4 ways to make a city more walkable | Jeff Speck

Summary

The speaker discusses the concept of a 'walkable city,' emphasizing that it's one where cars are optional rather than essential. He outlines the 'general theory of walkability,' highlighting four key elements: a reason to walk, safety, comfort, and interest. The talk explores the contrast between traditional neighborhoods and suburban sprawl, the importance of mixed-use planning, and the role of transit. It also delves into practical aspects like block size, street width, and the presence of amenities that encourage walking, advocating for urban design that prioritizes pedestrians.

Takeaways

• 🚶 A walkable city is one where the car is optional rather than a necessity for freedom.
• 🏙️ Creating a walkable city requires offering compelling reasons to walk, ensuring safety, comfort, and interest during the walk.
• 📈 The speaker's 'general theory of walkability' suggests that walkability hinges on four simultaneous elements: reason, safety, comfort, and interest.
• 🌆 The typical American city's planning often lacks walkability due to zoning that separates uses and discourages walking.
• 🛣️ Sprawl is characterized by low-density, single-use areas that are not walkable and overburdened streets.
• 🏘️ Traditional neighborhoods, in contrast, are compact, diverse, and provide a mix of uses within walking distance.
• 🏢 Housing and jobs should be in balance in urban areas to support walkability; often, housing is underrepresented.
• 🚌 Transit is essential for a walkable city, but it must be complemented by walkability around transit stations.
• 🚦 Block size and street design significantly affect walkability; smaller blocks with mixed uses are preferable.
• 🚲 Bicycle infrastructure is a growing aspect of urban design, influencing the number of cyclists in a city.
• 🌳 Urban details like trees, on-street parking, and sidewalk design contribute to a safer and more comfortable walking environment.
• 🏢 Active ground floor uses, such as shops and restaurants, enliven streets and make walks more interesting and attractive.

Q & A

What is the definition of a walkable city according to the speaker?

A walkable city is defined as a city where the car is an optional instrument of freedom rather than a prosthetic device, implying that one should be able to enjoy freedom of movement without necessarily relying on a car.

What are the four essential elements required to make a city walkable according to the speaker's 'general theory of walkability'?

The four essential elements are: a proper reason to walk, safety and the feeling of safety while walking, comfort during the walk, and an interesting experience during the walk.

What is the historical context behind the formation of the planning profession as mentioned in the script?

The planning profession began in the 19th century when planners moved housing away from the soot-producing mills to improve living conditions and increase lifespans, leading to the onset of Euclidean zoning and the separation of the landscape into single-use areas.

Why does the speaker argue that the typical American city's planning is not conducive to walkability?

The speaker argues that typical American city planning, which often separates residential, commercial, and industrial areas, does not promote walkability because nothing is located near anything else, making it inconvenient for people to walk to different destinations.

What is the significance of mixed-use planning in creating walkable cities?

Mixed-use planning is significant in creating walkable cities because it allows for a diversity of places to live, work, shop, recreate, and get educated all within walking distance, thus providing a proper reason to walk.

How does the speaker describe the impact of suburban sprawl on walkability?

The speaker describes suburban sprawl as not compact, not diverse, and not walkable due to the lack of street connectivity, which leads to overburdened streets that are not safe for pedestrians.

What role does transit play in creating a walkable city according to the speaker?

Transit is essential in creating a walkable city because it provides access to the entire city as a pedestrian. Without transit, people are more likely to use cars, which can reshape the city to accommodate vehicles, leading to wider streets and larger parking lots that reduce walkability.

Why does the speaker emphasize the importance of block size in walkability?

The speaker emphasizes block size because smaller blocks, like those in Portland, Oregon, are more walkable. Larger blocks, as in Salt Lake City, tend to have more lanes and are less conducive to walking due to increased traffic and the distance between destinations.

What is the concept of 'induced demand' as it relates to city streets and how does it affect walkability?

Induced demand is the phenomenon where widening streets to accommodate anticipated traffic congestion actually leads to more traffic, as the congestion that was limiting demand is removed, allowing more vehicles to use the road. This can negatively affect walkability by encouraging more car use and reducing the focus on pedestrian-friendly infrastructure.

How does the speaker suggest improving the safety of walks in cities?

The speaker suggests improving walk safety by reducing street widths, implementing bike lanes, adding on-street parking to protect sidewalks, and ensuring that streets have proper edges and enclosure to provide a sense of refuge for pedestrians.

What is the role of 'interesting walks' in enhancing walkability and how can it be achieved?

