern California, and although my hometown of Costa Mesa also has nearby strip malls, and wide sidewalks, and safe, well-lit streets, I didn't enjoy walking nearly as much, though I forced myself to do it. Why didn't I like it nearly as much? (Not for the reasons that Matt Yglesias thinks.)
I've teased out a few explanations.
1) It's boring to walk in suburbia! This is especially so in Irvine, where draconian zoning codes mean that every house, condo and apartment looks exactly like every other house, condo and apartment nearby, the strip malls all look basically alike, etc. Paris is pleasant to walk around partly because it is so damned beautiful. The architecture is beautiful. The street signs are beautiful. The landscape is beautiful if you're atop Monmarte or near the Seine. On a relatively short walk you can traverse adjacent neighborhoods whose aesthetic is distinct.
Seville is beautiful too, but it is a much less wealthy municipality than Paris. Far less is spent on aesthetics, but the buildings still have a lot of character. The streets are also deliciously, absurdly convoluted. There are curvy one lane streets, impossibly narrow alleys, weird diagonals, an old Jewish quarter where there are no cars allowed. Traversing all that in a 1.5 mile walk is far more exciting than walking on identical looking square blocks.
New York City isn't as beautiful as Paris or as quaint as Seville. In midtown it is downright ugly in parts. But even the ugliest neighborhood is so dense that there is a lot of liveliness on the street. The city keeps the senses entertained. No walk is a long, boring slog.
2) Short blocks are important to a walkable city. It's the difference between doing three sets of ten jumping jacks, or 30 jumping jacks ? the former is just less intimidating, even if irrationally. Blocks break things up. They give a sense of constant progress. They vary the landscape. They also create a grid, which is great because it allows the pedestrian to vary his route, going one way on the way to the market, another way on the trip home and a third way the next day. Any automobile commuter should be familiar with how tiresome it seems some days to drive that same route. It's the same way when you walk, but the people who planned communities like Woodbridge built long blocks, and "planned" the route people are supposed to take to get from their home to the store.
3) Parking lots are awful to walk through. It's just no fun to walk across a big piece of asphalt where cars rule. You either pick your way through parked cars, or walk around the perimeter feeling like you wish there was a shortcut. Neither option is very appealing, because the mind wishes for a better option that isn't afforded. Another way to understand this is to think about how in a large strip mall, anchored say by a supermarket at one end, and a Target a quarter of a mile away across a vast parking lot at the other end, shoppers will often move their cars rather than walk across the parking lot between shops? even though these very same people are perfectly comfortable and happy walking across an indoor mall between, say, Nordstrom and Macy's.
Merely having stores in Irvine that fronted on the street, so you walked right from the sidewalk into the door, and putting the parking below ground or in back of the shops, would result in more people finding it attractive to walk, though many wouldn't understand exactly why.
4) The streets are too wide in Irvine. As a pedestrian, you've got to wait forever to get a signal, the cars move so fast that it's difficult to run across against a signal like you often can in New York City on the smaller streets. Narrow streets also make things more lively by allowing you to interact with stuff on the other side of the street.
5) 1.5 miles is a bearable walk to a supermarket, but there is no reason why there couldn't be smaller shops even closer to home where you could pick up milk or a six pack of beer or toilet paper? except that cities like Irvine decided to completely segregate residences and even low impact businesses like corner stores.
If Irvine planners were trying to make Woodbridge an attractive community in which to walk they did a very poor job.
Submitted by Conor Friedersdorf (not verified) on Wed Sep. 10, 2008 11:08 PM PDT.
If I might establish my credentials for a moment, I grew up in Southern California not far from Irvine, a place I've spent a ton of time. As an 18 year old I wouldn't have ever walked a mile to get to a supermarket. The car-centric culture of California came as second nature, so much so that although I'd routinely cycle for 30 or 40 miles recreationally, I'd never have thought to ride my bike to the supermarket.
