This graph shows how the midsized cities (excluding Arlington) with Top 10 walkability rankings score in WalletHub’s latest ranking of cities with the healthiest real estate markets. Sad to say: High walkability seems to be correlated with moribund real estate economies. The cities are (from left to right): Jersey City, Newark, Hialeah, Buffalo, Rochester, St. Paul, Cincinnati, Richmond and Madison. (Click for more legible image.)

There is an interesting juxtaposition of news items today. Redfin, the real estate brokerage website, has published a list of the Top 10 most walkable midsized cities in the country. Arlington County (a highly urbanized county) scored third and Richmond scored ninth, based on their Walk Score rankings.

Arlington won kudos for its Ballston-Virginia square neighborhood, where residents can walk to an average of 13 restaurant, bars or coffee shops within five minutes. While the Washington metropolitan area is notorious for its traffic, many Arlington residents live car-free, opting to get around on foot, bike and public transportation.

Richmond earned recognition for the revitalization of neighborhoods surrounding downtown, including Jackson Ward, Shockoe Bottom, Monroe Ward, the riverfront and Manchester. The Fan and Carytown neighborhoods to the west of downtown also stood out for their walkability.

To many urban theorists, walkability is a critical determinant of a community’s livability, ranking close behind the cost of real estate, the quality of schools and the level of taxes in what people take into account when deciding where to live. But it’s no guarantee of prosperity or rising real estate values…. which brings us to the other news item.

The top two midsized cities ranked by walkability are Jersey City (No. 1) and Newark (No. 2). But guess where Jersey City and Newark rank in WalletHub’s ranking of 2015′s Healthiest Housing Markets. Out of 94 midsized cities ranked, Newark scored 94th — dead last — while Jersey City ranked 76th. (Richmond ranked a ho-hum 45th among midsized cities.)

Bacon’s bottom line: I’ll concede that this is a quick-and-dirty analysis based on a comparison of midsized cities only, not a comprehensive comparison of all types and sizes of municipal governments, so it may not reflect the larger reality. But I would advance this as a reasonable hypothesis: Walkability is a wonderful thing, and many people desire it, but it is a relatively minor factor influencing the health of urban real estate markets.

– JAB

(Cross-posted from Bacon’s Rebellion.)

Map showing density of green coverage in Tysons. Image credit: UVa Today.

Andrew Mondschein, an assistant professor at the University of Virginia School of Architecture, is studying how the redevelopment of Tysons affects the pedestrian experience. The first step is collecting data. Accordingly, he is dispatching students equipped with sensors, wearable cameras and smartphone apps to monitor temperature, light levels, green cover, noise pollution and carbon monoxide emissions in ever nook and cranny of the what he calls the “archetypal American edge city.”

The goal of Fairfax County planners is to transform the autocentric mix of offices, shopping malls and plate-of-spaghetti road network from the epitome of suburban sprawl into a smart-growth poster of mixed-use development and pedestrian-friendly streets.

Map showing intensity of illumination.

“Tysons Corner is on the forefront of transforming suburban places into more urban places and all that entails,” says Mondscheinin an article published in UVa Today. “For city and urban planners, it is exciting, because if we densify suburbs we could reduce driving and emissions, provide more housing and make transit, walking and biking easier and more pleasant – hopefully improving public and environmental health. The Tysons Corner project embodies all of these wonderful goals.”

The data collected by students will provide on-the-ground measures of the pedestrian experience as Tysons evolves.

Map showing temperature variations in Tysons.

Mondschein says other communities can do the same thing. “With devices like these, communities could self-organize and self-initiate studies that can show what they need in an objective manner, with hard data. That can be arguably more persuasive when speaking to policymakers, fundraisers and politicians.”

(Hat tip: John Blair)

(This story was cross-posted from Bacon’s Rebellion.)

