Reddit reviews Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time
We found 27 Reddit comments about Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
North Point Press
> it seems there's a lot of hand-wringing over figuring out how to pack more people into cities instead of making non-city living more viable
Developing outward creates sprawling, low-density cities with very low qualities of life for the residents. Walkable City by Jeff Speck is a great primer
Unpopular opinion here but Earth Hour is not only misleading, it actually gives people a false concept of sustainability.
This American urban planner pulled some of the latest research and found that someone who lives in a super "green" suburban house and drives to it in a hybrid car still produces more carbon emissions than someone who lives in an old house downtown but doesn't drive as much because they can walk or use transit.
Our built environment (i.e. whether you have to drive for every daily task or not) is a real driver of sustainability, not light bulbs or appliances. Plus light bulbs are improving anyways as LED bulbs are becoming more popular and they use very little energy so turning them off for hour almost accomplishes nothing.
Earth Hour essentially tells people it is okay if you live in a McMansion in the deepest of suburban sprawl and burn fuel to drive to pick up even a carton of orange juice - as long as you just turn off a few bulbs once a year. It makes people feel good and ignore the true causes of their carbon footprint. This isn't a call to live like a hippie. It's a call for better urban planning with less sprawl, more transit, and more walkable, mixed-use neighbourhoods.
BENDER 63.4% 1st CHOICE
It was kind of worrying to see all of the Saralyn Romanishan signs in front of mansions in the Wedge. I'm glad the bulk of the ward stayed sane, and I hope Bender now realizes that the NIMBY vote is a lost cause, even if you court them by downzoning the neighborhood interior.
Congrats to /u/CMAndrewJohnson for winning 87% of the first choice votes in his ward.
Edit: Looks like the socialist might win in ward 3. Someone please send her a copy of Walkable City by Jeff Speck (or at least his TED talk).
In this exact order:
Walkable City by Jeff Speck is a good book about this.
I'm not proposing we intentionally increase congestion or remove cars or something like that. But a phenomenon called "induced demand" basically states that increasing road capacity does not solve congestion. When a road is expanded, it makes journey times temporarily shorter, leading people to drive more until this improvement in journey times disappears. End result: traffic crawls at same pace, but now you've added more cars to the road.
Accommodations for car traffic actually harm business. The most successful businesses are walkable ones: see Robson, Granville, commercial, 4th ave. Building wider roads and parking makes the street less pleasant to walk on. People no longer walk along a street hopping from store to store. Businesses suffer.
It is much more cost efficient, environmentally friendly, business friendly and city friendly to invest in other forms of infrastructure: transit, cycling, walking. The NPA's transport policies will hurt communities, hurt businesses and cost us a lot of money.
Yeah, I'm not sure that Cleveland is ready yet unfortunately. Even in Ohio City - right on the Rapid, across the bridge from downtown, etc - people still want cars. Like others have said, public transport to the suburbs is abysmal so you can't even get to inner ring places like Brooklyn or Linndale without a hassle. I hope one day it'll get better though. It's slowly getting better in Pittsburgh but I still get people who ask how my husband and I can get around with only one car.
PS if you haven't read Jeff Speck yet, you'll like him ;)
For every dollar spent on bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure you get a twenty dollar return. What that looks like is an uptick in vitality and health, less emergency rooms visits (as a result of increased cardio vascular health and the downstream impacts of being in the sun like combatting depression and increasing testosterone), less pollution and car accidents, and more people going at a slower rate actually taking in the surroundings, just to name a few positive benefits.
Funnily enough people going slower in the neighborhood (whether its urban downtown or suburbs) has an enormous impact psychologically, and that can be understood by anyone who always rides and decides to go for a walk, if that person then operates a motor vehicle less and chooses to commute via bicycle the impact is all the larger. Simply saying that you don't understand or see how it was worth it doesn't speak to the fiscal responsibility of the expenditure but the ignorance you have regarding the whole picture.
If you'd actually like to have a conversation about this I'd like for you to spend some time reading and watching a few videos.
The idea of cycling and pedestrian centric infrastructure and how it became so prevalent in modern planning.
Health and safety an abstract of a study with cycling. I'd link to dozens if I thought you'd actually read them but here is at least one that is relatively short and simple to understand.
Why prioritizing walking and cycling is important for the future of urban design and the health and wellbeing of society.
There are a great many resources if you're actually curious and wondering whether or not that strip of bike lane was worth it. If you're looking at it in terms of a single neighborhood or even just a city, that's a bit narrow, and you should maybe take that 10,000ft birds eye view of things.