Interesting walks are crucial for enhancing walkability as they provide a more engaging experience for pedestrians. This can be achieved by ensuring there are signs of humanity, such as active ground floors, mixed-use buildings, and avoiding large expanses of exposed parking decks or blank walls.

Outlines

00:00

🚶‍♂️ The Concept of Walkability

The speaker introduces the concept of a walkable city, where owning a car is an option rather than a necessity. He outlines the 'general theory of walkability' and emphasizes the need to provide reasons to walk, ensure safety, comfort, and interest during walks. The speaker contrasts the typical American city with more walkable cities and discusses the importance of mixed-use planning to create walkable communities.

05:03

🏙️ Building Walkable Cities

This section delves into the structural elements required for a walkable city, including proper urban design and planning. The speaker discusses the detrimental effects of sprawl and the importance of mixed-use zoning, compactness, and diverse neighborhoods. He highlights the role of transit in walkable cities and the impact of block size on walkability and safety, advocating for narrower streets and smaller blocks.

10:03

🚦 Designing for Safety and Comfort

The speaker focuses on the importance of safety in walkable cities, discussing the role of block size, street width, and the presence of lanes in creating safe environments for pedestrians. He critiques the overemphasis on accommodating cars, which leads to oversized streets and increased accidents. The speaker also touches on the benefits of narrower streets, on-street parking, and bicycle infrastructure in enhancing walkability.

15:05

🌳 Enhancing the Walkable Experience

In the final paragraph, the speaker discusses the elements that make a walk interesting and enjoyable. He talks about the psychological aspects of comfort, such as the need for 'prospect and refuge,' and the importance of edges and building ratios in creating inviting spaces. The speaker also highlights the role of active ground floors, the presence of trees, and the design of streets and curbs in influencing the walking experience.

Keywords

💡Walkable City

A 'walkable city' is a city designed in such a way that walking is a safe, convenient, and enjoyable mode of transportation. Defined as a place where the car is an 'optional instrument of freedom' rather than a necessity, the concept is central to the video's theme of urban planning that prioritizes pedestrian experience. The speaker discusses the importance of creating walkable cities for better quality of life and environmental sustainability.

💡New Urbanism

New Urbanism is a design movement that advocates for environmentally friendly habits by creating walkable neighborhoods with a wide range of housing and job types. In the script, the speaker credits Andrés Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, the founders of the movement, for their influence on the concept of walkability, emphasizing the importance of mixed-use development and traditional neighborhood design.

💡Euclidean Zoning

Euclidean zoning refers to land use regulations that segregate activities into distinct zones such as residential, commercial, and industrial areas. The term originates from the case 'Euclid vs. Ambler Realty Co.' The speaker criticizes this zoning practice for creating non-walkable cities where essential activities are not located near each other, thus promoting car dependency.

💡Traditional Neighborhood

A traditional neighborhood is characterized by its compact design, diverse land use, and walkability. The speaker contrasts this with suburban sprawl, highlighting the importance of traditional neighborhoods in fostering a walkable city. These neighborhoods are designed to include living, working, shopping, and recreational spaces within walking distance of each other.

💡Suburban Sprawl

Suburban sprawl describes the expansion of suburban areas characterized by low-density, car-dependent development. The speaker uses this term to describe the opposite of a walkable city, where lack of connectivity and over-reliance on cars make walking impractical and undesirable.

💡Transit-Oriented Development

Transit-oriented development (TOD) is a type of urban planning that maximizes the amount of residential, business, and leisure space within walking distance of public transport. The speaker mentions the importance of transit in creating walkable cities, noting that a walkable city requires access to the entire city on foot, which is often facilitated by well-planned transit systems.

💡Block Size

Block size refers to the dimensions of a city block, which can significantly impact walkability. Smaller blocks, as mentioned in the script with reference to Portland, Oregon, tend to be more walkable as they encourage more pedestrian activity and reduce the distance between destinations. The speaker contrasts this with larger blocks in Salt Lake City, which are considered less walkable.

💡Induced Demand

Induced demand is an economic principle that states that increasing the supply of a service (like road space) can lead to more consumption of that service, often negating the intended benefits of the increase. The speaker uses this concept to explain why widening roads to reduce traffic congestion can actually lead to more traffic, as the additional lanes encourage more driving.

💡Skinny Streets

Skinny streets are narrow streets that are considered safer and more conducive to walkability. The speaker mentions Portland's 'Skinny Streets' program as an example of urban design that promotes walking by creating streets that are more friendly to pedestrians and slower-moving traffic.