Some months ago, I wrote that laws against so-called “jaywalking” (that is, crossing in places other than crosswalks or where traffic lights encourage pedestrians to cross) fail to promote safety, because traffic lights are inadequate guides to safety. When crossing midblock, a pedestrian need only watch out for traffic coming in one direction—right toward her. By contrast, when crossing at a light, a pedestrian may be in less danger from cars coming straight at him, but may be attacked by cars making left and right turns. Moreover, it is not at all clear that jaywalking is a major cause of pedestrian fatalities; although most crashes do occur outside intersections, these crashes often occur in places where there is no easily available crosswalk. According to traffic writer Tom Vanderbilt, “While jaywalking is often cited as a cause of pedestrian accidents, less than 20 percent of fatalities occurred where a pedestrian was crossing outside an easily available crosswalk.” And even where a pedestrian is jaywalking, a crash may be caused primarily by driver misconduct.

However, my article did not fully address the social harms caused by these laws. I did mention that to the extent these laws discourage walking, they increase traffic danger, because more cars mean more potential crashes.

But even if this were not the case, the social benefits of jaywalking laws might be outweighed from their costs. In particular, jaywalking laws are harmful from a public health perspective, a social equity perspective, and a libertarian perspective.

The public health costs from increased driving have been amply discussed in smart growth literature. But just to summarize the key issue, when we drive instead of walk, we create two major types of public health risks. First, we harm ourselves. Less walking means less exercise, which means an elevated risk of many diseases; for example, the risk of type 2 diabetes is 31 percent lower for participants who engaged in regular moderate-intensity physical activity such as walking. Second, people who drive more and walk less endanger the rest of society. Even leaving aside the risks of climate change, particulate matter and other pollutants emitted from motor vehicles create significant costs. For example, one study found that particulate matter emitted from motor vehicles creates $211.6 million of health care costs in Auckland, New Zealand, alone. So, to the extent jaywalking laws reduce walking, they create increased risks of harm for both their intended beneficiaries and for society as a whole.

From a social equity perspective, jaywalking laws disproportionately harm the poor in two ways. First, poverty-level households are less likely to own cars than the average household, which means they walk more and thus are more likely to be ticketed.  20.4% of all poor people live in households with no access to a car, more than twice the national average. In urban areas, these percentages are higher: for example, in New Orleans, 46.7% of the poor live in such households, including the majority of the black poor.

Second, even if all Americans walked equally, jaywalking fines would harm poor pedestrians more than everyone else because these fines tend to be quite large (often in the $100-200 range) and are unrelated to ability to pay. This is especially true in cities where fines can lead to other legal consequences. For example, Ferguson, Missouri is notorious for its aggressive use of fines. If a Ferguson resident is fined and is more than a few minutes late* for a court date, she is arrested and charged additional fines totaling at least $170 ($120 for the main fine plus a $50 fee for an arrest warrant) and if she cannot afford to pay her fines she is imprisoned until the next court session. Because the relevant local court is in session three days per month, this unlucky resident may spend weeks in a local jail—for which privilege she is fined yet again!

Finally, such laws make no sense from a libertarian perspective. The ordinary (albeit oft-violated) norm of American public policy is that people should be at liberty when they are not harming others; for example, we allow smoking because smoking primarily harms only the smoker. Despite the fact that smoking creates indirect health consequences such as health care costs that affect society as a whole, society treats smoking more leniently than walking.

Where jaywalking laws are not enforced, these laws may not do much harm. But to the extent these laws are actually enforced, they create pollution and disease by reducing walking, and redistribute money from poor pedestrians to not-so-poor local governments.

*Technically, the resident must be absent from court for these additional fines to apply.  However, courtroom doors close just five minutes after a court session starts, according to a recent Harvard Law Review article.

(Cross posted from planetizen.com)

Is this critique fair? Somewhat.

Pavone examined a variety of suburban multifamily developments, but focuses on Reading Woods, in Reading, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston. She claims that Reading Woods residents “cannot walk to the public library, a bank, or a grocery store” and would have to cross I-95 to reach a chain restaurant. So I decided to look at Reading Woods on Google Street View and see how horrible it is.

