Creating -- And Using -- A Rating System For Neighborhood
Walkability Towards An Agenda For "Local Heroes"
Chris Bradshaw
[A paper presented to the 14th International
Pedestrian Conference, Boulder, Colorado. 1 October, 1993. Reprinted
by permission from the author]
ABSTRACT:
"Walkability" is a quality of place, one that is being
eroded by the day throughout the world. Although the term has been
appearing in literature for some time, the author, a pedestrian
rights activist and public consultation practitioner, knows of no
attempt to measure it. This paper attempts to do that, as well as
give three practical purposes for using the "walkability index".
One such use is to provide a motivation to induce more people to
become "local heroes", by re-establishing their links with
their streets and neighbourhoods and committing personal resources
to rebuild their local physical and social infrastructure, so
necessary to human life and the ecology of "the commons".
I. WHY MEASURE WALKABILITY?
I believe that I live in one of North America's most walkable
neighbourhoods. Unfortunately, its housing is also among the highest
priced in the city. Last year, its homeowners and business owners
faced steep increases in property taxes which are based on market
values. Many of my neighbours challenged the market-value-based
property taxes with the argument that market value of one's property
does not necessarily reflect one's ability to pay taxes. Others argued
differently: that the average person in our neighbourhood is more
likely to walk and therefore has less need for the municipal-level
infrastructure paid for by property taxes.
This got me thinking. I had always liked the idea of being able to
measure this quality called walkability. But now there might be a very
important use for it. What if a collection of such measurements - in
the form of a rating system or index - could be used in calculating
property taxes and, for new buildings, the initial development fee?
This may seem unfair, since it comes close to being an example of
user-pay, but would be applied not to the individual or the household,
but to the basic unit of walkability, the street block and the
neighbourhood.
The index could also be useful to homebuyers who could use the index
to settle matters such as: Are the streets safe? Is transit service
good? Will we need one car, two cars, or even no car?
Finally, there is the use of the index's indicators as an agenda for
collective action. Since the index would apply to an entire
neighbourhood, the action would naturally be collective. A
neighbourhood could improve its rating through changing itself: its
physical form and amenities, its range of businesses, its local
services, and collective programs. Therein lies the reference to the "local
hero", the person who enjoys the local scale, has affection for
his/her particular surroundings, and commits time and resources to
doing something to improve it by working with and through others to
improve the conditions for a sense of community: economic, social, and
cultural commerce.
II. WHAT IS WALKABILITY?
Walkability has four basic characteristics:
1. A "foot-friendly" man-made, physical micro-environment:
wide. level sidewalks, small intersections, narrow streets, lots of
litter containers, good lighting, and an absence of obstructions.
2. A full range of useful, active destinations within walking
distance: shops, services, employment, professional offices,
recreation, libraries, etc.
3. A natural environment that moderates the extremes of weather-
wind, rain, sunlight - while providing the refreshment of the absence
of man's overuse. It has no excessive noise, air pollution, or the
dirt, stains, and grime of motor traffic.
4. A local culture that is social and diverse. This increases contact
between people and the conditions for social and economic commerce.
III. PROPOSAL FOR CREATING THE WALKABILITY INDEX
[Note: Like in golf, the lowest score is best. Each question gives
the "demerits," from 1 to 4, to features or qualities that
work against walkability].
1. Density (persons per acre, up to centre-line of bordering
features)
1 - over 15
2 - 10-15
3 - 5-10
4 - fewer than 5
2. Parking places off-street per household (unrestricted street
access)
1 - less than 1
2 - 1-2
3 - 2-3
4 - more than 3
3. Number of sitting spots on benches per household (include seating
in front yards)
1 - more than .75
2 - .5 to .75
3 - .25 to .5
4 - .25 or fewer
4. Chances of meeting someone you know while walking (survey)
1 - 10 or more per mile
2 - 3-10 per mile
3 - fewer than 3 per mi.
4 - "Are you kidding?!"
5. Age at which a child is allowed to walk alone (survey)
1 - Age 6 or younger
2 - Ages 7-9
3 - Ages 10-13
4 - Age 12 or older
6. Women's rating of neighbourhood safety (survey)
1 - "I walk alone anywhere anytime"
2 - "I walk alone, but am careful of routes"
3 - "I must walk with someone at night"
4 - "I never walk, except to car visible from entrance"