I've since lived in a number of walkable cities ? the three that come to mind are Seville, Paris and New York City. I loved walking in those cities. I'd walk an hour to get to a restaurant for lunch. I'd walk 90 minutes at night to get home from a bar. In between stints in these cities, I'd go back to Southern California, and although my hometown of Costa Mesa also has nearby strip malls, and wide sidewalks, and safe, well-lit streets, I didn't enjoy walking nearly as much, though I forced myself to do it. Why didn't I like it nearly as much? (Not for the reasons that Matt Yglesias thinks.)
I've teased out a few explanations.
1) It's boring to walk in suburbia! This is especially so in Irvine, where draconian zoning codes mean that every house, condo and apartment looks exactly like every other house, condo and apartment nearby, the strip malls all look basically alike, etc. Paris is pleasant to walk around partly because it is so damned beautiful. The architecture is beautiful. The street signs are beautiful. The landscape is beautiful if you're atop Monmarte or near the Seine. On a relatively short walk you can traverse adjacent neighborhoods whose aesthetic is distinct.
Seville is beautiful too, but it is a much less wealthy municipality than Paris. Far less is spent on aesthetics, but the buildings still have a lot of character. The streets are also deliciously, absurdly convoluted. There are curvy one lane streets, impossibly narrow alleys, weird diagonals, an old Jewish quarter where there are no cars allowed. Traversing all that in a 1.5 mile walk is far more exciting than walking on identical looking square blocks.
New York City isn't as beautiful as Paris or as quaint as Seville. In midtown it is downright ugly in parts. But even the ugliest neighborhood is so dense that there is a lot of liveliness on the street. The city keeps the senses entertained. No walk is a long, boring slog.
2) Short blocks are important to a walkable city. It's the difference between doing three sets of ten jumping jacks, or 30 jumping jacks ? the former is just less intimidating, even if irrationally. Blocks break things up. They give a sense of constant progress. They vary the landscape. They also create a grid, which is great because it allows the pedestrian to vary his route, going one way on the way to the market, another way on the trip home and a third way the next day. Any automobile commuter should be familiar with how tiresome it seems some days to drive that same route. It's the same way when you walk, but the people who planned communities like Woodbridge built long blocks, and "planned" the route people are supposed to take to get from their home to the store.
3) Parking lots are awful to walk through. It's just no fun to walk across a big piece of asphalt where cars rule. You either pick your way through parked cars, or walk around the perimeter feeling like you wish there was a shortcut. Neither option is very appealing, because the mind wishes for a better option that isn't afforded. Another way to understand this is to think about how in a large strip mall, anchored say by a supermarket at one end, and a Target a quarter of a mile away across a vast parking lot at the other end, shoppers will often move their cars rather than walk across the parking lot between shops? even though these very same people are perfectly comfortable and happy walking across an indoor mall between, say, Nordstrom and Macy's.
Merely having stores in Irvine that fronted on the street, so you walked right from the sidewalk into the door, and putting the parking below ground or in back of the shops, would result in more people finding it attractive to walk, though many wouldn't understand exactly why.
4) The streets are too wide in Irvine. As a pedestrian, you've got to wait forever to get a signal, the cars move so fast that it's difficult to run across against a signal like you often can in New York City on the smaller streets. Narrow streets also make things more lively by allowing you to interact with stuff on the other side of the street.
5) 1.5 miles is a bearable walk to a supermarket, but there is no reason why there couldn't be smaller shops even closer to home where you could pick up milk or a six pack of beer or toilet paper? except that cities like Irvine decided to completely segregate residences and even low impact businesses like corner stores.
If Irvine planners were trying to make Woodbridge an attractive community in which to walk they did a very poor job.
Submitted by Tom Hilton (not verified) on Tue Sep. 9, 2008 4:47 PM PDT.
...as important as pedestrian-friendly design is, it's also possible to overstate that importance. Something more has to happen to reduce our dependence on cars.
If it's not enough for a place to be pedestrian-friendly, then maybe it also needs to be automobile-unfriendly. I would guess that there's lots and lots of parking for all those shopping areas; get rid of the parking spaces, and you'll see a lot more people walk.