First of all, I looked for sidewalks. The main street serving Reading Woods is Jacob Way. Jacob Way generally has sidewalks, as does Augustus Court (the main street serving the part of Reading Woods further away from South). So it seems to me that a resident of Reading Woods can use sidewalks for most visits to South Street and other neighborhood streets. To reach Main Street (the neighborhood’s main commercial street) you must walk briefly on South Street, which also has a sidewalk (though it only serves one side of the street, and looks pretty narrow).

By contrast, I have seen multifamily dwellings (especially in the South) that do far less to accommodate pedestrians. For example, if you go to Calibre Brooke Way in Smyrna, Georgia you will see an apartment rental office, and you will see a long driveway leading to apartments—but what you will not see is a sidewalk. The designers of the Calibre Brooke apartments seem to have assumed that every resident would either drive everywhere or be perfectly content to share the driveway with cars. Compared to Calibre Brooke, Reading Woods is downright pedestrian-friendly.

Second, I looked for destinations within walking distance. Even if the residents of Jacob Way have a sidewalk, what can they walk to?  Here too, they do better than many suburbanites. The walkscore of Jacob Way is a mediocre 47. Although Reading Woods residents cannot walk to everything, they can walk to quite a few things, even without crossing the highway. The commercial street nearest to Reading Woods is Main Street. Walkscore tells me that on the Jacob Way side of I-95, there are five restaurants on Main Street within a mile of Reading Woods, including a Burger King, a Domino’s and a few non-chain restaurants. In addition, there is an ATM, a fruit store, and some other small stores. Of course, there are additional delights for those foolhardly enough to walk under the I-95 underpass.

The part of Main Street closest to Jacob Way seems to me adequate but not great from a pedestrian perspective: there are sidewalks on both sides of the street, and four lanes, more than I would like but fewer than in much of suburbia.

On the negative side, much of Reading’s civic equipment is roughly one to two miles away—too far, I suspect, for many people to walk in Massachusetts weather. The nearest full-service grocery stores seem to be just over a mile away, and the public library and City Hall area both almost two miles away.

Third, I looked for public transit. If you can’t walk to the public library or city hall, can you take a bus or train there? Reading Woods is 1.3 miles from the Reading commuter train station—walking distance for an able-bodied person in good weather, but not for everyone and not in today’s weather conditions. Unfortunately, bus service is Reading Woods’s Achilles’ heel: the closest bus stop is on the other side of the highway, not significantly closer than the train station, and only runs until 7 pm on weekdays and not at all on Sundays. I can’t say that I would like to live there; on the other hand, compared to Kansas City’s western suburbs (where buses stop running around 5 pm and rail transit is a pipe dream), Reading Woods does not look so bad.

So do high-density islands such as Reading Woods increase societal walkability, or do they merely add density to suburban sprawl? I think the right answer is a question: “Compared to what?” Compared to the city of Boston or to close-in suburbs like Brookside, Reading Woods is mediocre at best. But compared to the outer suburbs of the South or Midwest, Reading Woods does not look so terrible.

So should government do anything to encourage housing in places like Reading Woods? From a smart growth perspective, Reading Woods is better than some further-out suburbs but still pretty mediocre. Ideally, a wise government would permit enough housing in closer-in communities to sate public demand for apartments affordable to the middle and lower classes.

On the other hand, Boston is a pretty expensive market, and it may not be politically possible to bring down rents without creating new units in places like Reading Woods. So I guess my answer is: “It depends.”

(Cross-posted from planetizen.com)

Moreover, this argument doesn’t seem to be supported by what I have actually seen with my own eyes. New York City neighborhoods like Times Square and the Upper West Side certainly have plenty of elevator buildings, but these places have far more street life than many low-density suburbs or quiet rowhouse neighborhoods. Why? Because even if a few shut-ins are less likely to go outside than in a low-rise neighborhood, any negative results of this phenomenon are outweighed by the positive effects of density. So many people live, work and play near Times Square that its streets are far busier than those of a less dense rowhouse area such as Washington’s Capitol Hill (or even of higher-density rowhouse areas such as New York’s West Village). By contrast, my current neighborhood in Kansas City is not particularly lively—but my block (dominated by a 10-story building) seems no more lifeless than the street a block away dominated by three-story buildings, or the single-family home blocks west of my building.