Many cities in this area do have the core of walkable infrastructure in them and just require a bit of change to make them better. There is an entire sub-genre of urban development books related to the very concept of turning sprawl into dense walkable neighborhoods (e.g. Sprawl Repair Manual, Retrofitting Suburbia, Walkable City).
Puget Sound Regional Council takes these kinds of issues into consideration with regional planning. City planners also take these kinds of things into consideration. There is very high interest in building more urban walkable neighborhoods even in suburbs. The problem is it takes time and money for cities to implement these rules, and construction projects to correct deficiencies, and the building stock to turn over.
There are definitely examples of it.
If you're at all interested in how a walkable city is built, I highly recommend the book Walkable City by urban designer Jeff Speck, who, among other cities, has helped in Grand Rapids in the last 15 years.
One of the things that he talks about is that streetcar systems are cost-effective for exactly this reason: private real estate owners will often heavily subsidize (or pay entirely) for street cars to connect their properties to other walkable areas. In addition, they're a great way to bring new areas into the fold of walkability: if you have a streetcar running through walkable areas A, B, and C, and extend the line slightly into unwalkable area D, people will automatically assume that D is a soon-to-be walkable area that still has affordable property and start buying and developing properties there, turning the whole thing into a self-fulfilling prophecy. Once D is walkable, you extend the line a little bit more into area E, and the whole process repeats.
Personally, I don't think a full repeal to all of the residential zoning is the best practice. A full repeal would likely only increase land values
(here's a good explainer as to how that can happen). I do believe they need to be loosened significantly. At the rate this city is growing, it needs to have all of the tools necessary to help increase density and banning thing such as having both an ADU and DADU on single family lots and requiring their sizes to be such that they cannot accommodate families is a bad thing. Duplexes and triplexes also should be legal in single family zones. These allowances also should be paired with strategic rezones that allow for some sort of corner market/commerce zone within a 5-10 minute walkshed of every house in SFZs in order to make it reasonable for people in SFZs to live without a car in these now densified neighborhoods.
In regards to more reading: are you looking for more reading regarding Seattle zoning law exclusively or are you looking for reading recommendations that follow an urbanist bent? For Seattle specific stuff, The Urbanist and Seattle Transit Blog post a lot regarding land use in the city. If you are looking for books that talk about general city planning the gold standard is The Death and Life of Great American Cities. I personally really enjoyed Walkable City, Suburban Nation, and Happy City.
The following comment operates on the assumption that you are interested in American urban planning from an administrative or public policy focus. For real estate development, urban design/architecture, or international issues, look elsewhere.
A solid, all purpose undergraduate major: philosophy. You can teach yourself subjects and even methods, but to learn how to think critically and write about complex subjects in a clear way you need quality, focused instruction and that's the purpose of philosophy. Outside of your general major requirements, take exclusively analytic philosophy courses. Typically there is an analytic philosophy survey course but for other courses identify which professors in your department operate in this tradition (and take teaching seriously) and take whatever courses they offer, regardless of your personal interest in the subject going in. Common subjects include logic, philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, epistemology, etc. These courses will discipline your thinking and writing in ways that other majors won't. These skills are absolutely fundamental and lay the groundwork for a successful, highly adaptable career.
Outside of that major, which will fulfill your humanities requirements, you should fill your general requirements with courses like U.S. government (typically fulfilling a social science requirement), microeconomics and macroeconomics (social science, business, and occasionally quantitative), and environmental science (natural science). Take as many economics courses as you can. You can also take a basic geography course focused on cities but in my experience these courses teach you what you can easily learn from disciplined study on your own time. Focus your electives on methods courses, specifically statistics and digital mapping (GIS). You can also easily learn these online but if you have to fill up requirements, stick with these.
"But wait, don't I need to know something about urban planning?" Definitely! But you don't need to use up valuable course time on this subjects unless you have top urban planning scholars teaching undergraduate courses at your school, which probably isn't the case. Feel free to share your program and I'm sure the great community here can point out any top scholars active there. Otherwise, focus on teaching yourself the subject over summer and winter breaks. Read books by esteemed experts/scholars/writers in the field. A few broad essentials, all of which should be available at your public library:
Other users are welcome to contribute what they see as essentials. The key here is to read about urban planning relentlessly in your free time (important: this includes blogs!) and focus your coursework on skills development. This combination of philosophy/methods coursework and disciplined, independent reading will make you not only an issue expert, which are a dime a dozen, but a productive expert, someone who can approach a completely new problem and produce useful results.