1.5 miles is a little far for most pedestrians and shopping. Check out the web site at walkscore.com to see how your location stacks up. It's a fun site. I did a quick check on one of the streets in your area and it scored as "somewhat walkable"
Submitted by Tom Hilton (not verified) on Tue Sep. 9, 2008 4:51 PM PDT.
Yup, I was right--zoom in on Google Maps and you'll see that those commercial areas have enormous parking lots. (Which not only reduces the hassle value of driving--it increases the unpleasantness of walking.)
Submitted by Legacy on Tue Sep. 9, 2008 4:54 PM PDT.
Dave: 1.5 miles is the maximum. For most residents going to most stores, walking distance is less than a mile.
Tom: Yes, of course there are lots of parking lots.
Remember: my point isn't that Woodbridge is a Platonic idea of suburban walkability. But in real life, this is about as good as it gets. And despite that, no one walks. No one.
I live in a 1920's-built neighborhood on the near west side of Madison, Wisconsin. Its striking feature is relatively large single family houses with smallish yards. This arrangment was essentially outlawed after World War II, and is only now being rediscovered. It is a whole lot more like a stereotypcial suburb than like Manhattan -- I would say a 2 or a 3 on a scale where Manhattan is 10. The main un-suburblike feature is the limited yards. But it is also highly walkable, and people do walk and bike to work and shopping. What this means I don't really know, but like Kevin's 'burb, it is a data point one doesn't hear much about.
To echo what Tom H. said, San Francisco's solution is to make parking as absolutely infuriating as possible. And it worked: we sold our car within 2-3 months of moving here, after racking up several hundred dollars in parking tickets.
Dave is right, though it is really a time issue. Few people have (or are willing to make) time for a 30-60 minute round trip walk (plus dwell time at the store). About 10 minutes each way is probably the max people are willing to tolerate ... and only if gas stays or gets more expensive.
Years ago when it was developing, I looked in Woodbridge. Didn't buy for a variety of reasons, but it was a nice environment. I think parts of Woodbridge were intended to be first homes for younger people. Maybe that's part of the problem. When you're young it's not cool to walk. That's for old people who have the time for such stuff. When you're young, you're in a hurry. God knows in my own distorted way, I was.
Submitted by Legacy on Tue Sep. 9, 2008 5:01 PM PDT.
PeakVT: I agree, and that's the problem. In a suburban environment of any kind, 10 minutes is just about impossible for all but a small percentage of the population. Maybe frequent shuttle buses are the answer in some places. Not sure.
Maybe Woodbridge gets too much snow.
I just came from New Haven, CT and the main reason I walked was because of excellent friendly neighborhood grocery and beer/wine retailers. These weren't shopping areas, but distributed retailers on a few main streets. Dense 1900 era multi-family development meant these guys could stay in business with pedestrians. And they had weird parking laws that made having a car a pain.
i live in uci's graduate housing, and the shopping centers around here, particularly on campus ave., have quite a few walkers. if you have time, kevin, (since i don't) i'd love to see a comparison between the design of woodbridge and the uci area. they are both master-planned by the same company, and a comparison could be instructive.
I think Tom H's point about the unpleasantness of walking in car-oriented places is really an issue. I also live in an older suburb (much of it built ca 1880-1920) off a commuter rail line. What makes it walkable is the small town feel of the neighborhood and the sense of scale and place, not just the availability of shopping etc. There's something to look at while you're walking around.
Ditto on New Haven: It is possible to go car-free there, as a single person or a couple. The key is having stores around the corner. The postwar American suburb was designed to separate domiciles from commerce, so dependence on cars became natural.
Once the kids come, however, the car is needed for all the activities.
I used to live in an area of Berkeley with a similar setup: it had decent walking and transit infrastructure, and was dense enough to support stores within a 30-minute--but not a 10-minute--walk.
But our sidewalks and bike lanes were well-used, which I'd attribute to our shops and our major employer (UC) having relatively little parking. A secondary effect may have been that Berkeley's streets are well-laid-out with a smattering of corner stores and smallish business districts here and there, making the area more urban-feeling and more interesting to walk around in. But I'm pretty certain that the big difference was the inconvenience of parking.