In fact, high-rises may sometimes increase street life by increasing the popularity of city life and thereby increasing urban density. The “streetlife” argument against urban high-rises assumes that people who don’t live in high-rises would be happy to live in low-rise apartment buildings. In other words, it assumes that consumer preferences are: (1) highrises, (2) lowrises, and (3) suburbia. But some consumers may prefer (1) highrises, (2) suburbia, (3) lowrises, because they are only willing to live in the city if they can get the amenities that come with (1) for example, doormen to enhance security (which are more common in high-rises than in smaller buildings) or elevators to reduce stress on aging knees and hips. In turn, these consumers are more likely to walk on city streets than if they lived in suburbia, thus increasing urban streetlife. And if they are business owners or executives, they are more likely to place their businesses in the city than if they lived in suburbia, thus causing even more people to walk on city streets.

To the extent that government uses the “streetlife” argument to prohibit or limit high-rise development, this argument has no logical stopping point. If the goal of public policy is to encourage people to leave their homes and use the streets, herding them into smaller buildings won’t really do very much, since some people can still be perfectly happy recreating in a rowhouse or single-family house. Instead, cities should make these homes as uninviting as possible; for example, cities could impose maximum apartment sizes instead of minimum sizes, and perhaps abolish all these pesky building codes that make apartments safe and comfortable. The Sustainable Cities blog post says that the high-rise “becomes your world, especially those which include a restaurant, market, gym and other amenities.” The same could be said of an apartment or house that includes exercise equipment (one’s surrogate gym) or a kitchen (one’s surrogate restaurant)—so perhaps we should outlaw indoor kitchens or exercise equipment.

To be sure, a neighborhood composed of nothing but high-rise apartments can be monotonous. But the culprit is not the scale of buildings, but their use. A neighborhood with high-rises standing on top of ground-floor retail (such as Broadway on New York’s Upper West Side) will typically be far more lively than a block of nothing but apartments (such as West End Avenue a block away).

(Cross-posted from Planetizen.com)

But under the wrong conditions, even a two-lane street can function almost as badly as a stroad. My parents in Atlanta live near Mt. Paran Road, a two-lane street that attracts 40-45 mph traffic for three reasons.  First, the absence of sidewalks scares off pedestrians- especially since many residences are surrounded by woods or bushes rather than by more walkable lawns, which means pedestrians have no alternative to walking in the street.  Second, despite its curves, the street is just straight enough and wide enough to accommodate fast traffic. Third, this part of the city lacks a grid of east-west streets, so Mt. Paran and two or three similar streets have become the easiest way to get from the western edge of the city’s affluent northside to north-south streets further east. As a result, Mt. Paran combines speed and congestion, much like a true stroad.  And when it is congested, a driver feels tremendous peer pressure to drive as fast as possible, because he or she is part of a long line of cars that cannot switch into another lane.

What can be done about two-lane stroads?  I’m not sure.  Sidewalks would be a major improvement; given the difficulty of getting anywhere nearby without driving on Mount Paran, I’m not sure traffic calming would be politically feasible.  But planners of future neighborhoods can certainly learn something from the difficulties of streets like Mount Paran: the best way to avoid turning residential streets into de facto regional arterials is to build a grid of streets that accommodate both drivers and pedestrians more effectively.

(Cross-posted from cnu.org, with minor modifications)

Of course, I am not the first person to discover this. For example, the plot of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged focuses less on the evils of the welfare state than on the efforts of a well-connected steel company (Orren Boyle’s Associated Steel) to use government to squash competition from Rearden Steel.

Peter Norton’s book Fighting Traffic shows how automobile-oriented street rules are at least partially a result of similar special interest manipulation. In the early 1920s, auto sales suffered because of urban traffic congestion and bad public relations related to the death toll from automobiles running over pedestrians. The auto industry and related groups such as road-builders and tire companies (or as Norton calls these groups, “motordom”) responded in three ways.

