Walkability

Posted by on September 20, 2006

Rick Chellman , principal with TND Engineering, posted this to a thread for Knight Fellows and I thought it was worth sharing...

Walkability as a new feature in an otherwise suburban area is one thing and details are VERY important; in a more established pedestrian environment, the streetscape can "get away" with more problems.
As many of you know, I have tried to place myself at the forefront of creating walkable streets and places for years; I have traveled widely and paid close attention to what "works" and what doesn't.

I have long enjoyed and at times have studied Portsmouth, NH as a very walkable place that generate a lot less vehicular traffic than it would were it "assembled" in a suburban fashion (I proved this with a cordon traffic count in the 1990's).

We moved to Portsmouth about a year and a half ago and, having a dog as well as liking to walk, I walk 5-8 miles/day around town from my home. These walks give me the opportunity to study details, and many are "wrong" based on what i know to be professionally better (problematic existing one-way streets, narrow sidewalks, etc).

But Portsmouth was settled in 1623 and still has the oldest continuously operating Naval shipyard. It also has a high concentration of very good restaurants and is rated as one of the top shopping locations in New England- its "sustainability" is pretty well established at this point in time.

Portsmouth also has many narrow streets- State highways 20' wide; two-way residential streets of 14-20' wide, with on-street parking etc.

It is not uncommon in my travels to many friendly locations to find strangers acknowledging and even speaking to each other when passing on the sidewalk; in Portsmouth, it is not at all unusual for this to occur across the street as strangers pass.

So, "walkability" can be a carefully crafted newly created place or a less carefully crafted older environment where pedestrians overpower the design problems.

Bottom line: If we make/enhance walkable environments, then we have preserved the best set of options for future transportation systems- be they buses, trains or Star Trek transporters, if we can walk to them their viability is automatically enhanced by orders of magnitude.