Walkable Cities: Lose Weight and Save Money Now!

Is your city a walkable city? Is it necessary to use your car for getting things done every day? How far away is your grocery store? How far is your favorite restaurant? Chances are, you probably need your car for most things. Why? The answer lies in the fact that the suburb is the American dream, and you probably live in a suburb. It’s not your fault that you’re living in a suburb. You can probably blame your grandparents or great grandparents.

Walkability as part of city planning is becoming a hot topic. Walkability is one of the many components in a movement known as New Urbanism. New Urbanism is a movement which has been gaining popularity since the 1980’s. New Urbanism calls for a complete reform of how city planning is done and how houses should be built. Walkability is an integral part of the New Urbanist movement. Walkability is simple in definition; it is how accessible a city is by foot. If daily life requires the use of a car, your city is not a walkable city. I like to think that the walkability of a city is also dependent upon mass transit. Ideal as it would be, not everything a person needs to do is accessible by foot, at least in a pleasant distance, even in a walkable city. Many walkable cities are large, like New York city. Having a rail system, like a subway or surface level light rail as found in Prague or Amsterdam, encourages people to walk because distances that are out of reach by foot, suddenly become accessible again, rather than having to pull the car out of the driveway. Using New York as an example, one would usually agree that using an automobile there is torture. Although the many boroughs are far apart, one could easily get to all of them with the right combination of walking and rail use.

Suburbs are often, if not always, not walkable to the places you need to go to get errands done. Suburbs are the spread out and clutter free off shoots of the main city near by. New Urbanism looks to Europe for examples of how cities are built and their continuity as vibrant cities that do not require the use of a car. Even smaller towns or suburbs in Europe, take for example Oxford, England, still for the most part are walkable. Suburbanization dates back as early as the 1800s, but for our purposes, today’s suburbs are the fault of the baby boomer generation. Affordable housing was demanded by the government after World War 2 for returning GIs. Soon, the single family home in the suburb became the dream of breadwinners everywhere and houses started appearing in droves. Suburbs were seen a pleasant, moral place, and the packed cities were left behind. These houses were built in low density, creating the need for the automobile to get new suburban homeowners into the core of the city to get whatever they needed since suburbs are often limited in the availability of goods.

In the US today, our most walkable cities would include: Boston, Chicago, Illinois, Seattle, Washington D.C., San Francisco, and Minneapolis. This list needs to be longer. We, as a country, need to push for our cities to become more pedestrian friendly. Certain abolishments can help us out. For example, the strip mall needs to be destroyed. The strip mall is a very auto oriented development. Not only are they tacky, but they are meant to cater to cars, rather than humans. David Sucher wrote a book called City Comforts, which is a guide to building more comfortable cities, with walkability being one of the key issues. Sucher has three rules for Urban Design that makes life more comfortable and cities friendlier to humans: build to the sidewalk (or property line), make building fronts permeable (no blank walls), and prohibit parking lots in the front of a building (as found in strip malls). Sucher thinks that if a city can incorporate these ideas, that we would be better off. Sucher sees the city as a place which should be pleasant, and with everyone walking, should be a place to have chance encounters with those you know.

Walkability can solve many of America’s most pressing issues. How? It is quite simple. Americans are overweight. Why? “Poor diet and lack of exercise” is the common answer. Instead of driving to the drive-thru (another horrid urban development) of a fast food retailer, why not walk to the local market or café. Take the rising cost of gas prices. What can we do individually? Not drive. However, not driving is simply unrealistic for most, but if cities catered to our feet as well as our cars, leaving the minivan or SUV in the driveway not only saves you money, but is also good for your health and lessening the burden the US collectively has on oil. So, get some comfortable walking shoes and get on with your life. The non-fast food, and non-fast paced style of life that walking can afford someone, is a pleasant one.