I live in L.A. , a country of 20 - lane interchanges , parking lots the size of football game stadiums , and mind - bending , soul - crushing , living - vary dealings . Every daylight , I meet people who do n’t even know we have a public transit system and see places in my neighborhood without any sidewalks . This is because , a half - one C ago , my metropolis decided to redesign itself for car , not humans .
L.A. ’s seemingly bright plan to re - engineer its urban environs has become a global affliction . There are now 60 million raw machine being added to the planet every year , and with those vehicles come more smog , toxic emanation and dependance on rapidly deplete resources . As we embrace the car , our cultures become more sedentary , and rates of obesity and heart disease increase . machine not only make our cities unhealthful , they also make our cities grave : In some places , more people are stamp out by auto than infective diseases like malaria .
To undo these X of suburban propaganda is basically to unravel a perversion of the American Dream , one that has since travel around the world . But there is a novel and sound aspiration afoot , even right here in L.A. : One of a happy , healthy city engineer for walk .
walk is the simplest , most cost - effective way to improve a metropolis ’s economical and environmental viability . Walkable Cityauthor Jeff Speck said it best inhis late TEDCity2.0 talk : “ Sustainability — which includes both wellness and wealthiness — may not be a function of our bionomical footprint , but the two are deeply interrelated . If we contaminate so much because we are throwing away our sentence , money , and lives on the highway , then both problem would seem to share a single solution , and that solution is to make our urban center more walkable . ”
I ’ve plant several revolutionize examples of tools that can encourage citizens to choose walk , help oneself interior decorator work up more inviting street , and let urban center to prioritize people over cars .
Valuing walkability
You ’ve belike listen ofWalk Score , a instrument that can tell you how walkable your destination is by mensurate its distance to amenities like restaurants , stores , and theodolite . Now Walk Score is gaining serious grip in the real landed estate market by promoting walkability as a desirable part of choosing where to live . The situation latterly begin featuring apartment rentals with their Walk Scores prominently displayed , providing an interesting way to place actual time value on what we pay in rent . I imagine hear people at a dinner party party a few years from now bragging about the great deal they got on a two - bedroom condominium . Not only about the price : “ It has a staring 100 Walk Score ! ”
But it ’s not just a palpate - full tactic to rent apartments . A2009 study by CEOs for Citieslooked at 94,000 real estate transactions in 15 American market place and found that , in 13 of the 15 markets , higher walkability scores ( using Walk Score ’s rankings ) were directly linked to higher home values . This is critical entropy for the people who are designing and building our neighborhoods . prove that potential purchaser value walkability will not only serve developer focus their elbow grease establish in walkable districts , but it can also help guide urban planners to encourage and incentivize new lodging in these denser areas .
A cross - section of the Great City in Chengdu , China which will have a car - free centre of attention and many footer - only zones
gondola - free neighborhoods are already a reality in place likeVauban , Germany , where the cars are banned and a trolley to nearby Freiburg runs through the town . TheGreat City , project for Chengdu , China , is even more challenging , intended to house 80,000 people in a entirely railcar - spare nerve centre with regional mass transit connections . designer Adrian Smith and Gordon Gill forecast that resident will be able-bodied to take the air anywhere in the city within 15 minutes .
Minutes, not miles
Knowing how long a base on balls will take makes all the difference . take the air Score featurestravel time maps , which allow you to see how far you ’ll be able to walk , bike , drive , or take public conveyance in a certain amount of meter . Google Maps ’ addition of walking , biking , and transport options to its directions has been the greatestgame - modifier for increasing walk . With a click of a release , what was be after as a journey in a car becomes a possibility on foot .
The Transport for London app Re : Route not only tells you how many calories you ’ll burn by walking , it rewards you with decimal point you may switch for deduction at local businesses
Reroute.itallows you to compare your journey for several modes of transportation at once across many different cistron : price , time , kilocalorie glow , and the amount of CO2 emissions your tripper will generate . dead a walk becomes more sympathetic when you may calculate its other benefit : even though it will take twice as long , for good example , you ’ll pass no money and could burn up to 500 nutritionist’s calorie . Even more fascinating is another app namedRe : Route(above ) , which rewards Londoners who choose fundament or motorcycle transit with points that can be exchanged for discount from a full range of partners . That ’s extra motivation to get walking .
This is only the get-go . With Google Glass and other augmented world machine , the route info we experience on our smartphones will bedisplayed in the urban environment , in genuine fourth dimension . This month , theodolite directionshave been added to Glass , to complement the existing walk direction . Such entropy could be tacked onto our Nike FuelBands and FitBits , which would depend how much walking we could add to our commute to accomplish our day-by-day step goal — maybe nudge us to get off the bus a stop betimes .