This is the path I have followed and I have been happy with the results. Hope this helps.
Edit: grammar errors, typos, etc. fixes.
I think you would really like this book. The author explains how the design of cities around cars takes priority and causes numerous problems. This forces us to sacrifice our needs for cities that accommodate cars and not our social needs. There is also an increase in traffic deaths and accidents because we have bigger streets and faster traffic which causes people to go into autopilot mode and not focus on surroundings.
https://www.amazon.com/Walkable-City-Downtown-Save-America/dp/0865477728
Yes!!! I read about this in Jeff Speck's "Walkable City," and it instantly turned me into the kind of person who spouts off lectures about the importance of trees in cities whenever it comes up in conversation. I'd always been in favor of them, because they're beautiful and they provide shade and create and environment that's generally pleasant to be in, but there are SO MANY more tangible, measurable benefits. It's beyond frustrating to me that it's not prioritized more.
EDIT: For those interested, Jeff Speck's TED talk: https://www.ted.com/talks/jeff_speck_the_walkable_city
Jeff Speck’s “Walkable City: How Downtown can Save America, One Step at a Time”” is a personal favorite. He quotes his work in Lowell, MA throughout the book.
I’ve also been recommended to read Cheryl Heller’s “The Intergalactic Design Guide: Harnessing the Creative Potential of Social Design” and while I haven’t yet had the chance to pick it up, I think it might be up the alley of what you’re looking for.
I’m halfway through James and Deborah Fallows’ “Our Towns: A 100,000 Mile Journey into the Heart of America” which is also excellent, and provides a great set of case studies in urban revitalization.
My own masters practica (in Emergency management) is on creating greater access to healthcare via some urban planning interventions in a similar New England city, if not the same one.
I’m local to Boston, and would be happy to loan you the first and last books, should you be interested.
Cheers!
Some recent-ish architecture/urban design books that are really good reads & from well respected practitioners!
Walkable City by Jeff Speck
Happy City by Charles Montgomery
Cities for People by Jan Gehl
Otherwise, most stationary/art stores should stock some [Rotring] (http://www.rotring.com/en/) pens/mechanical pencils. They are high quality drafting pens that are always in high demand.
source: I own a lot, and still want many more. Always handy.
It's something I've adapted from a few sources on urban planning/design. It's something I never thought about until recently, but the way we build places can have a huge effect on the people who live in them. Personally, I noticed that I was always happier in cities where I could walk around and see other people walking around, versus when I was in small towns where I had to drive to get to anything. I couldn't put my finger on what it was, exactly, until I was in college and got to read Jane Jacobs's Death and Life of Great American Cities. Suddenly it all started to make sense.
If you're interested in learning more, check out New Urbanism, r/urbanplanning, and maybe a good book on the subject, like Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design. This is a great place to start, it highlights some common problems in our current building patterns and pulls examples from all over the world to show ways that work better and help build happier places.
Some other good reads:
Jeff Speck has some good introductory writing on the topic. Check out Step 5 of Part II under the heading "Keep it complicated"
That PDF is kinda janky, so here's an Amazon link if you're interested: https://www.amazon.com/Walkable-City-Downtown-Save-America/dp/0865477728/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=walkable+city&qid=1563914434&s=gateway&sr=8-1
Excerpt:
> Welcome to the world of risk homeostasis, a very real place that exists well
outside the blinkered gaze of the traffic engineering profession. Risk homeostasis
describes how people automatically adjust their behavior to maintain a comfortable
level of risk. It explains why poisoning deaths went up after childproof caps were
introduced—people stopped hiding their medicines—and why the deadliest
intersections in America are typically the ones you can navigate with one finger on the
steering wheel and a cellphone at your ear. [9]
Besides the huge cost of building these bridges at every intersection, or at least the major intersections, is the problem of pulling people away from the sidewalk and the businesses that reside there. By designing a city so exclusively for cars, you run the risk of disenfranchising pedestrians, which is a dangerous game to play.
Pedestrians are vital to the local economy, especially in cities, because they are far more likely to give their patronage to businesses than the people driving.
There are a bunch of other problems with discouraging pedestrians, like the destruction of the sense of community of an area or the public health problems that could be engendered to name a few.
I'm pulling these points from a book called "Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time" by Jeff Speck. It's a really interesting read, and if you're interested in the subject of urban planning, it's a must read.
