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Maybe within the same general area, though then things like schools and cost matters as well
Yes.
I actually prefer neighborhoods that are more balanced even though I don't have kids, don't really plan on having kids. Midtown Sac or Pearl aren't really neighborhoods where families live. It's more 20 and 30 something hipsters.
Sacramento is particularly hard in that the schools are horrible. They're at least pretty good in Pocket or North Natomas, and then East Sac and Land Park have good schools up to high school where people go private or move. Otherwise, out to the suburbs with you. That's unfortunate, but a bit of a conundrum. The middle-class and working-class with kids avoid 90% of Sacramento because the schools are horrible so the schools will never improve. The only people who live there with kids either don't care (private school, perhaps) or are so poor they can't afford to live anywhere else. Sac isn't all that expensive. You can buy a modest house that feeds into very good schools just a couple miles from Sacramento for $300-350k. North Natomas is good and starts around $280k or so, 10-15 minutes from downtown so it's close too. So most people do that as opposed to $150-$200k for a house in Sacramento with bad schools but that isn't an active warzone. The warzones are, of course, cheaper.
Hmm. I would include having lots of actual pedestrian arounds, as an area where people actually walk
There's lots of pedestrians in Palladio in Folsom (outdoor lifestyle center). It's highly unwalkable. People get there by car and then walk around to buy things or eat or watch a movie or shop at Whole Paychecks, often a combination of the above.
Just in general, shopping malls have lots of pedestrians. Very few are walkable though. City Center in SF, sure. More confusing would be downtown Walnut Creek. Certainly walkable, but up until very recently there was no housing in downtown Walnut Creek. Downtown Redwood City is a bit like that. Certainly walkable, lots of people walking around... getting there by walking, however, not really feasible for the majority of people walking around any of them. I'd be very hesitant to call Walnut Creek walkable. Palladio I would absolutely refuse to call walkable. Palo Alto or Albany, sure those are walkable.
The problem is that people have vastly different ideas of what building for human beings entails. Suburbs are built for human beings. Cities are built for human beings. You have bigoted individuals with overly rigid views who refuse to accept the simple fact that just because something isn't built to their exact specifications it's bad. They call it things like "built for cars," which is of course nonsense. It's built for people. Most people prefer to get around by car.
We're at a disagreement.
I call an area built for cars because it is designed to be most easily traversed in a car; the built form is matched to the needs of a person-as-driver, not as a person-as-pedestrian or person-as-cyclist. As Nei stated, the built forms are entirely different. For a person-as-driver, one would have wide, abundant lanes, straight streets, few stops, and abundant parking. For a person-as-pedestrian, most publications I've read say (and this is a view I agree with) that an average person wants slow, quiet vehicle traffic on relatively narrow streets, short setbacks, wide sidewalks, active building frontage, dense (horizontally, perhaps not vertically) construction. One built form produces fast speeds but few pedestrians, the other many pedestrians but slow traffic.
Examples of human scale are the downtowns of Palo Alto, Los Gatos, Saratoga, Willow Glen, Columbia (CA), Mountain View, or places like Normal Heights (San Diego), Cannery Row (Monterey), Tiburon, Santa Cruz, "old" town Folsom, San Perdo Square (San Jose), Santana Row (Santa Clara), etc.
I call an area built for cars because it is designed to be most easily traversed in a car; the built form is matched to the needs of a person-as-driver, not as a person-as-pedestrian or person-as-cyclist. As Nei stated, the built forms are entirely different. For a person-as-driver, one would have wide, abundant lanes, straight streets, few stops, and abundant parking. For a person-as-pedestrian, most publications I've read say (and this is a view I agree with) that an average person wants slow, quiet vehicle traffic on relatively narrow streets, short setbacks, wide sidewalks, active building frontage, dense (horizontally, perhaps not vertically) construction. One built form produces fast speeds but few pedestrians, the other many pedestrians but slow traffic.
Examples of human scale are the downtowns of Palo Alto, Los Gatos, Saratoga, Willow Glen, Columbia (CA), Mountain View, or places like Normal Heights (San Diego), Cannery Row (Monterey), Tiburon, Santa Cruz, "old" town Folsom, San Perdo Square (San Jose), Santana Row (Santa Clara), etc.
Not really. For a person as driver straight streets don't matter much, but for bus routes and walking somewhere productively straight streets are important(the more the road meanders the more walking you are going to have to do to get somewhere.).
Few stop lights is only good if you have no intention of stopping or turning on/off the street. Some roads are built to conduct traffic through an area enabling fast long distance travel and others are not. An city is an mix of both types of road.
For person as pedestrian I want sidewalks, and cross walks and places where I can cross easy. I could careless about narrow streets unless I actually live on an building on said street. Slow and quite only if you live near it. Wide sidewalks, not unless there is an problem with the width of the sidewalk, short setbacks maybe, dense construction not really, active building frontage(ah is the building putting on an show?).
The reason why you get fewer pedestrians in some areas is because those areas are less dense to begin with. Pedestrians are mostly going to be people who live in the area or maybe a some that have traveled there for some reason(work, night life, ect...) and that is about it.
