Walkable Cities Where Walking is the Useful, Safe, Comfortable and Interesting Choice [Podcast Series]

Jeff Speck is a city planner.
He is the author of several books including Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America One Step at a Time.

“But it took me many years of doing this work to realize that actually good urban design is designed for walking, and all the things that walking supports and that support walking. And that actually if you use walking as both kind of the measure of the success of a place, but also develop a series of strategies around making walking more possible, more likely, more effective, more instrumental in our lives, then you make better places.”

“How do you create an environment in which people are making the choice to walk or bike, in fact, rather than to drive? And the answer is that the walk has to be as good as the drive. And for the walk to be as good as the drive. It needs to do four things simultaneously. It needs to be useful, safe, comfortable, and interesting. So we look at the factors that contribute to each of those four things. And we try to improve them.”

“And they basically said, the reason why we have the first generation of Americans are expected to live shorter lives than their parents is because we've engineered out of existence the useful walk in our communities. You know, bad diet is one thing, but inactivity is just as important. Maybe more important.”

“What the epidemiological studies showed was that the reason that people in cities were surviving COVID better was because they were healthier because they walked more. And it was almost like the epidemiologists were my, like I had coached them, because they basically boiled it all down to walkability and said, it would be a bad idea for people to leave walkable places and move to unwalkable places because they're going to end up out of shape and more likely to die from COVID.”

“You're not going to have the big yard, you're not going to have the big home typically, but you have access to so many public facilities, right, that the density floats, that can make it a much better quality of life.”

“School location and size has a huge impact on the kid’s health and ability to learn and the way that you get to school really predisposes you towards being a better or worse learner.”

“The one thing that has changed the most is that finally in 2023, we've made normal, at least in the progressive cities, we've made normal bike infrastructure that was normal in Berlin in 1995. So it took us, it took us almost 30 years.”

“But if your city can give you a safe route, maybe not 100% safe, but a generally a non-treacherous route to and from your work. And you have the opportunity to bike on it. Of course, the risk you face from injury is real. But it's dwarfed by the benefits that you get to your health from being fit and active.”

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