Here's a link to the book:
https://www.amazon.com/Walkable-City-Downtown-Save-America/dp/0865477728
This would be an instant purchase for me if it was heavily based on the concepts of New Urbanism. That's really what I've been looking for in a city building sim, a game which understands and rewards the design principles most modern urban planners actually use in the real world.
I'd love a game which really allows you to get down to the street level and design cities based on pedestrian usage. I want to be able to tinker with things like sidewalk width, street trees, building height restrictions... all the little details, and see the effects of changing them. On a larger level, I'd like to be rewarded economically and environmentally for creating lovely urban neighborhoods that people would enjoy living in, on a street-by-street basis. And I'd like a game which models the long-term consequences of automobile culture as well--allow you to design those kinds of cities (Houston, Atlanta, Phoenix) but show the consequences of suburban sprawl in unhappiness, pollution, and economic problems.
Most city building sims play at too large of a scale for my taste, and often ignore what modern urban designers understand about what's important in real cities. Sim City especially has often been very guilty of this--encouraging heavily separated uses, with big zones of commercial, industrial, residential rather than the all-important "mixed-use neighborhood" where everything your citizens need is in walking distance of where they live.
A couple of books I'd recommend you read if you're interested in learning more about urban design as you develop this game:
and Jeff Speck's TED talk for a very brief overview.
Here is the mobile version of your link
> Where transit is good, people choose it.
Not so simple. Transit doesn't work when connecting non-walkable neighborhoods. Transit is a financial disaster when connecting park-and-rides to downtown areas. The problem w/ both is low levels of service. Examples are the Silver Line in DC, and DART in Dallas. This was well discussed in the book Walkable City. Think about it on practical terms: the Mountlake Terrace transit center for example is used 2x a day heavily: morning and evening rush hour. The rest of the time, the buses sit idle, or have 1 or 2 passengers per ride. When you average out costs over time, rides come up to be EXTREMELY expensive. Metro doesn't break out the data like this, but they know internally which rides are bleeding money. It's all political tho, it's people in city governments, businesses, and transit organizations getting together to highly subsidize certain highly expensive projects and lines for personal gain.
The Lynnwood Link is a great example. Right now you have a decent bus service already, and all you're going to do is move bus riders to rail, while spending tens of millions of dollars in the process. You're not going to add many riders from Mountlake Terrace. That park-and-ride is already at capacity before 7am daily, so nothing will change. If they were going to build apts by the station, it already would've happened. In my experience of riding trains and buses, I actually prefer rapid transit buses in good condition. People in Mountlake Terrace will likely lose service, as buses are much more flexible in where they drop off people downtown. Also, I hate park-and-rides. The goal should be to get cars off the road, and these park-and-rides still require most people to own a personal car. ST3 will change nothing in regards to these park-and-ride programs.
I like to pass this graph on too. Basically, no city in N America is dense enough to be able to economically pay for transit systems, they all need to be highly subsidized, and cars are cheaper. The answer is density first, THEN transit, not the other way around. People have failed to understand this basic concept.
Relevant passage from Walkable City by Jeff Speck
>#AMERICAN CAR-NAGE
>Even if we were to dispute the notion that walking is good for you, it is indisputable that cars kill a lot of people. Car crashes have killed over 3.2 million Americans, considerably more than all of our wars combined.^24 They are the leading cause of death for all Americans between the ages of one and thirty-four,^25 and their monetary cost to the nation is estimated to be hundreds of billions of dollars annually.
>Most people take the risks of driving for granted, as if they were some inevitable natural phenomenon. We don't bother with hand-wringing over the half-a-percent chance that our lives will end in a car crash^26 or the roughly one-in-three chance that we will eventually be seriously injured in one, since these risks seem unavoidable. But the numbers from other developed nations tell a different story. While the United States in 2004 suffered 14.5 traffic fatalities per 100,000 population, Germany, with its no-speed-limit autobahns, suffered only 7.1. Denmark rated a 6.8, Japan a 5.8, and the U.K. hit 5.3.^27 And who beat them all? New York City, with a rate of 3.1. Indeed, since September 11, 2001, New York has saved more lives in traffic than it lost on 9/11.
>If our entire country shared New York City's traffic statistics, we would prevent more than twenty-four thousand deaths a year. San Francisco and Portland both compete with New York, with rates of 2.5 and 3.2 deaths per 100,000 population, respectively. Meanwhile, Atlanta comes in at 12.7, and anti-urban Tampa at a whopping 16.2.^28 Clearly, it's not just how much you drive, but where you drive and, more accurately, how those places were designed. Older, denser cities have much lower automobile fatality rates than newer, sprawling ones. It is the places shaped around automobiles that seem most effective at smashing them into each other.