The unfortunate implication is that if we want to set a public policy goal of using less gas and getting more people to walk, we'll probably need to make driving less convenient. That, or wait for gas to get to $10. Good design may have prepared Woodbridge for such a future, but I'm not surprised that it didn't usher it in on its own.
Submitted by Gene Ha (not verified) on Tue Sep. 9, 2008 5:59 PM PDT.
I'm another fellow in an 1890-1920 suburb, this one outside Chicago. Small yards, shops nearby, lots of sidewalks. Decent amount of bike racks.
Most people still drive. Some walking. When I first moved here a year ago, I never saw another adult on a bike. This year I see it daily. It's livable either driving or mass-biking.
A well designed town has to be flexible. If people suddenly all start walking or biking (or using something we haven't imagined) it will still be livable. The McMansion bedroom communities without shops will be in trouble as gas prices creep up over the next decade. My town will do okay, and I expect more people to bike and property prices to recover well over the next ten years.
A. you cannot master plan out basic human laziness. Most people would rather park their immobile butts on the couch than walk to the store.
B. I've been to Woodbridge several times for their annual Spring Fair and always saw tons of people walking around the lake. The personality of a community makes a lot of difference too. If enough people start walking everywhere, others will follow....people are lemmings and they will do whatever "everyone else" is doing.
The extreme separation of residential areas and business areas is one of the stupidest ideas anyone has ever had. Period.
The Lake View neighborhood in Chicago is my example of something wonderful.
The streets that run north and south, such as Broadway, Clark, and Halstead, have businesses - restaurants, bookstores, coffeeshops, shoe stores, antique stores, etc. You name it.
The streets that run east and west have residences (and painfully beautiful ones at that.)
The sidewalks are always filled with people - but not crowded.
It's heavenly. To me, anyway (I don't live there, unfortunately!)
It's not about the non-car-ness of it (there is a good deal of traffic.)
It's the wonderful people-ness of it, and the astonishing variety of just plain experience that is all within walking distance.
Such pleasure. It's a neighborhood - the insipid suburbs lack this essential feeling.
Submitted by Jassalaca Jape (not verified) on Tue Sep. 9, 2008 6:05 PM PDT.
People are rational. In the community where I live, gasoline prices have been over $3.50 per gallon for oh, the past twenty years or so. They're now pushing $6. I see people walking and riding bicycles all the time.
When I go to the States, the vast amount of wasted space is always striking, but that's just what happens when you have all that surplus land and cheap energy.
Submitted by poliwog (not verified) on Tue Sep. 9, 2008 6:07 PM PDT.
Having shed SoCal and my car, I'll suggest that "pedestrian friendly design" entails much more than "walking distance to services".
As a remedy, I second B's remark about scattered retail lightly interspersed with residential. Are your choices limited to Exactly One cafe/grocer/whatever? (And therefore one likely route you repeatedly walk again and again?) Or do you have any real selection of destinations once you step out the door? How might Woodbridge feel if an equivalent retail belt bracketed its top and bottom?
College towns seem to finesse this mix fairly well -- and not just by stuffing students into high-rise dorms. Campuses like UCSB and San Diego State have plenty of standalone homes integrated with retail & services, both centralized & distributed.
Socrates: I agree that neighborhoods like Lakeview are wonderful, and I live in one much like it. But lots of people don't find it wonderful, and instead value the convenience and predictability of the suburbs.
And that's fine! It's a free country. Too often, we find ourselves pointing out how wonderful the urban lifestyle is compared to the "soul-crushing suburbs," and while I agree on a personal level, I don't think it's a compelling argument for changing our land use policies.
What I do find compelling, on the other hand, Atrios's point that neighborhoods like Lakeview are scarce and very expensive, indicating that there's an unmet demand for many more of them. If we made it easier to build urban or streetcar-suburban neighborhoods, more people could afford to live in them, and auto usage would drop accordingly.