💡Bicycle Infrastructure

Bicycle infrastructure refers to the facilities and services that support cycling as a mode of transportation. The speaker discusses the importance of investing in bicycle infrastructure, such as dedicated bike lanes, to encourage cycling and enhance the walkability of a city. Examples from Portland and New York City illustrate the positive impact of such infrastructure on cycling culture.

💡Active Ground Floor

An active ground floor in urban design refers to the use of the ground level of buildings for engaging, human-scale activities such as retail, dining, or residential entrances. The speaker emphasizes the importance of active ground floors for making streets more interesting and attractive to pedestrians, citing examples like the 'Chia Pet Garage' in South Beach and the transformation of a neighborhood in Columbus, Ohio.

Highlights

The concept of a walkable city where cars are optional rather than essential for freedom.

The general theory of walkability requiring a proper reason, safety, comfort, and interest for a walk.

The importance of mixed-use planning to create a walkable city, contrasting with Euclidean zoning.

The historical context of urban planning and its impact on health and lifespans.

The traditional neighborhood model as a compact, diverse, and walkable community.

Suburban sprawl as the antithesis of walkability due to its lack of connectivity and compactness.

The negative effects of oversized parking lots and large public institutions on walkability.

The role of block size in determining walkability, with smaller blocks being more conducive to walking.

The phenomenon of induced demand in traffic planning and its impact on street congestion.

The redesign of Oklahoma City's downtown streets to improve walkability and reduce lanes.

The significance of on-street parking as a safety feature for pedestrians and a boost for merchants.

The impact of street width on driving speed and the preference for narrower streets in residential areas.

The growing bicycle revolution in American cities and the correlation with bicycle infrastructure.

The importance of detailed urban design elements like curb return radius and trees in slowing traffic.

The psychological aspects of walkability, including the need for prospect and refuge in urban environments.

The role of building design in creating an interesting walk, with active ground floors and human signs.

A case study of Columbus, Ohio, where a bridge redesign revitalized a neighborhood by improving walkability.

The necessity of addressing all four components of walkability simultaneously for a successful walkable city.

Transcripts

So I'm here to talk to you about the walkable city.

What is the walkable city?

Well, for want of a better definition,

it's a city in which the car is an optional instrument of freedom,

rather than a prosthetic device.

And I'd like to talk about why we need the walkable city,

and I'd like to talk about how to do the walkable city.

Most of the talks I give these days are about why we need it,

but you guys are smart.

And also I gave that talk exactly a month ago,

and you can see it at TED.com.

So today I want to talk about how to do it.

In a lot of time thinking about this,

I've come up with what I call the general theory of walkability.

A bit of a pretentious term, it's a little tongue-in-cheek,

but it's something I've thought about for a long time,

and I'd like to share what I think I've figured out.

In the American city, the typical American city --

the typical American city is not Washington, DC,

or New York, or San Francisco;

it's Grand Rapids or Cedar Rapids or Memphis --

in the typical American city in which most people own cars

and the temptation is to drive them all the time,

if you're going to get them to walk, then you have to offer a walk

that's as good as a drive or better.

What does that mean?

It means you need to offer four things simultaneously:

there needs to be a proper reason to walk,

the walk has to be safe and feel safe,

the walk has to be comfortable

and the walk has to be interesting.

You need to do all four of these things simultaneously,

and that's the structure of my talk today,

to take you through each of those.

The reason to walk is a story I learned from my mentors,

Andrés Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk,

the founders of the New Urbanism movement.

And I should say half the slides and half of my talk today

I learned from them.

It's the story of planning,

the story of the formation of the planning profession.

When in the 19th century people were choking

from the soot of the dark, satanic mills,

the planners said, hey, let's move the housing away from the mills.

And lifespans increased immediately, dramatically,

and we like to say

the planners have been trying to repeat that experience ever since.

So there's the onset of what we call Euclidean zoning,

the separation of the landscape into large areas of single use.

And typically when I arrive in a city to do a plan,

a plan like this already awaits me on the property that I'm looking at.

And all a plan like this guarantees

is that you will not have a walkable city,

because nothing is located near anything else.

The alternative, of course, is our most walkable city,

and I like to say, you know, this is a Rothko,

and this is a Seurat.

It's just a different way -- he was the pointilist --

it's a different way of making places.

And even this map of Manhattan is a bit misleading

because the red color is uses that are mixed vertically.

So this is the big story of the New Urbanists --

to acknowledge that there are only two ways

that have been tested by the thousands

to build communities, in the world and throughout history.