First, motordom hijacked the safety issue by blaming the victim. Car companies claimed that pedestrian deaths were the result of something called “jaywalking” (i.e., pedestrians using the streets as they had always used them, rather than waiting for automobile traffic to take its turn). In addition to financing a public relations campaign against jaywalking, motordom encouraged cities to enact anti-jaywalking ordinances.

Second, motordom lobbied government to reconstruct American streets in ways that favored fast car traffic, and even created its own “experts” to lobby city officials. A Los Angeles auto club hired Miller McClintock, a Harvard graduate student, as a consultant. Before being hired by the car lobby, McClintock wrote that widening streets would merely attract more traffic. After going on the motordom payroll, McClintock endorsed wider streets and fining jaywalkers. Car companies then hired McClintock to establish a foundation that taught engineers how to design cities for cars. The motordom-subsidized engineers then went to work in cities throughout the country, creating the sort of streets that infest cities today: wide streets where traffic flows at speeds fatal to pedestrians.

Of course, motordom needed a source of money to build these wider streets—so they urged government to enact gasoline taxes, and to devote gas tax money to widening streets and building new highways.

These motordom-favored streets shut out competing forms of transportation. Wider streets made walking unpleasant and dangerous, and thus discouraged not only walking, but also public transit (since most transit trips usually involve some walking).

New highways opened up new suburbs for development, thus shifting housing beyond the reach of existing streetcars, trains, and buses and forcing then-private transit providers to choose between two unpleasant options: losing revenue as its urban service area lost population, or spending money trying to extend service into suburbia. Today, motordom’s supporters claim that public transit is inefficient—but this inefficiency is largely the result of the motordom-endorsed policies discussed above.

In sum, the history of sprawl is actually a bit similar to the plot of Atlas Shrugged: just as Orren Boyle’s Associated Steel used government to smother Rearden Steel, the automobile lobby creatively used government to discourage walking and public transit.

(Cross posted from planetizen.com)

CityLine Partners, developer of the Scotts Run Station South project in Washington’s Northern Virginia suburbs, won rezoning approval last year to transform a typical suburban office park into 6.7 million square feet of mixed-use commercial and housing towers with ground-floor retail. The development plans includes contributing to a Tysons-wide grid street network, creating more walkable streets and reducing the parking footprint.

It would be a real coup to bring a Wegmans to the development. The upscale store appeals to exactly the kind of higher-income demographic that CityLine wants to attract to its project. But Wegmans’ business model meshes best with suburban development.  The company normally builds stores of more than 100,000 square feet surrounded by large surface parking lots. In Tysons, Wegmans was considering a new “urban” format of 80,000 square feet, similar to one it opened in Boston this spring, the Post reports. The idea was to place the store on the ground floor of a building with apartments upstairs.

Too bad Wegmans couldn’t make it happen. Some other grocery chain will. A tremendous share of future development in the United States will take place in walkable, denser, mixed-use communities like Scotts Run. Vast surface parking lots do not figure into the plan — the land is simply too valuable to squander on such a marginal use. In contrast to Wegmans, Wal-Mart, once the epitome of land-intensive suburban development and the object of scorn among urbanists across the country, has re-tooled its stores to fit in smaller urban footprints. In fact, a new complex developing around the Tysons West station will be anchored by a Wal-Mart.

For decades, retailers were a driving force behind sprawl. They built their business models around big stores, big parking lots and easy automobile access. They provided amenities in the suburbs that few center cities could match. But the market dynamics have shifted. People are moving to walkable urbanism whether Wal-Mart and Wegmans like it or not. Retailers need to invent new formats to serve the new markets. Inevitably, someone will. And when enough retailers make the switch, they will make walkable urbanism all the more alluring and its rise all the more inevitable.

– JAB

(Cross posted from Bacon’s Rebellion.)

(cross posted from cnu.org)