Submitted by Christopher (not verified) on Tue Sep. 9, 2008 6:16 PM PDT.
There is an adage in planning and placemaking circles -- if you design for cars, you get cars. if you design for people, you get people. it's not enough to just have sidewalks. you have to have an element of density and mixed use. we live in a suburban country, but there is a big difference between the 1940s,50s,60s version of suburbia -- designed with wider streets, separation of uses, bigger lots and a scale that is easily readable by car (of course this development was originally pushed in the 1920s with the redevelopment of Wilshire -- the first car oriented shopping district -- although at the time it was seen as a little bit crazy).
Then there are the old suburbs, whether you are talking about Chicago or New York or inner neighborhoods of DC and Philadelphia and even places like Brooklyn -- these were designed as rail suburbs. with local transit that circulated people around to and from hubs, with express trains that took them the final distances. These towns were also walking friendly -- wide sidewalks, businesses facing the street -- to allow for short trips to be done on foot.
As the automobile was promoted by government and the auto industry -- streets got faster, sidewalks got smaller (which wouldn't have mattered much in the first place, streets were designed for people to walk in and get on an off trolleys and to move a little quicker than those using the sidewalks. Paved streets, of course, were actually built for bicyclists) Over time, the scale of the car and the speed of travel means in head to head competition -- the car always wins.
We need to take back our streets and neighborhoods from cars -- not just urban neighborhoods, but suburban ones too. Kevin's neighborhood might be a little bit more difficult, but what if all that subsidized parking was remove? Stores were brought to the edge of the streets, housing was added above the stores? there are new urbanists suburbs that are being built with exactly these kind of design standards, making them not unlike the early 20th century-era suburbs that I grew up in around Chicago.
Hey Kevin - I think what you see is pretty common. Nevertheless, it's important to keep in mind that buildings and neighborhoods have very long lives and shouldn't be built with the idea that nothing ever changes.
A classic example is the huge number of buildings with non-operable windows. When electricity is cheap that seems like a reasonable idea (at least to some people). But when that fact changes you are left with a whole lot of buildings that need to be retrofitted with new windows and, even then, the original design didn't take external air flow into consideration.
In addition, beyond whether or not people walk, local shopping, churches, schools, etc. means shorter drives. Collectively, communities of 30,000, such as yours, can save a lot of fuel and reduce pollution greatly by just being able to pick up the groceries in their own neighborhood.
If people could drive across town and easily park here in Manhattan, huge numbers of them would. But that's impossible. I think people generally choose to walk, even in a walkable area, only when the walk is less that about 10 minutes each way. Unless, that is, walking is easier than driving, as it is in most city centers; only in that case do you frequently get people walking more than 10 minutes.
That said, on the margin, it matters a lot what is along the way of your walk. A city filled with sights, or a path through a park, is a lot more appealing than a mile of sidewalk through suburbia, and probably increases by, say, 50%, the number of minutes people are willing to walk when they could easily drive.
Wow! Two Blockbusters! You SoCal folks really like your movies.
This ain't no country club, this ain't no disco either. This is L.A.
Actually, kudos to you for doing the walk, especially doing it regularly. I should walk more. I'm sure your doctor approves. And of course, besides the fuel savings, if everybody walked more, the health cost savings would be huge.
Please don't take this as a slur on people from the Indian subcontinent, but am I to assume Irvine has a low Indian population? Want to see some serious walking people, you have to look no further than that ethnicity.
Barring a few hyper dense and hyper chic and/or lefty communities, California is not know for its walking ethos - its just way, way too car centric, even for the US in general. I think this more than anything is the reason you're not seeing many folks walking in the area. Give it a few decades of higher and higher gas prices and you'll see an adjustment. Of course on the flip side, alternatives to gas driven cars might be wholly practical and cheap at that point - so it could be a wash.
