demystifying walkability (notes on Jeff Speck’s Walkable City)

City walkability is a topic often thrown around Gen-Z twitter or urban planning internet groups — it’s probably one of the topics that has spread the most beyond the urban planning academic bubble. Cars are bad, public transit is good, and walkable cities are the cure-all to societal loneliness and environmental harm. I’ve seen talk about a project called Culdesac, where a group of people have been living in a car-free city in Arizona — The NY Times called it a “pedestrian oasis” and The Guardian commented that “People are happier in a walkable neighborhood.” All the fervor around walkability makes it seem like you just have to eliminate cars and boom, you have a happy society. There’s not enough discourse around how you make a city walkable and whether it’s wise to eliminate cars completely. It also makes walkability seem like an unreachable ideal that may not actually be profitable for a city, even though it can boost income significantly. Jeff Speck’s book made me realize that making a city walkable can indirectly and directly lead to economic prosperity, if done with the right considerations in mind.

How making a city walkable can directly lead to economic prosperity

I come from a practical family of Colombian immigrants. For cities in Latin America, the primary goal is growing city wealth and mitigating poverty. That’s why my cynical mind always thought — city walkability is intellectually aesthetic, but not realistic. In the end a city will choose to invest in highways and skyscrapers, let large retail stores set up shop, allow for the wealthy to drive to work, and permit any kind of foreign real estate investment, because those all generate jobs and income short-term. Reading Walkable Cities changed my perspective on this, since I realized it can be very financially beneficial for a city to invest in walkability. Speck pointed out a couple ways that U.S. cities have gained wealth in exchange for vehicle usage:

Residents avoid vehicle costs, and that surplus in income instead goes into the local economy.

Owning a car costs about $10,000 per year. In Washington DC over four years of investment in transit, car registrations fell by almost 15,000 vehicles, estimated to have resulted in 127M being retained in the local economy each year. Imagine those ~$1,000 in monthly car loans and insurance per car owner being instead directed to public transport workers and local restaurants and services.

Walkability increases property value.

City walkability has all sorts of benefits for residents; it increase quality of life, boosts fitness, reduces asthma due to car emissions, supports socioeconomic mobility and innovation, etc. However, people don’t always go for what’s good for them. In this case, they do. People prefer walkability over large houses and yards, and are willing to pay the premium for it. Studies show that walkable areas in Washington DC have significantly higher housing costs than those with fewer environmental amenities.

How it can indirectly lead to prosperity

Investing in walkability not only yields direct economic growth, but also has unexpected positive externalities.

Public transit work creates more employment than road and highway work.

Public transit work doesn’t just keep the city moving; it acts as a significant economic catalyst, much more so than road and highway construction. Following the implementation of Obama’s American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, a discernible employment advantage was noticed for transit-related jobs over those linked to highways. Specifically, for every dollar invested in public transportation, there was a substantial return in the form of job creation, generating approximately 70% more employment compared to similar investments in road and highway projects. This boost can be attributed to several factors.

Firstly, transit projects often require more diverse skill sets — from engineering to customer service — and thus employ a wider range of professionals. Secondly, these projects frequently lead to long-term employment opportunities, given the need for ongoing maintenance, operation, and potential expansion of transit services. This contrasts with road construction projects, which, while necessary, tend to have a more finite duration with less potential for sustained employment after completion.

Adding bikes and pedestrians reduces car accidents without reducing travel time.

Car crashes continue to be the leading cause of death in the U.S. for people ages 1 to 54. To solve this problem, you might wonder, how can we make drivers more cautious and aware while driving? Here’s a crazy idea: add some pedestrians and bikers to the roads. We’ve all experienced the acutely heightened awareness while you’re driving next to a biker instead of an empty bike lane. Turns out that effect widely reduces accidents.

Janette Sadik-Khan, Mike Bloomberg’s transportation chief, converted one lane of Prospect Park West in Brooklyn from driving to biking. The number of speeders dropped from about 75 percent of all cars to less than 17 percent, and injury crashed went down by 63 percent from prior years. Car volume remained and travel times stayed almost exactly the same or even became a few seconds faster.

Another example is found in the streets of Toronto, where it wasn’t necessarily pedestrians that were added, but trees, lining the streets to make the sidewalks more pedestrian friendly. This resulted in a 5 to 20 percent decline in mid-block crashes. The explanation being that when there were no trees, cars would speed, responding to the presence of broad “recovery zones.” Once trees were added on the side, cars no longer had a margin of error.

Limiting building height results in more real estate development.

The way skyscrapers affect walkability can be subjective; I have heard from some friends that they find the Manhattan skyscrapers invigorating to walk aside. However, they objectively block out sunlight, which is a crucial aspect for city walkability. City districts enforce building heights in order to preserve their well-lit sidewalks and better ambience in general. This has an unintended effect of boosting real estate development activity since it lowers the barrier to entry for building on any given square foot.

To explain, take Baton Rouge in Louisiana, where the building height was abolished. Its first skyscraper was built, but then no others were built the following years, and the surrounding plots of land remained empty. The surrounding landowners didn’t want to allow mid-rises on their plots of land, since that’s not the most the lot can hold, and they wouldn’t sell the plot of land for a reasonable price because of its skyscraper potential. Urban developers lost interest and chose to develop elsewhere. By lowering the building height maximum, the city is essentially expanding the possibilities for the use of land, because the profit per square area is capped.

More interesting sidewalks are also more profitable.

We like to walk through sidewalks that feel alive. As Jane Jacobs describes it, the sidewalks we walk through should feel like outdoor living rooms. This is not parks or nicely landscaped green spaces, but small shops and varied locales. Specks also points out that we feel safer in enclosed areas, rather than sprawling spaces where we instinctually feel exposed to predators. This is also why people tend to gravitate to the sides of streets or tall objects in the middle of a field, for example. This means that an interesting, walkable street necessarily has something lining it, and conveniently that can result in business opportunities for small business owners and more commercial activity for the city.