Our built environment is killing us — sprawl contributes to obesity and cars are lethal. Despite all the politically charged crime narratives, car driving makes suburbs less safe than cities.
Urban planners can do something about it, and they know the solutions. But old habits die hard — of free parking and wide drivable streets. Change the narrative.
That’s from the influential 2012 book by urban planner Jeff Speck called “Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time.” The book was part of a wave of research and urban championing that empowered a new generation of policymakers, designers, planners and community leaders. I’ve long seen it referenced by other authors I read, and the publisher released a 10th anniversary issue, so I finally circled back and read this well-regarded read.
The reissue was mostly the original book, though it included a new preface and other updates, including pandemic references. I dug into the treacherous claims about safety and where we live, which are personal and messy — because we’re more often scared of sharks and burglars than car crashes and obesity, the far more prevalent threats to our well-being.
To pick up Speck’s claims: About 25,000 people were murdered in the United States last year, according to the CDC — and of course that’s not all in cities. Nearly 40,000 people die in cars each year, though that isn’t all in the suburbs either. More directly to Speck’s point, as many as 500,000 American deaths each year may be attributed to obesity-related causes, according to one respected analysis, which are far more prevalent among people who don’t do much walking. Altogether, Americans are dying in rural places faster than urban ones, according to a 2022 analysis.
Whatever the case, Speck contributed to a foundation of urbanist thinking a decade ago, and I dug into the work. Below I share my notes for future reference.
My notes:
- In 1969, half of kids walked or biked to school; Now 10% do
- Donald Shoup: make people pay to park
- Author’s General Theory of Walkability: Safe, Useful, Comfortable and Interesting
- Uber and Lyft didn’t reduce car ownership or miles driven
- For this 10th anniversary edition, Former Commissioner of the New York City Department of Transportation Janette Sadik-Khan writes in her introduction: “If you want to make a change in the world, change your streets.… You can’t simultaneously prevent and prepare for more traffic.”
- Jane Jacobs wrote her landmark work in 1960, convinced the planners by 1980 but not most city residents: Walkability is an end, a means and a measure
- Mayors institute on city design
- Anatole Broyard: “Rome was a poem pressed into service as a city”
- Cities get their fabric wrong by focusing on pedestrian facilities rather than walkability; like The 5 B’s of 1980s urban design Bricks, banners, bandstands, bollards and berms
- In her introduction Janette Sadik-Khan notes that Speck was too enthusiastic about millennials staying in cities, whereas many of them since aged into the suburbs
- Updated stats on driving by age: licenses declining or delayed?
- NORC: naturally occurring retirement community
- David Byrne: “If we can build a successful city for children, we can build a successful city for all people.”
- Joe Cortright walkability helps home values $500 to $3k per Walkscore point
- Urbanism has attracted young people (still true?)
- Geoffrey West and Luis Bettencourt research
- EPA the more miles a state drives the worse it performs economically. (Some variation overall though)
- From white flight to bright flight: an economic transition from forming an economic cluster first, to attracting people first ((my note: in the 1950s, did residents leave first or the businesses that employed them?))
- July 9, 2004: Frumkin et al’ influential paper “Urban Sprawl and Public Health” gave medical rigor to city planners arguing against sprawl
- Our built environment is killing us — obesity and cars
- Studying San Diego: residents of low walkable neighborhoods are fatter than others
- Traffic fatalities per 100k: Philly 7.4, NYC 3.1, USA is 14.5 in 2004
- Research that shows cars make suburbs less safe than cities
- Robert Putnam’s influential 2000 book Bowling Alone: commute time correlated with civic and social engagement
- Buettner’s Blue Zones: “move naturally” as part of your everyday, not necessarily running marathons
- In 2001, Scott Bernstein published an influential series of carbon map that swapped out “carbon per square mile” for “carbon per capita” to show cities reduce carbon impact
- Author argues that foreign oil makes Middle East rich but this was before fracking revolution: Would it really change his mind if that wealth had been domestic at that point? (My bet: No!)
