What makes a place or space walkable? (colonial, Florida, Georgia)
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Interesting to see SF's mode share. Comparing District 1 ("greater downtown") to the electoral ridings (voting districts) of Toronto Centre and Trinity Spadina which include Downtown Toronto and then some, District 1 has about 190,000 residents vs 265,000 for the 2 Downtown Toronto ridings.
Commute mode share
SF Core:
20% walk
8% bike
43% transit
31% drive/carpool
Toronto Core
29% walk
6% bike
36% transit
26% drive/carpool
So less walking in SF by a non-insignificant number and more of the other 3 modes.
Topography, perhaps. That part of San Francisco has some pretty mean hills. Americans are just lazy? Around downtown, I usually just walk. Kind of sucks going up the hills though since I'm usually lugging about 30-50 pounds of stuff like a camel.
Edit: transit is also much cheaper in San Francisco. A monthly pass is $56, $80 for BART within the city. Toronto is $133.75 I don't know how much of an effect that would really have though.
No, you just don't know what the word means. Someone preferring to live where it's horrible to drive (thus forcing people to walk or take transit) isn't necessarily a bigot. Someone who complains that a place is horrible to drive in likewise is not necessarily a bigot. One likes to live in such an environment, whereas another does not like to live in such an environment. This is a simple disagreement. Person A likes it where it's horrible to drive; Person B does not like it where it is horrible to drive. No bigotry is implied there on either side.
OK, I probably wasn't clear enough. I will use your own words:
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.
This can easily be changed to:
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 "anti-car," which is of course nonsense.
I'm just saying that both "sides" can be hostile towards each other, not just the urbanist/walkable folks.
OK, I probably wasn't clear enough. I will use your own words:
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.
This can easily be changed to:
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 "anti-car," which is of course nonsense.
I'm just saying that both "sides" can be hostile towards each other, not just the urbanist/walkable folks.
Well, of course both sides can be. But again, you have some areas that ARE anti-car. Seattle, for example, has anti-car policies in and around downtown. That's certainly not bad, per say, they're just policies that are designed to actively discourage car usage, something Seattle is very upfront about. They are anti-car policies. They're not anti-car in the sense that they want to eliminate cars or anything, just reduce the number of cars coming into downtown while simultaneously being very pro-growth. Downtown Seattle has grown at 5x the pace of Seattle as a whole over the past decade or two.
I actually like Seattle and think they're doing some fantastic things with downtown, and a large part of that is that they have for a long time been implementing anti-car policies and investing heavily in transportation. That goes back a really long way too. Seattle was one of the first cities to stop building urban freeways in the city core, for example.
For somebody who needs to drive maybe Belltown doesn't meet their specifications. It was very hard to find a place to park when I lived there in 2008 and imagine it's only gotten worse. I was in a new building with a parking garage but there was a waitlist. I ditched the car then as I didn't need it anyway but now that wouldn't be feasible with my job. I'm all over the place an transit doesn't work for that. On the other hand, it clearly does for many people. Car ownership rates have actually increased in the downtown area (probably due to gentrification). Many people obviously are willing to live in Belltown despite the cost and not necessarily being able to park nearby. I'm too price sensitive to pay that much money to park my car though.
On the flipside, for a commuter that wants to drive into downtown it's also problematic. There's a parking maximum of 1 spot per 1,000 SQF of office space. These days most offices are packing in an employee per at least 200 SQF. Clearly not everyone can drive in. Again, a reasonable policy in my mind. Traffic is already bad and there's been lots of new office space built downtown with no real increase in road capacity.
Anyway, so what? If you're someone that absolutely must drive everywhere, Belltown would be a difficult place to live. Solution? Don't live there. The policies make a lot of sense to me. That doesn't mean they meet my exact specifications as they don't. Belltown would not be on the shortlist of neighborhoods I'd be looking at for many reasons, one of them being the cost and availability of parking. Overall, though, I like what they're doing. It's just not what I'm looking for. Big difference between that and calling it inhuman development designed for shoes and choo choo train deviants rather than real people just because for me personally it's not what I'm looking for.
And yes, I completely agree with you. There's definitely a lot of bigotry on the other side with looking down on people, get a car, loser, sentiment if you will. That's something I like about Seattle or the Bay Area as opposed to Sacramento. That type of nonsense is much less prevalent than it is here in interior California.
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.
Note the authors have no background in urban planning or a related field.
You know what isn't "walkable", a sidewalk that is block off with a sign pointing to other side of the street that says "Please use other sidewalk"
A frequent occurrence in San Francisco with all the construction going on, a place I would consider highly walkable myself. Half the time I ignore it and scuttle across. With all the construction going on at the new Transbay Terminal, however, I've been forced to cross the street on several occasions. I'm not really up for "scuttling" an entire block in a traffic lane. Annoying, but so it goes.
This is sort of riffing off of the other thread about college campuses, but I think it belongs here more.
Think for a second about a college dorm. The hall between the dorm rooms is, theoretically speaking, just a means of transit - you walk through the hallway between your dorm door and the stairwell or bathroom. However, in virtually all college dorms, the hallway becomes a public space for socialization. People desire a common space for recreation, and so they re-purpose the area that they walk through for recreational purposes. When students are commuters, a similar thing does not happen. Even if they chanced upon one of their friends when driving down the street, they would not pull over the car to have a chat with them then and there.
This is pretty much the core of walkability - the use of a public space not only as a method of conveyance, but as "room" that one lives part of their lives in. If you're walking on the sidewalk, and you run into a friend, you can stop and have a chat. Or you could decide to pause and look at a house being constructed across the street - you can "live in" the location, rather than just briefly observe it on the way somewhere.
As we live in a capitalist consumer-based society, walkability for adults ends up often revolving around commerce. But it does not have to. In a society where people have precious little free time, and much of recreation revolves around shopping or dining, by definition more people when they get off work will be walking in commercial districts than on quiet residential streets. But the college example shows that this doesn't need to be true. College students have much more free time than the average full-time worker, and spend plenty of time ambling about when they aren't buying anything.
The logical conclusion you would also draw from this is even shopping malls can be walkable, as are non-commercial areas like parks. As nei often says, if there are a lot of people walking somewhere, by definition it is a walkable space - even if they drive there before they walk.
^^And do note that many students can't wait to get out of the dorms, or into suites or whatever. There are plenty of other places to congregate besides the hallways of the dorms.
A frequent occurrence in San Francisco with all the construction going on, a place I would consider highly walkable myself. Half the time I ignore it and scuttle across. With all the construction going on at the new Transbay Terminal, however, I've been forced to cross the street on several occasions. I'm not really up for "scuttling" an entire block in a traffic lane. Annoying, but so it goes.
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