Jeff Speck has gone from being a city planner and architectural designer to one of the world’s most-acclaimed authors on walkability in a relatively short time.
The author of Suburban Nation (with Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk) and Walkable City spoke at a recent symposium sponsored by Mobility Lab and the Association of Commuter Transportation.
Here are 10 things Speck mentioned in his excellent presentation that should inspire anyone to consider leaving the car in the garage or even on the dealer’s lot altogether.
- The only reason he and his wife have one car – living in the Washington D.C. neighborhood of U Street, which is loaded with transportation options – is that they now have a second child. Two car seats makes it very difficult to go car-less, but they did enjoy their first seven years on U Street without a car.
- His wife usually drives the kids around, while Speck bikes and takes transit. He says bicycling is by far the fastest way around D.C. “If you build a city right, you won’t have to have cars.”
- Why walk, bike, and transit more? Tremendous cost savings. Huge health benefits. Protect our planet.
- Speck said the research shows that the more a state causes you to drive, the less wealthy you will be. Again, cost savings.
- “The suburbs are killing us. One-third of all children born since 1990 will become diabetics.” That aligns with the fact that homes in the American suburbs average 13 car trips each day.
- “The greenest place to live in America is in the heart of the city. Humans are a destructive species. If you love nature, stay away from it.” He added that people who live in Manhattan have a third of the carbon footprint of the rest of the nation.
- To nudge city planners and officials along, here are a few suggestions from Speck: get rid of one-way streets where there are businesses, make streets safer by changing 4-laners to 3-laners with a bike lane, create “billboards” for healthy biking by paining bike lanes green, add trees to make streets instantly safer, and fix streets that are already close to walkable as a way to get started more manageably with the urban plan.
- Inspiring nugget #1: Forty-three percent of kids in Portland walk or bike to school, up from about 10 percent a decade ago.
- Inspiring nugget #2: Denver’s population grew by 28 percent when it used the “urban triage” method over a decade. Some of the reason was definitely that it built up a small walkable area.
- When downtowns begin to get market-rate housing, it is usually at least partly because merchants have been convinced to go along with an end to free parking practices and opted for competitive parking pricing so that 80 percent of spots are full and the previously useless parking then gets turned into better uses.
Speck said that more Americans should have the opportunity for a car-optional existence. That means mistakes like DART in Dallas should not happen. It is the largest urban transit system in the nation, but ridership has dropped every year they’ve been building it because there’s nowhere for riders to walk once they get off at most stops. Couple that with the cheap parking throughout Dallas and the road-building plan and there is little reason to ride DART.
He also said that mayors should be chief designers of their cities. “People won’t remember if their mayor balanced a budget, but they’ll remember if the mayor establishes a park.”
Photo by M.V. Jantzen. And for more of his photos from the ACT conference, please go here.