One is the traditional neighborhood.

You see here several neighborhoods of Newburyport, Massachusetts,

which is defined as being compact and being diverse --

places to live, work, shop, recreate, get educated --

all within walking distance.

And it's defined as being walkable.

There are lots of small streets.

Each one is comfortable to walk on.

And we contrast that to the other way,

an invention that happened after the Second World War,

suburban sprawl,

clearly not compact, clearly not diverse, and it's not walkable,

because so few of the streets connect,

that those streets that do connect become overburdened,

and you wouldn't let your kid out on them.

And I want to thank Alex Maclean, the aerial photographer,

for many of these beautiful pictures that I'm showing you today.

So it's fun to break sprawl down into its constituent parts.

It's so easy to understand,

the places where you only live, the places where you only work,

the places where you only shop,

and our super-sized public institutions.

Schools get bigger and bigger,

and therefore, further and further from each other.

And the ratio of the size of the parking lot

to the size of the school

tells you all you need to know,

which is that no child has ever walked to this school,

no child will ever walk to this school.

The seniors and juniors are driving the freshmen and the sophomores,

and of course we have the crash statistics to prove it.

And then the super-sizing of our other civic institutions

like playing fields --

it's wonderful that Westin in the Ft. Lauderdale area

has eight soccer fields and eight baseball diamonds

and 20 tennis courts,

but look at the road that takes you to that location,

and would you let your child bike on it?

And this is why we have the soccer mom now.

When I was young, I had one soccer field,

one baseball diamond and one tennis court,

but I could walk to it, because it was in my neighborhood.

Then the final part of sprawl that everyone forgot to count:

if you're going to separate everything from everything else

and reconnect it only with automotive infrastructure,

then this is what your landscape begins to look like.

The main message here is:

if you want to have a walkable city, you can't start with the sprawl model.

you need the bones of an urban model.

This is the outcome of that form of design,

as is this.

And this is something that a lot of Americans want.

But we have to understand it's a two-part American dream.

If you're dreaming for this,

you're also going to be dreaming of this, often to absurd extremes,

when we build our landscape to accommodate cars first.

And the experience of being in these places --

(Laughter)

This is not Photoshopped.

Walter Kulash took this slide.

It's in Panama City.

This is a real place.

And being a driver can be a bit of a nuisance,

and being a pedestrian can be a bit of a nuisance

in these places.

This is a slide that epidemiologists have been showing for some time now,

(Laughter)

The fact that we have a society where you drive to the parking lot

to take the escalator to the treadmill

shows that we're doing something wrong.

But we know how to do it better.

Here are the two models contrasted.

I show this slide,

which has been a formative document of the New Urbanism now

for almost 30 years,

to show that sprawl and the traditional neighborhood contain the same things.

It's just how big are they,

how close are they to each other,

how are they interspersed together

and do you have a street network, rather than a cul-de-sac

or a collector system of streets?

So when we look at a downtown area,

at a place that has a hope of being walkable,

and mostly that's our downtowns in America's cities

and towns and villages,

we look at them and say we want the proper balance of uses.

So what is missing or underrepresented?

And again, in the typical American cities in which most Americans live,

it is housing that is lacking.

The jobs-to-housing balance is off.

And you find that when you bring housing back,

these other things start to come back too,

and housing is usually first among those things.

And, of course, the thing that shows up last and eventually

is the schools,

because the people have to move in,

the young pioneers have to move in, get older, have kids

and fight, and then the schools get pretty good eventually.

The other part of this part,

the useful city part,

is transit,

and you can have a perfectly walkable neighborhood without it.

But perfectly walkable cities require transit,

because if you don't have access to the whole city as a pedestrian,

then you get a car,

and if you get a car,

the city begins to reshape itself around your needs,

and the streets get wider and the parking lots get bigger

and you no longer have a walkable city.

So transit is essential.

But every transit experience, every transit trip,

begins or ends as a walk,

and so we have to remember to build walkability around our transit stations.

Next category, the biggest one, is the safe walk.

It's what most walkability experts talk about.

It is essential, but alone not enough to get people to walk.

And there are so many moving parts that add up to a walkable city.

The first is block size.

This is Portland, Oregon,

famously 200-foot blocks, famously walkable.

This is Salt Lake City,

famously 600-foot blocks,

famously unwalkable.

If you look at the two, it's almost like two different planets,

but these places were both built by humans

and in fact, the story is that when you have a 200-foot block city,

you can have a two-lane city,

or a two-to-four lane city,

and a 600-foot block city is a six-lane city, and that's a problem.

