Walkable Communities

- Is creating a walkable community a design issue? Counterpoint: cities in Europe that have extreme car congestion and are still rife with pedestrians. However, these cities were originally designed for pedestrian traffic.

- Walking can be seen as 'competitive' to driving in the sense that it is competing against advertising campaigns and other media produced by car companies etc.

- There are micro issues of design (are there enough sidewalks? are they wide enough?) and macro issues of design (is the mixture of zoning diverse enough to provide incentives for people to want to walk around?)

- Density and congestion can actually promote walking

- Possibility of really plugging the idea of walkable communities for improved health and reduced health care costs

- How do you plan municipalities to promote mixed use? How much control and influence do planners and policy makers have over affecting the composition of a community?

- There are explicit laws and regulations that can be used, and then there are incentives (e.g. if you, as landowner, adhere to these recommendations put forth by the developer, the development process will be faster, easier, etc.) But ultimately, the landowner holds a lot of clout that can only be defeated or mitigated by regulation.

- How do we break the habits of people who instinctively take the car when they could be walking? E.g. how do we produce incentives for consumers in addition to incentives and regulations for businesses?

- Perhaps encouraging and providing incentives to students and the population at large to travel, they will see more communities that rely on walking and be more willing to adopt that change here

- Provide exemplar cases -- e.g. use Kensignton Market as a car-free zone, do a good job, and use it to promote further change. This will likely involve changing our description of the solution to reducing car congestion in the area instead of eliminating it (e.g. provide easy mechanisms for deliveries to be made on time by delivery vehicles etc. but bar most consumer auto traffic).

- Existing communities are designed by planning streets first (i.e. we think of the cars first) and then transit etc. with pedestrians last. There are examples now of communities that are being built with pedestrians in mind first (e.g. Markham Cornell), and we need more exemplar cases like this.

- And we need to take into account that our population is aging, and the walking distances we estimate as 'reasonable' accomodate people of reduced mobility, although if we improve the situation of pedestrians, the health benefits of walking may allow for greater mobility in old age

- Density does several things:

  1. Diminshes distances between services, thus increasing proximity of things you need/want.

  2. Increases auto congestion, providing discouragement to drivers and encouraging pedestrians

  3. ?

- Is there an ideal density?

- A greenfield plan is considered to be "transit-supportive" if there is a density of 50 persons or jobs per hectare

- Downtown Toronto is 400, Manhattan perhaps roughly 600

- We need to be aware of our language when 'selling' the idea of density to new communities, so that the emphasis is on great design (which necessarily includes considerations of density) instead of simply talking about density explicitly and raising the hackles of those who associate density with ugliness.

- It is our responsibility to educate people about great design, because we all have access to tools now that make the transmission of such information possible.