I live in the East Village of NYC, which scores 100 on the walkability scale (no kidding) but I recently visited my brother and his wife in Seattle. Seattle is one of those cities which is making its way back to non-car-transit. My brother and his wife do everything by car (to the point where their 18-month-old baby won't get into her car seat because she wants to stand in the front seat and "drive" the car) but now the dynamic between us had changed. Before, I was the loser in dangerous New York without a car. Now they're talking about taking the bus and composting, and all of a sudden I'm not the complete weirdo for owning a NYC apartment instead of a car that I used to be. They haven't actually changed their behavior any, but their awareness of the world around them has definitely changed.
Let me add that other countries' suburbs can be a good model for an in-between accessibility. Britain's suburbs, for instance (e.g. the bedroom settlements around Glasgow) are clearly driven by car accessibility yet are also navigable with public transportation and a little patience.
Remember: my point isn't that Woodbridge is a Platonic idea of suburban walkability. But in real life, this is about as good as it gets. And despite that, no one walks. No one.
I think that living in Irvine (which I've done) can give you a pretty skewed idea of what's "as good as it gets." Irvine was heavily designed, yes, but it was designed with cars in mind. That's an important distinction; Orange County is, in general, far from "as good as it gets," walkability-wise. Other than the Inland Empire, it's got more sprawl than anywhere else I've seen (not that it's without its exceptions).
As a counterexample, I've also lived in Seabright, suburban neighborhood of Santa Cruz. In that area, it's pretty much impossible to live less than half a mile from some small commericial/dining area or other, and most people live within a quarter-mile or less. That, I think, is the sort of walking range Atrios was talking about (5 minutes or less)--and it's not that hard to achieve in suburbia as long as you use the small-town model rather than the giant community planned with cars model.
Kev -- Come visit me in Plymouth MN. My house is an easy walking distance to a grocery store, bakery, pub, liquor store, vet for companion animal, childcare, hardware bigbox, my bank, city hall, post office and schools. (oh, and the local library once they finish rebuilding it.) Yes, it's possible.
Submitted by Chris Brown (not verified) on Tue Sep. 9, 2008 7:52 PM PDT.
I have lived in Mexico for the last three years and one of the things I really like is that in practically every block there are shops selling fruits and vegetables, a mom and pop grocery, and a "cocina economicas" (small restaurants, often contained in the front room of a home, like trattorias). Every couple of blocks one may find a lavandaria, where folks take their laundry for cleaning.
Historically zoning, in most communities in the USA have segregated commercial and residential uses. Here where car ownership is not nearly as ubiquitous as in the USA, commercial uses are interspersed with residential uses.
Obviously I'm not sure how it really works, but looking at Google Earth gives one the impression that the reasonably short walk ends with crossing a zillion-lane road and walking all the way through a parking lot, at least in some cases. That's just...unpleasant. Like those shopping centers with huge parking lots and stores scattered around the edges. If you go to more than one store you either drive across the parking lot (which I just refuse to do) or you walk all the way through the parking lot, trying not to get hit. The actual distance is short, but it *looks* like a death march.
Planning, cars, etc.. yes yes yes. But people need more than bike lanes (which usually are done to keep bikes from slowing down cars, not for the benefit of bicyclists). How many of those businesses have bike racks? Ok, how many have them in front, instead of hidden in back? Not many! Because for some reason, people are willing to walk past a million cars to get into a store, but a bike rack is so... scary! I get a kick out of riding my bike into drive-through lanes for restaurants and banks and such: They insist they can't serve me because I'm not a car, I insist I can't come in because they have no parking for me! Bicycles, and pedestrians, are accommodated but only barely as we get in the way of traffic flow. So, change the timing on lights to give pedestrians priority. Take away a lane and give it to cyclists.
And I'm sorry folks: Here in Wisconsin I ride in all weather - down to zero in the winter and try some 90 degree humid days in the summer out for fun too. Riding was EASY in my California days, so no whining!
Despite the fact that it's about as pedestrian friendly as a suburb can be, nobody walks anywhere.
It's not pedestrian friendly at all. You walk alone because you are an outlier. People have already touched on all that's wrong with your "planned community" so I needn't repeat. I do suggest you acquaint yourself with some of the writings of urban design, and you'll figure out by yourself all that's wrong with your neighborhood.
