By Sarah Coefield, coefield@msu.edu
August 19, 2009
Great Lakes Echo
Despite rising gas prices and growing concern over greenhouse gases, many Great Lakes residents find it difficult to leave their cars at home.
The Web site www.walkscore.com ranked the walkability of 40 large cities across the United States. Of the five Great Lakes cities that were examined, only Chicago made the top ten.
So what makes a city walkable?
Dan Burden says a walkable community is “built around the human foot.” He founded Walkable Communities Inc. and has worked with cities nationwide to identify trouble and encourage pedestrian-oriented development. Burden is also on the board of advisers for Walkscore.com.
“(A walkable community) is the right size, scale and concept for people to live where they want to without ever getting into a car or only using it when it’s necessary,” he said.
Streets and blocks with a lot of connectivity provide multiple routes for pedestrians to reach their destinations while also slowing traffic. Density and zoning are also key factors, Burden said. Walkable communities have homes and businesses that are close together, so residents can go to work or run errands without jumping in the car.
In addition to ranking cities, Walkscore.com allows visitors to enter an address to get an idea of a community’s walk score.
It measures distances between popular destinations such as movie theaters, drug stores and restaurants. But it falls short when it comes to other important measures. The site does not account for public transit, crime or block length, all of which impact how pedestrians will navigate a community. Burden recommends residents use their own knowledge of their communities to get a better idea of their potential walk scores.
Many streets, like this one in East Lansing, Mich., are not pedestrian-friendly. Photo: www.pedbikeimages.org/Dan Burden
While large cities in the Great Lakes basin have a low walk scores, select neighborhoods within those cities earned the “Walker’s Paradise” rating. For example, the Loop in Chicago and the Lower East Side in Milwaukee have some of the highest scores in the nation.
“Good larger cities are made up of many great neighborhoods,” Burden said. “And so whether we’re talking about a Milwaukee, or even larger, a Chicago, we’re talking about many, many good neighborhoods.”
Great Lakes communities can raise their scores by focusing on the next wave of growth being inward rather than outward, Burden said. “Start with the downtown.”
Burden cites suburbs as the downfall of walkability, but is confident the vitality of a functioning downtown can draw residents inward. “The suburbs were the pursuit of a dream that wasn’t real,” he said. “There was always something missing from these places. You always had to get in your car to go somewhere.”
For Burden, a walkable community is about more than mere convenience. “In general, if we think back to any town we love … it tends to have been a walkable community.”
“The day those suburbs opened was their best day,” he said. “Downtowns, especially ones that are being revitalized and put back together, they’re organic and they have a life to them … they keep getting better once we start putting the investment back in them.”
To find your community’s walk score, enter an address in the Walk Score widget above.