- Lutz and Fernandez’s 2010 book Carjacked argues 10-25% of US military budget could be described as oil resource control
- Argues that lower cost hybrid and electric cars just result in people driving more ((My note: Jevon’s Paradox)
- “Electric vehicles are clearly the right answer to the wrong question.”
- In the book Green Metropolis, David Owen writes “the real problem with cars is not that they don’t get enough miles per gallon; it’s that they make it too easy for people to spread out, encouraging forms of development that are inherently, wasteful, and damaging… The critical energy drain in a typical American suburb is not the Hummer in the driveway; it’s everything else the Hummer makes possible – the oversized houses and irrigated yards, the network of new feeder roads and residential streets, the costly and inefficient outward expansion of the power grid, the duplicated stores and schools, the two-hour solo commutes.”
- “Gizmo green” when we add sustainable products to our lives without changing anything about those lives
- “This point was pounded home in a recent study, Location Efficiency and Building Type—Boiling It Down to BTUs,” that compared four factors: drivable versus walkable location; conventional construction versus green building; single-family versus multifamily housing; and conventional versus hybrid automobiles. The study made it clear that, while every factor counts, none counts nearly as much as walkability. Specifically, it showed how, in drivable locations, transportation energy use consistently tops household energy use, in some cases by more than 2.4 to 1. As a result, the most green home driving a Prius in neighborhood with sprawl still loses out to the least green home in a walkable one”
- David Owen calls this “LEED brain”
- Dan Malouff: “LEED architecture without good urban design is like cutting down the rainforest using hybrid powered bulldozers.”
- The environmental movement in United States as been anti-urban dating all the way back to Thomas Jefferson
- In The Economist, Ed Glaser wrote “we are a destructive species, and if you love nature, stay away from it. The best means of protecting the environment is to live in the heart of a city.”
- Banking on $200 per barrel oil (p 60), but it’s $85 to date
- In 1991 John Holtzclaw of the Sierra Club found the sharpest decrease in miles driven happened at the initial stage of making suburbs slightly denser, whereas urban getting more dense had diminishing returns. This can motivate us to get started
- Mercer’s annual survey of quality of life by cities: Urbanism predicts better living
- Author’s 10 walkability steps to make useful safe comfortable and interesting walks
- Patrick Condon paper: Highway spending and home prices track inversely in Canada and USA
- Washington DC fought highway funding enough to divert some of it to their metro rail
- Induced demand: traffic studies are bullshit, he argues, because the assumptions are games, the firms that do traffic studies also do the engineering and they ignore induced demand (widened driving attracts more driving)
- Congestion reduces fuel consumption because people drive less
- Traffic engineers and traffic planners have bad standards
- The NYC west side highway and San Francisco’s collapsed Embarcadero didn’t create traffic elsewhere; people just traveled less
- “Most cities need congestion to keep driving in check, because driving costs drivers so much less than it costs society”
- In 1798, Louise Philippe commented “Americans are in the habit of never walking if they can ride”
- Ivan Illich (1932-2002): the faster a society moves, the more it spreads out and so requires more time to meet it: “Beyond a certain speed, motorized vehicles create remoteness which they alone can shrink. They create distances for all and shrink them for only a few.”