>I provide all this information to communicate the point that, while we Americans may take our great risk of automobile injury for granted, it is actually something that is well within our control—in the long term, as a function of how we design places, and in the short term, as a function of where we choose to live. This discussion becomes particularly ironic when we consider how many people through the decades have decamped from the city into the suburbs ostensibly for the safety of their families. Dr. Jackson is famously fond of asking his audiences "In what kind of community are you most likely to end up dead in a pool of blood?"^29 He points to the work of Alan Durning, who analyzed the combined risk of dying from two causes—traffic crashes and crime—in Seattle, Portland, and Vancouver, British Columbia. He found that, on average, if you add the two factors together, you are 19 percent safer in the inner city than in the outer suburbs.
>More recently, several more thorough studies have been completed by William Lucy at the University of Virginia, looking at auto accidents and murder by strangers. In one, he found that the ten safest places in the state of Virginia were eight of its most densely populated cities and the two counties abutting Washington, D.C., while the ten most dangerous places were all low-population counties.^30 In another, he compared crash and crime statistics in eight large American cities between 1997 and 2000. Here the data produced more subtle results. The basic theory held true: car crashes far outweighed murder by strangers as a cause of death in all locations and, in older cities like Pittsburgh, the inner cities were considerably safer overall. But in more modern places like Dallas and Houston, where the downtowns are largely unwalkable, the city car-crash statistics were almost as bad as in the suburbs. Even with its fourteen annual traffic deaths per 100,000 population, however, Dallas was still safer overall than half of its surrounding counties.
Woah, easy killer.
Look I get what you're saying. Highways and wide lanes seem like sexy things. That's exactly what I used to think as well before I started learning about urban planning and transit design. There's a lot of intricacies about it but here's some good beginner stuff
First, check out r/urbanplanning. Super interesting sub about the city ecosystem and how to design a successful city.
Books:
"The Death and Life of Great American Cities" by Jane Jacobs. Basically the bible of city design.
"Walkable City" by Jeff Speck is also an awesome book. That guy is a great presenter as well
Videos:
How Highways Wrecked American Cities
Why Public Transportation Sucks in the US
Why Trains Suck in America
How Closing Roads Could Speed Up Traffic - The Braess Paradox
How to Fix Traffic Forever
Presentations:
Basically any presentation by Jeff Speck
What it boils down to, is you destroy the urban environment by introducing cars. They take up so much room that can be used for dense development but requiring parking sports and wide streets.
Great representation of what car do to cities
This is my last comment here. I can't argue with someone about urban development/planning if they haven't studied the topic themselves. It's a topsy-turvey thing to us living in the post automobile United States, but it makes sense after you do some research.
Enjoy!
MONDAY
I highly recommend 1984 by George Orwell if you haven't read it. I know it's a classic, but many people still haven't read it. It's by far my favorite book of all time.
I would love Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time.
Thanks for the contest!
Thanks for the tips! The pie shakes at Hamburg Inn sound amazing. I actually just caved in tonight and got a burger/shake combo after a week of eating healthy...
As far as recommendations go, I have a feeling you've likely read most of the fiction I'd suggest. That said, here's a couple non-fiction suggestions you might not have read:
Walkable City, by Jeff Speck. If you've ever been interested in cities, what makes them work (or not work), and what types of decisions urban planners make, check it out. It's a quick read, entertaining, and you'll never see your city or any other city in the same way.
Nothing to Envy, by Barbara Demick. Told primarily through the eyes of two people, this book provides readers with a glimpse of what life is like for the millions of ordinary North Korean citizens.
Anyway, I know it's well past the time frame for your AMA, but if you get a chance, I'd love to know if there's any one book that helped you the most as a writer (e.g. King's, "On Writing"), or any one piece of advice that has carried you the most. I don't ever plan on writing professionally, but I've always wanted to write a novel just for the satisfaction of creating something, regardless if anyone actually reads it. I just feel like I spend so much time consuming things others have created, while creating nothing in return. Plus, getting 'lost in a world you're creating' sounds immensely satisfying.
Recommended reading for individuals who don't actually know anything about parking policy: The High Cost of Free Parking
, Walkable City
Haha, Chicago and DC are literally the two exceptions. The book Walkable City gets into the history. I'm jealous of you guys!