The healthiest, most economically advantaged and sustainable cities on the planet share one trait: their walkability.
Walkable cities are better for the environment, people’s overall wellness, and positively impact levels of wealth. Unfortunately for those of us in the United States, a lot of our cities were built around cars — not feet. For as much as folks love the walkability of New York, Boston, Minneapolis, and Savannah, they dislike in equal measure the sprawl of other beloved cities like Atlanta, Los Angeles, and Dallas.
Recent pushes for healthier urban designs across the country are changing the landscape of cities. Central Park, arguably the world’s most famous green space, will be permanently closed to cars as of this June. Meanwhile Los Angeles, leader of car culture, has found itself in the throes of an “infrastructure renaissance” to become more pedestrian and eco-friendly. And 62 percent of millennials today say they prefer to live in pedestrian-friendly, mixed-use neighborhoods.
Experts assess various factors to determine a city’s walkability.
The walkability of a city is measured by the following:
- Access to amenities like supermarkets, doctors, parks, schools, and restaurants;
- Design that encourages safe pedestrian traffic such as crosswalks, well-lit sidewalks, a city center, and proximity of destinations to one another;
- Green spaces! Trees have been shown to improve commuter mental health and actually reduce the number of traffic accidents;
- Concentrated transit corridors (making public transportation easy, with direct routes to major hubs);
- A design that people find interesting with public art, mixed-use buildings close to the street, a variety of architecture, parks and green spaces; and
- Comfort and ease with which people can get around, including designated spaces for bicycles, pedestrians, and vehicles. This may also include narrower streets with fewer lanes, forcing vehicles to drive slowly.
You can see how your favorite city stacks up to these litmus tests with applications like Walk Score, which allow you to look up any American city’s walkability score. The group’s “Walk Scoremetric” draws on data from the US Census, Google and OpenStreetMap to rank communities from zero to 100. In 2017, Walk Score found the top-10 walkable US cities to be (in order from most walkable to least) New York, San Francisco, Boston, Miami, Philadelphia, Chicago, Washington, DC, Seattle, Oakland, and Long Beach.
But don’t stop stateside! Just last month, internationally renowned urban planner and consultant Brent Toderian came up with a way to find the most walkable city in the world: He surveyed the Twitterverse.
Hundreds of results poured in; with the top-five cities voted for (in order from most beloved to least) Barcelona, Edinburgh, Venice, Tokyo, and Toronto. The only US city to make the top 10? New York, in seventh place.
Following the outpouring of responses, Toderian had this advice: “If you can focus on only one thing for a more livable, healthy, sustainable, resilient, successful city, work to build a more #walkablecity.”
City planners have answered call to redesign outdated, unsustainable design.
Devesh Doobay, director of planning and economic development for the City of Riverdale, Ga., has in the last 15 years also worked for planning departments in New York City and Tampa, Fla. He spoke to us by phone about the changing landscape of urban planning.
Doobay said planners are going block by block through towns and cities to deconstruct where things went wrong, and replace sprawl with what he calls “community cohesion.”
“Since the advent of cars, when people were planning cities they just didn’t know any better,” Doobay said. “Fifty years from now, planners will look back at us and think we’re crazy for not considering autonomous vehicles in our urban design. The truth is, plans are redone constantly according to different times and trends. Today, we’re getting back to walkability. And for that, there’s a lot of thought that has to be put into the deconstruction of things.”
Central to walkable cities are green spaces.
Incorporating green spaces into urban design is critical, Doobay said. “It allows for the interspaced areas to create recreation spaces actively and passively. Even if it’s just a small patch of grass with a bench on it in a median of a city block, sitting there to meet a friend and be in that green space serves a vital purpose, especially in denser, more urbanized cities. In more sprawling cities like Dallas, LA or Atlanta, green spaces can serve as more environmental buffers to incorporate nature into a city landscape. But they also answer infrastructure concerns.”