- Inclusionary zoning and granny flats for affordable housing
- Donald Shoup on parking (in contrast, important Chapin’s Urban Land Use Planning never mentions parking)
- The book includes lots of lots of parking stats
- A third of traffic congestion in urban settings were people circling to find parking
- Need to price curbside and off street parking effectively
- Donald Shoup: price parking at a point that results in 85% occupancy of one spot in a block
- Author reference’s San Francisco congestion dynamic pricing: It was never fully implemented
- Old Pasadena vs Westwood Village Donald Shoup parking case study
- Residential parking permits are an agreeable compromise to keep residents on board with parking pricing
- When 25% + workers take transit, 10%+ go on foot. When fewer than 5% use transit, less than 3% walk (transit and non transit users walk more: either your city supports driving or other forms)
- He cites Baltimore as a possible city reducing car reliance on p140 but he never mentions Philly
- “With rare exceptions, every transit trip begins and ends with a walk”
- Terry Tamminen’s 2008 book Lives Per Gallon recounts the story of the 1920s GM shell company that bought city transit to kill it
- Range of % residents using transit varies by country and region and city center
- Metros orange line into Arlington worked
- Dallas DART transit an early failure because it wasn’t built into neighborhoods or any density
- Litman test of cities built old enough
- Transit needs urbanity, clarity, frequency, pleasure
- Streetcars create real estate when invested in alongside development (154)
- For transit: 10 minute headways or less, or find a way to make it so
- Alan Jacobs (no relation to Jane) in his 1995 book Great Streets argued how street width is predictive of walkability. Preindustrial Boston and lower Manhattan NYC have blocks less than 200 ft long; Philly and SF have average less than 400 ft in length; but Irvine has streets 1k or longer
- Wesley Marshall and Norman Garrick at UConn have definitive study on bigger blocks correlating to less safety for pedestrians and drivers: a doubling of block size corresponds to a tripling of fatalities
- In the 1980s Lewiston, Pa residents tried to overturn PennDOT “road diet” of turning a four lane Highway into three (with a turning lane), which is known for often handling more volume because of the inefficiency of left turns
- “The greatest threat to pedestrian safety is not crime, but the very real danger of automobiles moving quickly.” (168)
- “Widening a city’s streets in the name of safety is like distributing handguns to deter crime”
- Author recommends 10 ft wide streets (Congress for New Urbanism)
- Author visited South Philadelphia’s famed competing cheesesteak shops Pats and Genos; he likes the rare 30-degree angle intersection (173)
- Risk homeostasis: narrow, dangerous-feeling intersections counterintuitively are ones that feel so safe (so you speed), whereas big, wide suburban ones are dangerous
- Sight triangles at intersections encourage drivers to roll through stop signs
- Hans Monderman: naked streets and shared space “chaos equals cooperation
- Popular introduction of one way streets in 1960s
- Barnes Dance intersection with dedicated pedestrian crossing
- 60 seconds is preferred signal cycle, he says
- Right on red laws are popular with drivers but outlawed in Netherlands and pedestrian unfriendly
- Leading pedestrian interval (LPI) lets pedestrians get 3 second head start into intersection
- 4 way stop signs are preferred whenever possible for all
- A bicycle on same energy as walking will take you three times as far
- John Pucher and Ralph Buehler report on bicycle usage: it’s not environmental or cultural but built environment — density and safer cycling infrastructure
- Zef Hemel to Shorto: in 1960s Netherlands was drifting to car culture but Jane Jacobs shaped their policy
- “Any urban road investment that ignores bicycles is money that could be better spent.” (195)
- Portland and Boulder increased bicycling by investing in infrastructure
- Mayer Hillman: cycling health benefits outweigh risks 20 to 1
- Strength in numbers: more cycling reducing incidents
- Vehicular cycling (John Forester): drive bicycle like it’s a car (he hated bicycle lanes) — a waning but vocal bicycle radical: it may be safer for those who do it but exclude most everyone else. We have effectively had vehicular bicycling for decades but little bicycle usage, author argues
- Counterintuitively bicycle lanes (and helmets) appear to encourage incautious driving, because lanes widen streets. So ideally bicycles would share roads ; ideally use bicycle lanes to use excess street space rather than widen for them