Was the two lane driveway to the garage really necessary here?
That is a tough one, it could depend on how big the parking garage is for this building, and it could be a zoning law of some sort that requires the two lane driveway, especially based on the location of the garage entrance.
Walkable is vastly overstated, anyway. You know how many people commute to work by walking in San Francisco? 8%. Eight. That's it. San Francisco is pretty damn walkable, but only 8% walk. It's higher somewhere like Manhattan, at least for people living and working in Manhattan. Walking, biking, etc is over half. That's huge, don't get me wrong. But the nature of Manhattan means that most people cannot live there. There's far too many jobs in one location and as a result most workers are not living in Manhattan but rather commuting in. You know how many people commute in to Manhattan by other (walking, biking, motorcycle, telecommuting)? 4%. It's a trivial number, effectively none.
How many people take transit to work in SF? The times I have been to SF, I noticed most people that live in SF live in the walkable neighborhoods throughout and not so much downtown. With that in mind, I wouldn't imagine many people there would walk to work due to the distance they have to go, but I would think that many people walk to many other things that are within their neighborhood.
I call an area built for cars because it is designed to be most easily traversed in a car; the built form is matched to the needs of a person-as-driver, not as a person-as-pedestrian or person-as-cyclist. As Nei stated, the built forms are entirely different. For a person-as-driver, one would have wide, abundant lanes, straight streets, few stops, and abundant parking. For a person-as-pedestrian, most publications I've read say (and this is a view I agree with) that an average person wants slow, quiet vehicle traffic on relatively narrow streets, short setbacks, wide sidewalks, active building frontage, dense (horizontally, perhaps not vertically) construction. One built form produces fast speeds but few pedestrians, the other many pedestrians but slow traffic.
Examples of human scale are the downtowns of Palo Alto, Los Gatos, Saratoga, Willow Glen, Columbia (CA), Mountain View, or places like Normal Heights (San Diego), Cannery Row (Monterey), Tiburon, Santa Cruz, "old" town Folsom, San Perdo Square (San Jose), Santana Row (Santa Clara), etc.
I'd say we're in agreement. It's just that I don't think most people would call that walkable since there's wide streets, fast traffic, not much active building frontage, lots of parking.
Built for of Santa Row absolutely reflects human use. It's intended to be driven to. That's why it faces inward and has abundant parking. It's pretty nice to walk around once you're there though as that's it's intended use. Drive, park, walk around. There's some housing there, of course, but nowhere near enough to support the amount of shopping and dining. Almost no one will walk there and the design reflects that.
Why? I'd rather talk about the study than the walkability / public health topic in general.
Plenty of times on CD posters criticize studies for all I'm not saying it's incorrect nor do I know , I'm saying it's not informative. Their sample was neighborhoods that had relatively low walkability, it doesn't say much whether more walkable areas (which may not have been the subject of the study anyway) affect health; you can't extrapolate past the observed data in a study.
But if we must keep talking about this topic, how about a very clearly walkable area? New York.
Highest obesity rates are NOT in the inner city. They are in rural areas. In NYC itself, much wealthier but less walkable Staten Island [Richmond County] has a higher obesity rate than Brooklyn [Kings County]. Queens is below the state average, well off unwalkable Putnam County is above. What's going? There's one rather obvious factor besides walkability and income, I'll let interested posters guess.
Why? So we can go on for another 10 pages or so about how Phoenix isn't really walkable at all? All we have is that one little paragraph of an abstract and people on here with no background in public health whatsoever want to come to far-reaching conclusions about it. We haggled about it on two other threads too, back in 2011.
I note that obesity rates vary across NY. The least obese county is a suburban county (I think), Rockland, followed by NY and Nassau Counties. I city, 2 suburban. Westchester (suburban) is pretty low, too. Those are the only counties with an obesity rate <20% in NYS.
I'd say we're in agreement. It's just that I don't think most people would call that walkable since there's wide streets, fast traffic, not much active building frontage, lots of parking.
Built for of Santa Row absolutely reflects human use. It's intended to be driven to. That's why it faces inward and has abundant parking. It's pretty nice to walk around once you're there though as that's it's intended use. Drive, park, walk around. There's some housing there, of course, but nowhere near enough to support the amount of shopping and dining. Almost no one will walk there and the design reflects that.
Santa Row is walkable for those that live there. But I am guessing Santa Row is a private developer project where their focus is making money, not knitting their development into the surrounding fabric.
How many people take transit to work in SF? The times I have been to SF, I noticed most people that live in SF live in the walkable neighborhoods throughout and not so much downtown. With that in mind, I wouldn't imagine many people there would walk to work due to the distance they have to go, but I would think that many people walk to many other things that are within their neighborhood.
About 2% of San Francisco isn't walkable, and downtown is a small part of it, depending what you consider downtown. The FiDi is about half a square mile, which is what most people consider downtown. It's also not particularly "dense" by population count being below the population density of San Francisco as a whole. Way more people work there than the 10,000 or so that live there.
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