These are the crash statistics.

When you double the block size --

this was a study of 24 California cities --

when you double the block size,

you almost quadruple the number of fatal accidents

on non-highway streets.

So how many lanes do we have?

This is where I'm going to tell you what I tell every audience I meet,

which is to remind you about induced demand.

Induced demand applies both to highways and to city streets.

And induced demand tells us that when we widen the streets

to accept the congestion that we're anticipating,

or the additional trips that we're anticipating

in congested systems, it is principally that congestion

that is constraining demand,

and so that the widening comes,

and there are all of these latent trips that are ready to happen.

People move further from work

and make other choices about when they commute,

and those lanes fill up very quickly with traffic,

so we widen the street again, and they fill up again.

And we've learned that in congested systems,

we cannot satisfy the automobile.

This is from Newsweek Magazine -- hardly an esoteric publication:

"Today's engineers acknowledge

that building new roads usually makes traffic worse."

My response to reading this was, may I please meet some of these engineers,

because these are not the ones that I --

there are great exceptions that I'm working with now --

but these are not the engineers one typically meets working in a city,

where they say, "Oh, that road is too crowded, we need to add a lane."

So you add a lane, and the traffic comes,

and they say, "See, I told you we needed that lane."

This applies both to highways and to city streets if they're congested.

But the amazing thing about most American cities that I work in,

the more typical cities,

is that they have a lot of streets that are actually oversized

for the congestion they're currently experiencing.

This was the case in Oklahoma City,

when the mayor came running to me, very upset,

because they were named in Prevention Magazine

the worst city for pedestrians in the entire country.

Now that can't possibly be true,

but it certainly is enough to make a mayor do something about it.

We did a walkability study,

and what we found, looking at the car counts on the street --

these are 3,000-, 4,000-, 7,000-car counts

and we know that two lanes can handle 10,000 cars per day.

Look at these numbers -- they're all near or under 10,000 cars,

and these were the streets that were designated

in the new downtown plan

to be four lanes to six lanes wide.

So you had a fundamental disconnect between the number of lanes

and the number of cars that wanted to use them.

So it was my job to redesign every street in the downtown

from curb face to curb face,

and we did it for 50 blocks of streets,

and we're rebuilding it now.

So a typical oversized street to nowhere

is being narrowed, and now under construction,

and the project is half done.

The typical street like this, you know,

when you do that, you find room for medians.

You find room for bike lanes.

We've doubled the amount of on-street parking.

We've added a full bike network where one didn't exist before.

But not everyone has the money that Oklahoma City has,

because they have an extraction economy that's doing quite well.

The typical city is more like Cedar Rapids,

where they have an all four-lane system, half one-way system.

And it's a little hard to see,

but what we've done -- what we're doing; it's in process right now,

it's in engineering right now --

is turning an all four-lane system, half one-way

into an all two-lane system, all two-way,

and in so doing, we're adding 70 percent more on-street parking,

which the merchants love,

and it protects the sidewalk.

That parking makes the sidewalk safe,

and we're adding a much more robust bicycle network.

Then the lanes themselves. How wide are they?

That's really important.

The standards have changed such that, as Andrés Duany says,

the typical road to a subdivision in America

allows you to see the curvature of the Earth.

(Laughter)

This is a subdivision outside of Washington from the 1960s.

Look very carefully at the width of the streets.

This is a subdivision from the 1980s.

1960s, 1980s.

The standards have changed to such a degree

that my old neighborhood of South Beach,

when it was time to fix the street that wasn't draining properly,

they had to widen it and take away half our sidewalk,

because the standards were wider.

People go faster on wider streets.

People know this.

The engineers deny it, but the citizens know it,

so that in Birmingham, Michigan, they fight for narrower streets.

Portland, Oregon, famously walkable,

instituted its "Skinny Streets" program in its residential neighborhood.

We know that skinny streets are safer.

The developer Vince Graham, in his project I'On,

which we worked on in South Carolina,

he goes to conferences and he shows his amazing 22-foot roads.

These are two-way roads, very narrow rights of way,

and he shows this well-known philosopher,

who said, "Broad is the road that leads to destruction ...

narrow is the road that leads to life."

(Laughter)

(Applause)

This plays very well in the South.

Now: bicycles.

Bicycles and bicycling are the current revolution underway

in only some American cities.

But where you build it, they come.

As a planner, I hate to say that, but the one thing I can say

is that bicycle population is a function of bicycle infrastructure.

