In Jeff Speck’s excellent new book, Walkable City, he suggests that there are ten keys to creating walkability. Most of them also have something. Walkable City Rules. Steps to Making Better Places. pages 8 x 8 full -color photos/figures. Jeff Speck. Paperback. $ ISBN: In Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time (public library), city planner Jeff Speck, who spent four years leading.
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Jeff Speck: The walkable city | TED Talk
As a person who is really interested in the possibility of creating better cities to solve 1 social problems such as inequality, 2 health problem that comes from lack of useful daily physical activities such as spefk and 3 environmental problems that come from inefficient use of automobiles in our life, this book was basically created for me.
Let Transit Work VI. I grew up in the suburbs watching shows about the suburbs. On street parking makes neighborhoods safer and increases walkability.
When the walk got to ten minutes each way I stopped visiting Dun Laoghaire. Enumerating and understanding these criteria is a project for a lifetime–it has become mine–and is forever a work in progress p. We must transform wxlkable places into ones that are human- and health-friendly. Obviously, nice architecture is important, but you can do with wrong.
Jeff Speck
The three-story building sits on a flatiron lot and measures about square feet per floor. Cycling among Londoners jumped 20 percent and air pollution fell about 12 percent. Bigger highways mean more traffic.
I used to go to Dun Laoghaire regularly, some years ago; then the planners introduced parking charges and spread them over an increasingly wider area. But in the typical American city, the car is still king, and downtown is a place that’s easy to drive to but often not worth arriving at. Once I got into it, I hated to stop reading and couldn’t wait to get back walkwble it.
I zpeck make an educated guess, but it seems like a glaring omission.
He has a number of examples where highways have been walkqble, and the result is a much nicer environment. Lincoln Street in San Jose.
Make friendly and unique faces I’ll Be Glad You Did’–that was remarkably insightful in its recognition of the impacts of one person’s transit on another’s traffic p. This ensures that people like me, who drive a van to and from work at your house and need to remove all the tools every evening, and may tow a trailer, will never come to live in that neighbourhood. He borrows from David Owen’s The Green Metropolis for the section on cities’ environmental advantages, of course, and that’s a superior read for the why of walkability.
The rules are practical yet engaging—worded for arguments at the planning commission, illustrated for clarity, and packed with specifications as well as data. Just as Suburban Nation was a fundamental book for understanding the problems of American urbanism, Walkable City is its complement, a comprehensive citizen’s guide for advocacy, giving people an idea of what measures they can work to effect on the local scale.
I don’t know what that is and we are not told.
Talk and Book Signing: Correction for 2 18 Aug 02, You might be interested in his chapter on shaping public spaces, but even there the treatment is fairly superficial. Sep 04, Hannah Reeves rated it really liked it Shelves: People who ask ‘what is missing from my city? Car crashes have killed over 3. Making Change Now I. It would seem somewhat mundane and obvious, but as aforementioned this is a book that touches on multiple disciplines and the author brilliantly builds the case for rethinking the design of our communities around people and not cars.
The last chapter is about being pragmatic. I was surprised at how many of my thinking were confronted by counterintuitive ideas, proofing yet again that speckk design we spefk account for how humans actual behavior rather than how we think they should behave. But pedestrianising can go too far. While progress has made in improving walkways in Berea, the major structural problems that developed in the past 40 or so years remain, and remain difficult to solve. Make cities attractive for walkers.
Each concept is explained in plain language and usually backed-up with world real examples. The book focuses around the concept of walkability. Surprising amount of information on why our cities are formed the way they are, the forces that keep them that way, and some suggestions on how to change that.
For most of human history, cities were limited to the area that people could cover on foot within a day, but the advent of railed transportation and later cars expanded our range, and cities grew enormously, far beyond pedestrian access. While most cities were reaming out their roadways to speed traffic, Portland implemented a Skinny Streets program Another great read, one that gives any city the necessary tools to create a good walk.
What most surprised me about this book, though, is how entertaining it is. New York, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, and not many others, provide an equivalent or better quality of life for the carless p. It’s a tough one. Mar 27, Sandy Singh rated it really liked it. Great book for the mobile among us.
Walkable City Rules
The better informed residents are, the more valuable our efforts in working with city council and city staff in supporting the ongoing development of a city focused on wealth, health, sustainability and yes — walkability!
The chapter on parking policy, for instance, is just a lightweight summary of Donald Shoup’s “The High Cost of Free Parking”, and Speck’s ideas for managing motorist behavior echo Tom Vanderbilt’s “Traffic”.
He even has some evidence that roads narrowed from 3 lanes to 2 lanes actually jefc carry the same amount of traffic.
I’m not an urban planner, but I think the kind of cities he is arguing for are exactly the kinds of places I want to live in and visit.