![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Book Review: Walkable City
Jan. 29th, 2019 09:07 amLast week I read Jeff Speck’s Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time, a fascinating, thorough, and occasionally snarky book about how to improve America’s cities, both for humans and for the environment.
“Walkability” is Speck’s simple shorthand for the changes that most American cities need to make, but this is by no means a simplistic book: for Speck, walkability is a result of a complicated network of policies.
First, Speck points out that America’s reliance on cars is not a result of market forces, but a governmental choice. There’s nothing inherently more free market about spending government money on roads instead of railways or bike paths or public transit, and nothing free market at all about governmental subsidies for gasoline (half as expensive in the US as in other developed nations) or a foreign policy deformed around the desire for cheap gas.
There is, therefore, nothing to stop us from using our transportation budget to fund buses and trains and roadside trees, instead of widening roads and building new interstates in the phantom hope that improved traffic flow will relieve congestion.
In this pursuit, State Departments of Transportation are forever widening the Main Streets of small towns (which are often state highways), as well as getting rid of on-street parking and trees, on the theory that speeding cars will crash into these objects if they’re not removed. But in fact, the principle of risk homeostasis - the fact that people automatically adjust their behavior to maintain a comfortable level of risk - means that cars tend to speed more and thus crash more often on these wide treeless streets, precisely because doing so feels less risky.
(This is the same reason that “safer” playgrounds often show little to no reduction in injuries, and often an increase in more serious injuries: if a piece of play equipment is boring, kids will come up with a way to make it risky.)
The end result is that pedestrians feel unsafe walking on these unshielded sidewalks, and in any case have no place to park even if they wanted to walk downtown. Downtown shopping dwindles, the downtown shops board up, every uses cheap gas to drive half an hour to Walmart, and the whole town slumps into decay. “In the inimitable words of Andres Duany, ‘the Department of Transportation, in its single-minded pursuit of traffic flow, has destroyed more American towns than General Sherman,” Speck explains.
And these policies don’t even work. They don’t cut down on accidents and they don’t relieve congestion. Traffic engineers act as if congestion is a constant factor - as if the exact same number of people will keep driving if you widen the road - but in fact, congestion is a result of induced demand, which means that the more road there is, the more people will drive on it. “Were it not for congestion, we would drive enough additional miles to make congestion,” Speck explains. The only way to make a dent in congestion is to provide genuine alternatives to driving: buses, bike lanes, or trolleys.
Speck is pro-trolley, on the grounds that “It would seem that everyone in this argument, except Darrin Nordahl, has forgotten just how darn adorable trolleys really are.” Also, trolleys “also last twice as long as buses and, unlike buses, the old ones often look even better than the new ones.”
This argument-by-adorableness may seem rather quirky, but it’s actually an important part of Speck’s approach: when making decisions about city design, you have to take aesthetic considerations into account - and often the aesthetically correct choice leads to gains in other areas, as well. Tree-lined streets are not only beautiful, but safer for both drivers and pedestrians, and the increased number of pedestrians can support more businesses, and more businesses gives people more incentive to walk around town… it’s a virtuous cycle.
I could go on. There’s an enormous amount of information in Walkable City, and huge swathes of it I haven’t even touched on, like the chapter about parking. But at some point it’s time to polish off a book review and just say: read this book. It’s worth your time.
“Walkability” is Speck’s simple shorthand for the changes that most American cities need to make, but this is by no means a simplistic book: for Speck, walkability is a result of a complicated network of policies.
First, Speck points out that America’s reliance on cars is not a result of market forces, but a governmental choice. There’s nothing inherently more free market about spending government money on roads instead of railways or bike paths or public transit, and nothing free market at all about governmental subsidies for gasoline (half as expensive in the US as in other developed nations) or a foreign policy deformed around the desire for cheap gas.
There is, therefore, nothing to stop us from using our transportation budget to fund buses and trains and roadside trees, instead of widening roads and building new interstates in the phantom hope that improved traffic flow will relieve congestion.
In this pursuit, State Departments of Transportation are forever widening the Main Streets of small towns (which are often state highways), as well as getting rid of on-street parking and trees, on the theory that speeding cars will crash into these objects if they’re not removed. But in fact, the principle of risk homeostasis - the fact that people automatically adjust their behavior to maintain a comfortable level of risk - means that cars tend to speed more and thus crash more often on these wide treeless streets, precisely because doing so feels less risky.
(This is the same reason that “safer” playgrounds often show little to no reduction in injuries, and often an increase in more serious injuries: if a piece of play equipment is boring, kids will come up with a way to make it risky.)
The end result is that pedestrians feel unsafe walking on these unshielded sidewalks, and in any case have no place to park even if they wanted to walk downtown. Downtown shopping dwindles, the downtown shops board up, every uses cheap gas to drive half an hour to Walmart, and the whole town slumps into decay. “In the inimitable words of Andres Duany, ‘the Department of Transportation, in its single-minded pursuit of traffic flow, has destroyed more American towns than General Sherman,” Speck explains.
And these policies don’t even work. They don’t cut down on accidents and they don’t relieve congestion. Traffic engineers act as if congestion is a constant factor - as if the exact same number of people will keep driving if you widen the road - but in fact, congestion is a result of induced demand, which means that the more road there is, the more people will drive on it. “Were it not for congestion, we would drive enough additional miles to make congestion,” Speck explains. The only way to make a dent in congestion is to provide genuine alternatives to driving: buses, bike lanes, or trolleys.
Speck is pro-trolley, on the grounds that “It would seem that everyone in this argument, except Darrin Nordahl, has forgotten just how darn adorable trolleys really are.” Also, trolleys “also last twice as long as buses and, unlike buses, the old ones often look even better than the new ones.”
This argument-by-adorableness may seem rather quirky, but it’s actually an important part of Speck’s approach: when making decisions about city design, you have to take aesthetic considerations into account - and often the aesthetically correct choice leads to gains in other areas, as well. Tree-lined streets are not only beautiful, but safer for both drivers and pedestrians, and the increased number of pedestrians can support more businesses, and more businesses gives people more incentive to walk around town… it’s a virtuous cycle.
I could go on. There’s an enormous amount of information in Walkable City, and huge swathes of it I haven’t even touched on, like the chapter about parking. But at some point it’s time to polish off a book review and just say: read this book. It’s worth your time.
