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By Dan Burden
Mr. Burden is the Director of Walkable Communities, Inc., (www.walkable.org/) and he is an internationally renowned advocate for walkable communities. These tips are borrowed from the Walkable Communities website.
Walkable communities are cornerstones and keys to all forms of efficient ground transportation. Every trip begins and ends with walking. Walkable communities put town planning back on a scale of sustainability. Here are some steps that you can take to make your community more walkable.
The Walkable Audit
The first step is to conduct your own walkable audit. Take a nine-year-old child with you, or push a baby stroller for tours of your neighborhood, your central business district, strip commercial section, and local school zone. Ask yourself how comfortable you feel walking. Are there continuous walkways and crossing points convenient to your needs? Are the walkways well separated from traffic? How many curb cuts are there and are they easy to negotiate? Do you feel welcome walking in these places? All these attributes are more than frills. They are necessary to create welcoming spaces.
Once you have performed an audit as an individual, expand this to include key people from you community. Get opinion leaders on your walk. Have a group with significant clout serve as sponsors of the walking audit. Include the mayor, council members, senior planners, engineers, safety officials, and law enforcement staff.
Develop a Plan
Goals, objectives and strategies come at the first stage of planning, but planning must be comprehensive. Your plans should be built into every level of community planning - transportation, community development, recreation, transit. . . everything. Make sure that your plan includes better ways of planning. Much conventional planning overlooks pedestrians.
Set Realistic Goals, Objectives and Strategies
Set reasonable community and regional goals for having your major roadway corridors and new developments built or retrofitted for walking by the year 2015. Change cannot occur overnight. But over a 15-20 year period, any town can restructure enough of its thinking and action to make a difference. Set achievable and measurable objectives that work within your community budget. Set priorities. Fund projects that link neighborhoods, and near shopping districts, schools, and transit centers, first.
Reverse the Funding Priorities
Today most communities only fund walking infrastructure on a "plead-the-case" basis. Omitting sidewalks should be the exception, not the rule. Require every builder and developer to provide walkways. Require appropriate facilities (sidewalks, crosswalks, mid-block crossings) on every collector, arterials or other principal street and highway right-of-way project in you community. Even resurfacing projects should be keyed to going back and retrofitting those where appropriate facilities were forgotten in the past.
Set Criteria
Sidewalks and crosswalks should not be anemic. Review the criteria for sidewalk, crosswalk and other infrastructure standards, and set workable walkable minimums. For good examples, review the design standards of cities where you enjoy walking. Call for shade tree canopies. Trees are cheap to plant and greatly increase property values and enjoyment of walking. Review design criteria for intersections. Most intersections work best for everyone (motorists too), when they are compact and well designed.
Collaborate and Communicate
Communities that cannot figure out how to communicate between agencies or levels of governments are doomed. A strong mayor, council, borough manager or other administrator must get a sense of teamwork underway. Towns and cities that do not communicate with counties and regions will always be working at cross purposes.
Don't Give Up
Strong community and regional visions are needed. If your town lacks this cooperation and coordination, start by rebuilding good town government first, then expand to the region. Examples abound of places that have turned around entire regions after first building one "real" community that serves as a model for others. Don't Give Up. Courtesy, community and passion are found in America's most walkable places.