I asked my friend Tom Brennan from Nelson\Nygaard in Portland

to send me some pictures of the Portland bike commute.

He sent me this. I said, "Was that bike to work day?"

He said, "No, that was Tuesday."

When you do what Portland did and spend money on bicycle infrastructure --

New York City has doubled the number of bikers in it several times now

by painting these bright green lanes.

Even automotive cities like Long Beach, California:

vast uptick in the number of bikers based on the infrastructure.

And of course, what really does it,

if you know 15th Street here in Washington, DC --

please meet Rahm Emanuel's new bike lanes in Chicago,

the buffered lane, the parallel parking pulled off the curb,

the bikes between the parked cars and the curb --

these mint cyclists.

If, however, as in Pasadena, every lane is a bike lane,

then no lane is a bike lane.

And this is the only bicyclist that I met in Pasadena, so ...

(Laughter)

The parallel parking I mentioned --

it's an essential barrier of steel

that protects the curb and pedestrians from moving vehicles.

This is Ft. Lauderdale; one side of the street, you can park,

the other side of the street, you can't.

This is happy hour on the parking side.

This is sad hour on the other side.

And then the trees themselves slow cars down.

They move slower when trees are next to the road,

and, of course, sometimes they slow down very quickly.

All the little details -- the curb return radius.

Is it one foot or is it 40 feet?

How swoopy is that curb to determine how fast the car goes

and how much room you have to cross.

And then I love this, because this is objective journalism.

"Some say the entrance to CityCenter is not inviting to pedestrians."

When every aspect of the landscape is swoopy,

is aerodynamic, is stream-form geometrics,

it says: "This is a vehicular place."

So no one detail, no one speciality, can be allowed to set the stage.

And here, you know, this street:

yes, it will drain within a minute of the hundred-year storm,

but this poor woman has to mount the curb every day.

So then quickly, the comfortable walk has to do with the fact

that all animals seek, simultaneously, prospect and refuge.

We want to be able to see our predators,

but we also want to feel that our flanks are covered.

And so we're drawn to places that have good edges,

and if you don't supply the edges, people won't want to be there.

What's the proper ratio of height to width?

Is it one to one? Three to one?

If you get beyond one to six, you're not very comfortable anymore.

You don't feel enclosed.

Now, six to one in Salzburg can be perfectly delightful.

The opposite of Salzburg is Houston.

The point being the parking lot is the principal problem here.

However, missing teeth, those empty lots can be issues as well,

and if you have a missing corner because of an outdated zoning code,

then you could have a missing nose in your neighborhood.

That's what we had in my neighborhood.

This was the zoning code that said I couldn't build on that site.

As you may know, Washington, DC is now changing its zoning

to allow sites like this to become sites like this.

We needed a lot of variances to do that.

Triangular houses can be interesting to build,

but if you get one built, people generally like it.

So you've got to fill those missing noses.

And then, finally, the interesting walk:

signs of humanity.

We are among the social primates.

Nothing interests us more than other people.

We want signs of people.

So the perfect one-to-one ratio, it's a great thing.

This is Grand Rapids, a very walkable city,

but nobody walks on this street

that connects the two best hotels together,

because if on the left, you have an exposed parking deck,

and on the right, you have a conference facility

that was apparently designed in admiration for that parking deck,

then you don't attract that many people.

Mayor Joe Riley, in his 10th term, Mayor of Charleston, South Carolina,

taught us it only takes 25 feet of building

to hide 250 feet of garage.

This one I call the Chia Pet Garage. It's in South Beach.

That active ground floor.

I want to end with this project that I love to show.

It's by Meleca Architects. It's in Columbus, Ohio.

To the left is the convention center neighborhood, full of pedestrians.

To the right is the Short North neighborhood -- ethnic,

great restaurants, great shops, struggling.

It wasn't doing very well because this was the bridge,

and no one was walking from the convention center

into that neighborhood.

Well, when they rebuilt the highway, they added an extra 80 feet to the bridge.

Sorry -- they rebuilt the bridge over the highway.

The city paid 1.9 million dollars,

they gave the site to a developer,

the developer built this

and now the Short North has come back to life.

And everyone says, the newspapers, not the planning magazines,

the newspapers say it's because of that bridge.

So that's it. That's the general theory of walkability.

Think about your own cities.

Think about how you can apply it.

You've got to do all four things at once.

So find those places where you have most of them

and fix what you can,

fix what still needs fixing in those places.

I really appreciate your attention,

and thank you for coming today.

(Applause)