Kaid Benfield
Kaid Benfield is the director of the Sustainable Communities and Smart Growth program at the Natural Resources Defense Council, co-founder of the LEED for Neighborhood Development rating system, and co-founder of Smart Growth America.
We have a number of formal and informal ways to think about what makes a good walkable community. I’ve written before about the popsicle test (can a child comfortably walk to buy a popsicle and walk back home?), the Halloween test (does the neighborhood attract kids walking door-to-door on Halloween?), and the 20-minute neighborhood (can you meet most all of your daily needs within a 20-minute walk or transit ride?).
My friend Steve Mouzon adds the tourist test (is the town or place good enough that people will want to vacation there?); Scott Doyon, not entirely in jest, likes the “pub shed” (how many drinking establishments are within walking distance?). For those who like numbers, the increasingly sophisticated Walk Score calculates the number and types of typical destinations within comfortable walking distance of any given location and assigns a rating based on the outcome.
Steve has now added another, very interesting idea to the mix: he posits that, in fact, "comfortable walking distance" is not a constant but a variable, and that the distances we are willing to travel on foot to do something depends on the quality of the environment along the way. Steve calls his concept "walk appeal." Streets and neighborhoods that entice us to walk farther have greater walk appeal.
In Steve’s provocative blog Original Green, he illustrates the idea by comparing two different environments that produce very different outcomes as to how far one is likely to walk:
Walk Appeal . . . explains several things that were heretofore either contradictory or mysterious. It begins with the assertion that the quarter-mile radius (or 5-minute walk), which has been held up for a century as the distance Americans will walk before driving, is actually a myth.
Both images below are at the same scale, and the yellow dashed line is a quarter-mile radius. On the left is a power center. As we all know, if you're at Best Buy and need to pick something up at Old Navy, there's no way you're walking from one store to another. Instead, you get in your car and drive as close as possible to the Old Navy front door. You'll even wait for a parking space to open up instead of driving to an open space just a few spaces away . . . not because you're lazy, but because it's such a terrible walking experience.
The image on the right is Rome. The circles are centered on the Piazza del Popolo (North is to the left) and the Green radius goes through the Vittorio Emanuele on the right. People regularly walk that far and then keep on walking without ever thinking of driving.
As you can see, the distance that Steve suggests one will happily walk in the depicted section of Rome is far, far longer than the distance between the two stores in the American power center. And I don’t doubt for a minute that Rome has a great deal more appeal to walkers than your typical parking lots fronting a couple of big-box stores.
Continuing, Steve suggests that one will walk two miles or farther in a world-class city such as London or Paris, but "put a Parisian accustomed to walking five miles or more per day on a suburban American cul-de-sac, and they wouldn't walk much." He further posits that people will walk about three-quarters of a mile on a good American Main Street, where buildings tend to have entrances right along the sidewalk and narrow storefronts to provide variety in the walker’s view. For residential areas, Steve says that, if a neighborhood is or mimics a traditional (pre-1950) one, we typically will walk about a quarter of a mile. But in sprawling suburbs, the distance drops to about 250 feet, and in a power center of big-box stores the distance drops to 100 feet.
In his post, he elaborates:
People won't walk across a sea of parking to get to another store because the walking experience is simply too dreadful. This is exacerbated by the fact that a sea of parking is a heat island, capturing and storing the sun's heat in all that dark asphalt, raising the temperature of the air above it by dozens of degrees in summertime. A sea of parking is also a huge stormwater runoff problem, and is most often solved by building really ugly stormwater retention pits nearby. If you don't know what they are, a retention pit is a depression several feet deep in the ground, usually surrounded by an ugly chain-link fence, where all the styrofoam cups, packing peanuts, and plastic wrapping collects after a rain.
So, one could say that a street in the heart of a world-class city has much more walk appeal than a typical suburban American street, and that a traditional Main Street has more walk appeal than big-box stores separated by a large parking lot. Steve says that “Walk Appeal promises to be a major new tool for understanding and building walkable places.”
Intuitively, I think he is on to something here. But it raises a lot of interesting questions that I think also deserve to be in the conversation. The most obvious, I suppose, is whether empirical research is consistent with the theory. I suspect it is, at least directionally, but one would like to base "a major new tool" on solid, proven facts.
In addition, as I’m sure Steve would agree, there are all sorts of variables and additional factors to consider:
In the first of what Steve promises will be a series of follow-up posts, he takes the idea a bit further and suggests that walk appeal can be measured, or at least that some of its key ingredients can be. Here are some of the factors he highlights:
I think I prefer to think of Steve’s list as suggestions for architects and planners – a basket of techniques that a designer can draw from when designing streets and buildings, particularly areas with significant commercial presence -- more than “measurables,” as he calls them. (Steve is himself an architect and designer, so it makes sense that his emphasis is on design.) But I think this business of what makes places appealing to walkers may be as much art as science.
For example, I grabbed a bunch of images from Google Earth in order to show parts of my walk home from Metro when I choose one of the longer-than-necessary options (in this case, 1.16 miles instead of 0.58 miles from the nearest stop). The route has immense walk appeal for me – I take it by choice – yet it would be found lacking on some (not all) of the components that Steve mentions, and it has significant walk appeal assets on some components that he does not mention, such as the presence of nature and pleasant residential architecture. I bring this up not to challenge my friend but just to add to the discussion.
Now, to be fair there is a section between numbers 6 and 7 above that I am not showing because it's institutional and somewhat dreary, for just the sorts of reasons that Steve cites as indicating a lack of walk appeal. If the entire route were like that, I would probably walk it less frequently.
What I like best about the concept of walk appeal is the suggestion that a comfortable or pleasant walking distance is highly variable, and that part of the reason we choose to drive even short distances sometimes is that the experience of walking to them is so horrible. Steve has provided some useful new vocabulary and an interesting new frame through which we can evaluate and consider streets and neighborhoods.
I’m all in on those ideas, and think Steve came upon a “Eureka!” moment when he found a way to articulate it. I’m going to keep reading – Steve’s writing is almost always engaging, and this time he has sparked a dialogue among his architect and planner friends, as well. But my hunch is that, for me at least, it is the idea of walk appeal that has power, and I would caution against getting too quantitative or definitive about its application.
This post originally appeared on the NRDC's Switchboard blog.