- Cyclist Manifesto book by Robert Hurst is pro sharrow (but author notes that they fade)
- Bicycle boulevard
- “Specialists are the enemy of the city, which is by definition a general enterprise” (207) he says of bicycle advocates just like car supporters who focus only on their transit tool of preference
- Evolutonary psychologists tell us we evolved to love prospect (viewing prey) and refuge (know our flanks) EP Odum argues “the forest edge” defines classic prehistory favored human habitat
- Leon Krier skyscrapers are “vertical cul de sacs”
- Christopher Alexander in Pattern Language: limit buildings to four stories, which allows walk ups and people interacting with the street
- Jim Kuntsler: elevators will become obsolete because of energy demands
- In Suburban Nation (the author’s past book), he argues for a 1:1 width to height ratio of a street-building is ideal, 6:1 surpass limits for feeling in somewhere
- Jan Gehl in Cities for People says 10 stories or above buildings capture air currents that make wind 4 times greater than elsewhere — though of course Manhattan and Hong Kong show that though they may degrade walkabilty they increase capacity with people inside them
- Washington DC: where the best architects go to do their worst work — height limits create great density but not inventive
- Vancouver: tiny skyscrapers on fat base gets a skyline but no wind and lots of low to ground urbanism
- Walking in icy Boston or sweltering Savannah is still better than between parking lots on San Diego’s best weather day: it ain’t only climate
- “In downtowns and other areas of potential pedestrian life, do your rules require that all parking lots be hidden behind a habitable building edge?” Like Charleston examples (238)
- Gehl, in public places we seek the “edges” to linger
- Calls out Frank Ghery for his Guggenheim Bilbao and other buildings that are indifferent to pedestrians but pretty buildings (author contrasts with Gehry’s work on Millennium Park in Chicago) James Fallows has an Atlantic story about Ghery’s indifference to an urbanist Fred Kent question at The Aspen Ideas Fedtival
- “The downtown is the only part of the city that belongs to everyone”
- A three year University of Pennsylvania study of 3,445 inventors commuting to 1,180 different firms found that “for every [6.2 miles] of added travel distance, the firm employing those inventors registered 5 percent fewer patents. The quality of the patents took an even bigger dive, dropping 7 percent with every 6.2 miles added to the inventors’ commute.” In other words, for every additional mile your inventors commute, they are likely to produce 1 percent fewer inventions of 1 percent worse quality. … is it the lack proximity that enfeebles suburban inventors, or the time wasted driving? Likely both.
- Research from China: car ownership lottery shows that driving a car leads to obesity
- Destiny Thomas: “infra-structural racism”
- Johns Hopkins: higher density places had less covid death per person; Chris Webster attributed that to lower obesity
- Covid killed congestion which means faster drivers who killed more
- Richard Rothstein: The Color of Law influential book on segregated housing
- Harland Bartholomew called an architect of exclusionary zoning
- Chuck Marohn: should only have streets for business so only local slow moving traffic or roads that are to move traffic fast and so no businesses
- He references Philadelphia removing signals from 472 intersections to replace them with 4-way stops, reducing crashes
- In Netherlands they try for naked streets
- Road centerlines increase driving speed by 7 miles which doubles the risk of pedestrian death in a vehicle hit
- Author is supportive of red light and speed cameras to keep distance between police and drivers while still enforcing speed limits — because our roads being designed for speed but signing otherwise just funds bloated local police forces
- Ride hailing increases not decreasing driving
- Notes progress on bicycles in 10 years — vehicular bicyclists are gone
- “Unprotected bike lanes were found to have no meaningful impact on safety, while sharrows again made cycling more dangerous.”
- When New Zealand enforced helmet laws, cycling was reduced — and made more dangerous
- Cycling infrastructure follows gentrification but the other way
- “A thirty-eight-month randomized trial of five hundred properties in Philadelphia found that, compared to others left unchanged, those planted with trees experienced a significant reduction in crime, including a 29 percent drop in gun violence in neighborhoods below the poverty line.”
- Natures Best Hope Doug Tallamy: urban tree cover can help animal web (in addition to crime and air and heat)
- Shares an American Planning Association open letter