Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time

This is the part of the story that the train boosters don’t want you to hear: investments in transit may be investments in mobility or investments in real estate, but they are not investments in reduced traffic.■ The only way to reduce traffic is to reduce roads or to increase the cost of using them, and that is a bitter pill that few pro-transit c

It is fascinating to talk to blind people about push-button walk signals. They push the button and wait for a lull in the noise. But then they can’t tell if what they hear is a red light, or just a gap in the speedy traffic. The alternative are those annoying chirping signals that now mark the pace of daily life in crunchy towns like Northampton, M

The lesson we learn from these places is that walking down a narrow, shop-lined street in icy Boston or sweltering Savannah is a vastly superior experience to walking down an arterial between parking lots and car dealerships on San Diego’s best day. Get the design right and people will walk in almost any climate.

“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.”45

In another poll, the devoutly nonideological Consumer Preference Survey, respondents favored public transportation over road building as a solution to congestion by almost three to one.● The actual funding allocation currently favors roads four to one over transit,9 so it would seem that a major correction is in order.

That said, not all bus systems are duds—far from it. The most remarkable one nationally may be Boulder’s, an inexpensive network that confounds conventional transit wisdom in a number of important ways. Thanks to its system of cleverly branded routes—including the Hop, Skip, and Jump, with each route getting its own color—the city is living up to i

Cities whose economic-development strategy is a corporate-capture strategy are typically those whose economic development director and planning director don’t talk to each other. The smart cities, like Lowell, hire a director of planning and development, who is first charged with creating a city where people want to be. Rather than trying to land n

Through the 2000s, the Dallas Area Rapid Transit (DART) system has continued to grow, and transit ridership has continued to drop.17 A few billion dollars later, despite escalating gasoline costs, a greater percentage of Dallas residents are driving to work than at any time in the past quarter century.

Portland’s system was instituted hand in hand with a commitment to “a host of other strategies and policies, including higher density, neighborhood-based urban design, elimination of minimum parking requirements, and basically the whole list of things that add up to walkability,” says Hales. “You can’t just drop in a streetcar.”