I find it amusing and a little sad that Mr. Drum is being berated for walking, regardless of the walkability factor.
I also think he (and the commentors) are right that "about walkable as it gets" still, in many cases, isn't all that walkable.
I would encourage folks to do a cart and horse calculus. If more folks consciously walked like Kevin (or biked), things would gradually change. Absent that, not gonna happen, and folks like Kevin will be needled for walking in an obviously unwalkable area, or whatever.
More people ride transit, all of a sudden transit is important. More people walk, all of a sudden sidewalks, density, mixed use, etc. are important. It's funny that we Americans always seem to wait to be forced to make the choices that create the changes in infrastructure instead of deciding first that walking/biking/mixed use is desirable on its own, without high gas prices or, in many cases, impossible parking situations.
And as far as comments like peejay's go (11:52pm), if you love urbanism (I do), that's great. But to sneer at those who try to make surburban life a bit more less car intensive because it isn't urban is, well, a bit misplaced. Different folks will live different places for a variety of reasons, we all know that, yet we all feel free to assume our choices and locations are more ideal. Kind of odd way of looking at things, especially if reducing cars/traffic/sprawl/alienation is a goal.
In Vancouver BC (we live in the downtown west end) they charge big time for parking. Meters are at least a toonie ($2) per hour and parking lots are even higher. Lots of merchants charge for parking in their lots - though some take the parking charge off your bill. But the net effect is to discourage the use of cars. It's a walkable city for the most part, and the cost of parking helps in the decision to leave the car at home and walk for errands.
Submitted by miles (not verified) on Tue Sep. 9, 2008 10:03 PM PDT.
I live in the Atwater Village section of L.A. (just northwest of downtwon), one of the old suburbs of the city in the early part of the 20th century. We have a few main business-lined streets and they are all walkable and many of us do just that. It's really a matter of getting people to give up driving everywhere. It's a habbit and it can be broken.
I love Kevin partially because he does ineed live in Irvine --and I too lived there,for about 8 years. But before that I lived in Chicago, in the city, in neighborhoods like Bucktown, Logan Square etc.--mixed residential and retail (as someone above described the lovely Lakeview neighboorhood, yes that was my experience too). I walked everywhere in Chicago. I never owned a car when I lived there and I was happy, quite happy. I moved to Irvine for school and fell into total culture shock. I felt totally dehumanized by the environment as a walker--and within 6 months I got a car and began the long, slow procress of becoming a habitual driver --it was awful. Yes, technically, I could walk to all basic necessities as Kevin describes--but it was impossible to walk to a nice-non-Starbucks coffee shop . . . or go to a decent bar, like I used to be able to do in Chicago. Neither of those things exist within walking distance in Irvine--only a bunch of corporate chains. If you want to go to something non-corporate, well, you gotta drive out of the city altogether.
And then also the way the streets are designed and the giant parking lots . . everything about it is designed to discourage walking, psychologically and spatially (which makes sense if you realize Irvine was originally designed by people from Detroit, at least that's the rumor I heard).
One major pain I found in Irvine: getting to the train station or the main post office in the city. Maddeningly, these institutions, which you will find at the center of any normal, old city (like Chicago and even LA!) are purposely decentralized in Irvine. The bus trip I had to take from the UCI Campus to the train station was almost deliberately inconvenient, as if to discourage anyone but housecleaners from taking public transportation. I hope it's gotten better on that front since I left and gas prices rose, but I was just there last month, and not much seemed to have changed.
So, I would just say, there's more to the car-centricity of Irvine than basic walking distance. I admire Kevin for doing insistently walking -- he's a stronger man than I was when I lived there--but I can totally understand why everyone else there is driving. The entire environment virtually forces you to drive.
I would just add that the amount of shade, distance between walking path and vehicular traffic, and speed of adjacent traffic all make a real difference.
If you have to cross a mini-Sahara or walk next to I-95 for any length of time that can be a real disincentive.
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