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

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.

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

We still have decades of auto-dependent land use trends to offset, but small shifts in the way our received infrastructure is designed can go a long way to making our neighborhoods more walkable — and in turn healthier, more affordable, and more vibrant.

Devon Zuegel • We Should Be Building Cities for People, Not Cars

He subsequently conducted similar studies in New York and Los Angeles, and found the data tracking along almost identical curves. In each case, increasing density from two units per acre to twenty units per acre resulted in about the same savings as the increase from twenty to two hundred.22 To students of urban form, these outcomes are not that su

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

For people to choose to walk, the walk must serve some purpose. In planning terms, that goal is achieved through mixed use or, more accurately, placing the proper balance of activities within walking distance of each other. While there are exceptions, most downtowns have an imbalance of uses that can be overcome only by increasing the housing suppl

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

A lucky few, larger cities—some of the heroes of this book—have already attracted so many well-off people into their downtowns and close-in neighborhoods that these places are in danger of becoming social monocultures. Despite their wealth, these can also be detrimental to street life, since yuppie overachievers tend to spend less time in the publi

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

This creative leap leads us to Shoup’s third cornerstone, the institution of “parking benefit districts” that put meter revenues to work locally.60 In addition to improving sidewalks, trees, lighting, and street furniture, these districts can bury overhead wires, renovate storefronts, hire public service officers, and of course keep everything spic

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

Back in 1991, the Sierra Club’s John Holtzclaw studied travel habits in twenty-eight California communities of widely varying residential density. He found, as expected, an inverse relationship between urbanity and driving miles. But, perhaps not expected, he also found his data points distributed around a pretty sharp curve, with most of the gains

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

“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