7. Responsiveness of transit service.
1 - Within ten minutes
2 - 10-20 minutes
3 - more than 20 minutes
4 - no service
8. Number of neighbourhood "places of significance"
(significant to the respondent) named by average respondent. (survey)
1 - 10 or more
2 - 5-10
3 - 3-5
4 - fewer than 3
9. Parkland (measurement)
1 - >50 acres/square mile and average residence and
<1,500-foot walk
2 - >50 acres/square mile and average residence and
>1,500-foot walk
3 - <50 acres/square mile and average residence and
<1,500-foot walk
4 - <50 acres/square mile and average residence and
>1,500-foot walk
10. Sidewalks (single point each)
- Not on both sides of 90% of streets
- Dips at each driveway
- Widths less than 5 feet on residential streets; 8 feet on
shopping streets
- More than one discontinuity (1" or more) per block
FINAL SCORE DIVIDED BY 20 WILL PRODUCE INDEX BETWEEN 0.45 AND 2.00
IV. SCALE IN HUMAN ACTIVITY
We live life a different scales:
global
national
city/region
neighbourhood
street/project
household/family
individual
Until recent times, few people lived their lives at scales above the
city/region level. In fact, although many people have jobs that
operate in the loftier orbits, or favour international news to local
news, or buy few locally produced goods, life is still lived locally.
Think of the seven scales as a hierarchy inside a thermometer. As
energy and cognitive capacity increases, the mercury expands up the
scale as the individual has the ability to operate at larger scale.
Over the normal course of a person's life, the scale starts low,
climbs into adulthood, then drops slowly until death. If plotted
against time, it would be like a bell curve. But no matter how large a
domain we can master, we continue to need to function comfortably at
lower scales.
The problem is this. we are losing the "infrastructure" for
the street and neighbourhood scales. The streets have become
automobile feeders for the city-scale roads. City agencies have
replaced neighbourhood and street-level visiting of the sick and
elderly. The child, who needs to have ever-widening contiguous spaces
to freely explore as he/she grows, is not allowed independent access
to the street until after he or she is old enough not to have much use
for it. How many of us in our work produce for a local market or
purchase local goods or services?
The result is cities designed only for AAAs: active, affluent adults.
If you are young, old, or disabled, you stay inside or go out only
with a guardian in tow, usually ferried about in a car or bus. If you
are poor, transit and long walks under inhospitable conditions is your
lot. These people not only are denied the human scale and lively
streets they need, but they now need more income to buy the "solutions":
a car and a "better" neighbourhood.
Why has this happened?
1. The automobile - a vehicle more suited to freeways and rural roads
- has taken over all streets. As a society we now accept that streets
are dangerous and dirty. Drivers are not held responsible for
pedestrian deaths and injuries; the pedestrians or their guardians
are. The streets reflect "might makes right", rather than, "the
more you wield, the more you yield" that exists between boats on
waterways.
2. Women, the traditional nurturers of the local scale, including the
household, have joined the workforce and are adopting men's love of
the large scale, which they believe equals power. Unfortunately,
street & neighbourhood relations have suffered. (The solution, of
course, is not for men and women to go back to their own separate "domains",
but for all adults to reestablish local links).
3. We are moving towards globalism: economy, government, and even
environmentalism. There is little in-between that is not owned or
controlled by global interests: no "sinew", no connecting
tissue. Why? The large-scale interests want it that way: local
interests, loyalties, goods, values, etc. are redundant in the "modern"
world.
Urban life, too, is disdained. Life is to be lived only after leaving
the city job far behind each day and driving as far away to a
non-urban home as money and time will afford.
The result is an imbalanced infrastructure: People buying private
solutions to public problems. There is no civic life occurring in
civic places anymore. We are told to expect only negative experiences
in these places. They are replaced by larger private yards, membership
in health clubs, and exotic vacations in places where safe civic
spaces and human-scale streets still exist. When they must be used,
one takes along "protection". We buy ever-more sophisticated
home and car alarms, rather than spend time rebuilding common, local
space. The self-regulating civic culture of the Commons is fast
disappearing. In those spaces we now see the "weeds" of
crime, litter, unkempt buildings and grounds, noise and grime, and
abandoned people.
V. HOW BROADLY DOES WALKABILITY IMPACT ON LOCAL GOVERNMENT COSTS?
Applying the walkability index to taxes and development charges
raises the question, "Shouldn't it be limited only to the portion
that applies to transportation infrastructure?" No. The effects
of walkability are beneficial over a far broader area.
The walkable neighbourhood makes less demand on several
services/resources:
- roads and parking facilities: Because of shorter trips and
smaller modes (space and weights), they make lower use of roads
and parking, and the real estate and maintenance costs they
represent.
- transit: Transit subsidies are lower (or perhaps non-existent)
for those living in walkable neighbourhoods: 1) more riders per
mile; 2) shorter trips and therefore more fares per mile; 3) more
transit use in off-peak; and 4) more bi-directional travel during
peak period.
- police protection: The walkable neighbourhood provides a great
deal more of its own surveillance, provides more jobs and
activities for youths, has fewer new, expensive cars to be stolen;
and fewer off-street parking lots where assaults are most often
committed.
- density-sensitive services: Garbage collection, underground
pipes, fire protection, and general administration are services
that cost more where development is less dense.
