What is Walkability?

Walkability is a quality of a neighborhood or town that provides safe, convenient, and usable facilities for pedestrians. Walkability implies a balance between the needs of cars and the needs of pedestrians, including tightly-knit street networks, calmed traffic, and connectivity between origins and destinations.

In the ideal walkable neighborhood, most daily needs can be satisfied within a 5- to 10-minute walk of home and work.

Pedestrian-friendly street design includes some of the following design details:

• buildings close to the street

• front porches

• continuous tree cover

• on-street parking

• hidden parking lots

• garages relegated to a rear lane

• narrow, slow-speed vehicular trajectories

Walkability is central to --

Community Health

In healthy communities, walking and bicycling are a normal, routine part of daily life. In these 'active community environments' the community leaders and citizens recognize that providing for active living through community design is a health issue. America faces a national health crisis of epidemic proportions. Moderate, daily physical activity, such as bicycling or walking, has long been recognized as an essential ingredient of a healthy lifestyle. Creating active community environments means taking a look at the broader scope of where there are – and aren't – opportunities to walk and bicycle safely, easily, and conveniently. It involves land use planning, transportation, schools, parks, safety, and much more.

-- National Center for Bicycling & Walking – www.bikewalk.org

Recruiting High Quality Businesses & Employees

To compete in the age of talent, regions must make the quality-of-place and the amenities of the New Economy central elements of their strategies to attract knowledge workers and build high technology economies. Regions must seamlessly link their amenity strategies to ongoing economic development and competitiveness efforts… [Below are some of the actions recommended as steps toward reaching that goal ] –

• Make quality-of-place a central element of regional economic development efforts.

• Integrate amenities and natural assets into all aspects of the regional economic development, talent attraction and marketing efforts.

• Invest in the outdoor, recreational and lifestyle amenities of the New Economy as a component of regional economic development and talent attraction efforts; for example, the creation of climbing walls, mountain bike trails, bike paths and roller-blading areas throughout the city and region. Explore the possibility of bringing in outdoor competitions and events such as triathlons, bike races, rowing competitions and similar efforts. Orient waterfront improvements to encourage active, recreational activities such as rowing, sailing and windsurfing and improve public access for these activities.

• Upgrade the areas surrounding major universities and colleges and make them centers for New Economy recreational amenities. Establish better and more user-friendly transit connection from the university districts to downtowns and high technology business areas through the use of light rail, mass transit or bike lanes.

-- Richard Florida, PhD, Director, Software Industry Center, & H. John Heinz III Professor of Regional Development at Carnegie Mellon University. From "Lifestyle Matters," Minnesota Technology Magazine, May/June 2001.

Energy Independence

How can a local system of sidewalks, bike lanes and trails address national problems? Every trip taken on foot or by bicycle can reduce our dependence on imported fossil fuels. This is especially important for short trips of less than 5 miles. Walking and bicycling provide us with both personal freedom and energy independence.

Here are some links to Internet resources on walkability. For a more comprehensive set of links on bicycling and walking, visit our LINKS page (hypertext).

National Highway Traffic Safety Administration of the Federal 
Department of Transportation

www.pedbikeimages.org/

www.greatstreets.org/

ftp.odot.state.or.us/outgoing/BikePedProgram/Europe/

New Urbanism is a growing movement of architects, planners, developers, and government officials who advocate pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods as the primary building block of livable cities.