WalkNYC is a new wayfinding system designed by PentaCityGroup for New York City that help go-cart understand the space between neighborhoods and landmark
But even with Google Glass at the ready to tell us our favorite legal community is a 400 - calorie walk away , we still require physical admonisher our urban center is walkable . level-headed signage can help . Legible London , a city - wide system , is one of the just examples out there , and New York City latterly implementedWalkNYC .
For city that do n’t have the resources to create permanent signage , there ’s the unfastened - source projectWalk Your City , which allow anyone to design , mark , and install wayfinding signage for their cities fit with QR codes that can be scanned to see the entire system . Even though it ’s a impermanent solution , it can lead to substantial - Earth change : Signs installed in Raleigh , North Carolina , got the care of the local transit planners , and a movement was quickly afoot to install city - approved signs .
The signs , in a signified , commute the invisible app datum into a kind of value proposition for the walker . watershed are pointed out , of line , but the most powerful part of this signage is that it does n’t express distances in miles — it measures in moment . This is a small but important detail . If you tell someone a coffee shop is two miles off , it feel far . But if you say it ’s a 40 - minute walk of life , suddenly this starts to vocalise far more approachable .
Reclaiming the streets
You might physically be able to walk to a grocery store , but crumple pavements or poor street kindling might make the walk less than pleasant — meaning you may be less potential to do it again . A site calledWalkonomicstakes into consideration eight extra constituent ranging from safety to beauty when grade walkability . Instead of scoring an speech , streets are ranked unripened , yellow and ruddy free-base on how honorable they are for walk . Walkonomics utilise data but there ’s an effort to crowdsource these conditions using real - sentence human observations : A chemical group calledWalkability Asiahas develop anappso anyone can garner selective information ranging from pavement quality to the speed of cars in23 Asian cities .
Walkonomics have into write up several different criteria when snitch street for their walkability
Perhaps the biggest balk for walkers is the sensing that it ’s unsafe , which can stand for anything from dim street firing to badly marked crosswalks to in high spirits crime . In the approximate future , the proliferation of ego - drive cars , likeGeneral Motors ’ EN - V , could help prevent collisions with pedestrians ( and other automobiles ) , and reduce the amount of urban space devoted to cars . But walking is the only option for a large portion of the world ’s population that can not afford a elevator car , which order the satellite ’s most vulnerable citizen at risk — even by 2020 , it ’s estimate that 78 percent of the households in China will still not have a car .
https://gizmodo.com/could-gms-tiny-self-driving-smartcar-actually-revoluti-1442166427
In emerging megacities such as Mumbai , minute roads and paths plan for walking have now become overproduction by vehicles . Some 40 percent of the great unwashed walk to work , and an astounding57 percent of all people killed in dealings accidents are footer . In Chennai , a local newspaper launched a movement calledRight to Walkwhich promote residents to photograph poor walking atmospheric condition in an movement to support government leader more creditworthy . It would appear that this advocacy is work : one of Chennai ’s densest region isplanning a pedestrian zona .
But another safety concern is our quickly aging population , which ca n’t navigate the city as expeditiously on animal foot . raptus deviser are nowredesigning cities for elderly walkersusing a special suit originate by researchers at MIT calledAGNES(Age Gain Now Empathy System ) which mime the swiftness , intensity level and manual dexterity of a someone in their 70s . Using the causa , everything from cross signals to curb meridian can be adjusted .
Redesigning for availableness , or universal design , will be perhaps the biggest changes we ’ll begin to see in our cities in the forthcoming eld : incline rather of stair , large case on signage , bench on more corners . In Thailand , the Chaing Mai state isinvesting in retirement communities , including making improvements to its urban space that will help make its cities more welcoming to pedestrians .
Inviting pedestrians
The open street event CicLAvia in Los Angeles is the bombastic open streets event in the U.S. Photo by Gary Leonard
In Los Angeles , CicLAviais held three times a year and has farm to become the largest open - street happenings in the U.S. with over 100,000 citizenry in the streets per event . It goes against every known stereotype about L.A.
But something interesting happened after the first few events : the city begin to instal permanent bike lanes and parklets along the itinerary where the festival go on . baby-walker have now literally gain ground in the city — as they have around the world — with the addition of plazas and other car - free zones . Now , one of the city ’s independent thoroughfares , Broadway , is beingconverted into a footer - well-disposed street . The city now hastwo pedestrian coordinators , and a group I joined calledLos Angeles Walks .
The value of increase pedestrian activity goes beyond the good walk vibration : Arecent study by UCLAnoted that business concern that actively take part in CicLAvia image their cut-rate sale increase by 57 percent , with customer more probable to return . Walking is now an economic driver for minuscule businesses in city of Los Angeles . Not bad for a urban center that devise the motorway .
Aversion of this storywas originally publish as part ofBBC Future ’s Building Tomorrow serial .
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