- social and health services: besides being sensitive to density,
these services are also sensitive to the presence or lack of
informally provided community services, best illustrated by
neighbours visiting sick neighbours or providing babysitting or
even a ride for a neighbour having a doctor or job appointment.
- economic development - the higher-density, the mixed land use,
the availability of a larger and more diverse work force, and the
availability of marginal, "incubator" spaces and
services makes these neighbourhoods more powerful generators of
economic vitality.
VI. ENTER "LOCAL HEROES":
I have started to invest more of my time into my local communities:
my street and my neighbourhood. I am starting to see the need - and
the opportunities - for this involvement, and am trying to find a way
to support myself doing it. Here are my ideas and initiatives. I
predict that, due to the downturn in the economy (and the poor
expectations for early recovery) and the arrival of the baby boomers
in the empty-nester stage of life, many more people will find their
local interests growing.
What are "local heroes"?
The term local heroes comes from a movie of the same name in which
the main character successfully resists the moves of Burt Lancaster
working for a multinational company to convert the local economy and
resources to a "higher use". In my mind, a local hero is and
is simply loyal to that scale and to the specific people and places
within his/hers, the same way a mother is loyal to the family and to
her family.
VII. AN AGENDA FOR LOCAL HEROES:
Local heroes need to spend time and mental energy getting to know
their community and street better and sympathetically. And that takes
time. Our employer pays us to spend 40 hours a week focusing on
his/her scale, and if we have a family, we will tend to spend most of
the remainder on the household and ourselves. Our personal time will
tend to be spend with larger-scale information and entertainment
sources available in print and electronically.
The first local heroes will need to be real leaders. They will need
to conceive and create new institutions and infrastructure for these
scales. Here are some ideas that I am working on:
1. Start a "co-transportation" club. This is the way to
provide "fractional" access to a car and break the need to
use a car a lot in order to justify the high fixed costs.
2. Local stories and maps. Get local people to record/share local
knowledge, develop local maps, design neighbourhood walks for
newcomers & visitors. Then hold a walking festival with all the
walks offered as part of a multi-day blitz.
3. Visions. Organize street and neighbourhood visions/plans and bring
together resources to coordinate future changes to conform. Try a
Visual Preference Survey (developed by A. Nelessen) to focus people on
their communities as place. It gets people mentally out on foot in the
settings they usually only drive through.
4. "Be a PESt!" (Pedestrian Environment Steward) and
animate and care for - the streets and parks.
5. Start a "DePoT" (corner store, recycling centre,
laundry/photo drop-off, and postal station, and delivery point for
larger stores and catalogue shopping). Hire teenagers to help with
pickup and delivery; supply them with cargo-carrying "bringhy".
6. Be a "johnny greenseed" and restore your neighbourhood's
ecology
7. Get local merchants to "localize": 1) cater to local
customers (the ones who don't use parking spots and don't expect you
to sit on busy road and advertise city-wide, 2) encourage locals to
produce for your store, 3) hire locally and help current employees to
move into neighbourhood, 4) reduce outbound wastes
8. Start a neighbourhood BBS (computer bulletin board system) for
local information and commerce.
9. Determine your community's walkability.
VIII. CONCLUSIONS
I hope I have related a context for recreating the missing links in
the continuity of urban life, the scales that are closest to the
commons, the economic incubators, the cultural breeding ground, the
feedback systems necessary for reducing humankind's "footprint"
on the earth and on each other. Walkability is pretty close to
livability, to healthy communities, to sustainability, but it's not as
abstract. We can all relate to it. And it relates to so much to
quality of life: health, community, social equity, enjoyment,
attachment to place, environment, fitness, low stress.
Let's look at walkability as a positive indicator of what we all want
- to replace pollution, crime, traffic accidents as indicators of what
we don't want - and thus become a focus for action, the collective
action, action and involvement that re- creates community and caring
for each other and the places we share.
Let me close with the words of Wendell Berry in his essay, "Words
and Flesh".
The favourite adjective of [the environment] movement now
seems to be 'planetary'. This word is used, properly enough, to
refer to the interdependence of places, and to the recognition,
which is desirable and growing, that no place on earth can be
completely healthy until all places are. But the word "planetary"
also refers to an abstract anxiety or an abstract passion that is
desperate and useless exactly to the extent that it is abstract.
How, after all, can anybody - any particular body, do anything to
heal a planet? The suggestion that anybody could do so is
preposterous. The heroes of abstraction keep galloping in on their
white horses to save the planet - and they keep falling off in front
of the grandstand.
We cannot save the world by riding white horses, heroically or
otherwise, or by duplicating global marketing. It will be done locally
in the places we know and love, where we live and work and walk and
play. It will occur within the dynamics of community and immediate,
useful feedback on our own actions.
IX. BIBLIOGRAPHY
Berry, Wendell
What are People For?, San Francisco: Northpoint Press, 1990
Jacobs, Jane, The Death and Life of Great American Cities,
Vintage: 1961
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