Summary
Walkable City is a few books in one: it’s a brief history on how we got to the car-centric cities we have today, a compilation of anecdotes on cities’ approaches to transportation and how they do/don’t work, an academic look at city planning, and a tactical recommendation on how to make cities more livable and walkable. The book rests on the premise that walking is good - which I think few people would argue with - and promotes policies and tactics to make cities more walkable. As someone who never really appreciated cities until my adult life and never really thought about urban planning until living in a city, books like this have changed the way I experience cities both at home and abroad. The book rests on the premise that walking is good - which I think few people would argue with - and promotes policies and tactics to make cities more walkable. This book is filled with interesting insights that anyone interested in history, engineering, or politics would appreciate.
Fun fact, the author frequently references Boston, as he is based right outside Boston in Brookline.
Takeaways
What does walkability look like? Speck’s “General Theory of Walkability” is that for people to walk, walks must be 1) Useful, 2) Safe, 3) Comfortable, and 4) Interesting. He then outlines ten steps to creating a walkable city, trying each step to at least one of the four “walkability” criteria. Speck details a great deal of research and case studies in each step, a couple of which I highlight here.
Free parking isn’t free! He makes a lot of recommendations for how cities should approach parking. He’s very anti-free parking, as free parking essentially is a regressive tax in that it subsidizes individuals who can afford a car while socializing the cost to everyone. For context, parking subsidies in the early 2000s were estimated to be in the hundreds of billions of dollars annually. Speck pushes for a few changes to the parking landscape, including removing minimum parking requirements for buildings, eliminating free parking and letting the market decide the rates, and forbidding parking lots in front of buildings. Note the last recommendation is not to eliminate curbside parking but rather elimination of parking lots in front of buildings, as the lots make walking less interesting (by moving store windows away from the sidewalk) and less safe (by introducing more pedestrian/vehicle intersections), among other reasons.
Cities need more mixed-use zoning: he describes the historical reasons for Euclidean zoning, which is the typical single-use zoning that separates residential, commercial, industrial, and other uses. In the industrial era, Euclidean zoning was intended to separate people from industrial pollution. This type of zoning did improve people’s health, but it is terrible for walkability, since it makes it hard to walk from where you live, to where you work, to where you shop, as all the zones are dispersed. Since city planning and infrastructure can last for decades, modern cities, especially in the Rust Belt, still feel the impact of single-use zoning on walkability. Intuitively, mixed use zoning makes cities more walkable by making walks more useful, safer (since mixed use zoning means more people will be walking at all times of day rather than just specific times), and more interesting.
Comments