Your Walkable Community Can Be Bikeable Too

Making a walkable community can contribute significantly to saving energy on transportation. It's often a short route from a pedestrian friendly community to a bicycle friendly one. Much more should be done to promote pedestrian safety and bicycle safety through design of so-called complete streets.

Both biking and walking are enjoyable ways to exercise, and both are efficient ways of completing relatively short trips in congested areas near downtowns. In sum, the social benefits of promoting a walkable community and more cycling are great.

Sidewalks and Walkways

Let's take walkability first, as it has greater potential. The number of adults who are interested in cycling is limited, and equipment hauling and equipment maintenance are involved. A walking community has the advantage of being able to connect with other transportation systems and recreation possibilities without worrying about how a cumbersome cycle will interface with the rest of your day.

Many older communities have an ample sidewalk network with adequate care taken for pedestrian safety. Keeping the sidewalks in good repair seems to be a battle in many communities, and in the urban core, sidewalk maintenance from the public sector may come rarely if at all.

But keep up the pressure to maintain sidewalks, as it's important that we have many ways to get around. If you hang around community work very long, you will hear something about "pedestrian scale" and how pleasant it is to be able to walk through a business district where the street lighting is down low enough that it lights the sidewalk rather than the wider area illuminated by the highway-oriented taller street lights. The pedestrian scale in a business district encourages leisurely browsing, which contributes to unplanned purchases that are good for your local merchants.

But of course for the pedestrian scale to be an advantage to your business, you have to have pedestrians. And they really don't want to get their shoes muddy, have to walk in the street for half a block where there's no sidewalk, or trip over the sidewalk section displaced by tree root upheaval.

Where there's a sidewalk network, repair and maintain it. If there are a few missing links, correct that.

Where residential areas or strip malls were developed with no sidewalks, your journey to a walkable community will be tougher. Lobby your municipal government to figure out a plan to install the walks. In retrofit situations, commonly you'll have to settle for walks on one side of the street only. Installing sidewalks will subtract from either the street or the yards, but most streets can withstand what is known as a road diet (a cute term for making the street more narrow).

To assess whether it is practical to convert driving area to sidewalk, you would need to consider the frequency of on-street parking, the amount of traffic, whether there are certain congested times of the day or week, and other visibility and safety conditions along the street. If traffic is low, such as on many residential streets, the street itself may well have been overbuilt. If you are a walking advocate, try to convince your local government that walkable communities are the way of the future.

Connectivity

Probably an even greater problem than lack of sidewalks is the lack of connectivity of many post-World War II streets. The privacy of a cul-de-sac was presumed to be highly desirable. Unfortunately it also means that the walk from Point A to Point B may be three times as long as the straight line distance between those two points.

Your neighborhood should become serious about being a walkable community, for the sake of preventing childhood obesity if nothing else. If you do, then you need a planning process for how to deal with the cul-de-sac effect. In brief, the solution lies in obtaining easements or outright purchases of property by the local government to allow walkways to be installed between two houses.

In many places one pair of houses on the cul-de-sac can spare the room, although often it's going to be a fight. You will need to make walkability a campaign with some popular support before you even approach property owners with any such idea.

If you are able to institute a program of improving your walking community appeal through new sidewalks and new walkways connecting the cul-de-sacs, you need to publicize the improvements so people have an idea of where they can now walk.

Many states provide for special assessments of taxes on a benefits district that creates an amenity such as sidewalks. Ask your city attorney about this, and organize your neighbors to request sidewalks, even if you have to pay for them over a several-year period.

Organized Walks

The first season sponsor organized walking events that can turn into fun community events. Leave from a park or school where people can fill their water bottles, and perhaps provide a snack or ice cream at the end if you have an organizational sponsor.

The organized walks may be a way to build momentum for a capital investment program featuring new sidewalks and walkways also. If people in your area are afraid of crime as they walk, the group activity could help ease that fear and make it possible for the older and more vulnerable citizens to participate.

Barriers to a Walkable Community

You also will want to look at major barriers to walkable community goals, such as wide high-speed roads and possibly railroad or industrial passages where the footing does not seem sure. Your neighborhood creek, although a terrific potential asset, also can serve as a barrier for getting around.

So look at whether a pedestrian bridge over a major highway, creek, or grouping of railroad tracks would make people feel and be safer. Could you connect your immediate neighborhood of concern to a park or other amenity if you had a safe passage? An underpass also is possible in many situations, including under many bridges over streams.

The federal government sponsors a Safe Routes to School program that aims at removing barriers to safe walking to schools. Investigate this, with the help of your state highway department, local planner, or larger local transportation offices. Improvements for school kids will equal a more pedestrian friendly walkable community also.

Bicycling in a Walkable Community

Cycling should be promoted especially as part of wellness programs and in low income communities. It's hard to beat for inexpensive transportation. But adults rediscover the fun also, and many relatively short bicycle trips serve the dual purposes of recreation and the utility of running one short errand without putting up with traffic and parking.

Cycling requires many of the same considerations as building a walkable community. For example, retrofitting of facilities and connectivity are critical points. Additional needs are clear markings for bicycle lanes, educating cyclists to pedal in the same direction as the automobile traffic, and educating motorists that in many states the cyclist has every legal right to be in the driving lane.

Other bicycle safety considerations include, for example:

1. Making sure that curbs are cut where they should be,

2. Checking into loose stormwater grates and other obstructions near the curb,

3. Assuring that cyclists have somewhere to go on ramps and other narrow transition points, and

4. Providing what is known as a bicycle slot in traffic islands that often separate right-turn lanes from the straight-ahead lanes. Giving the cyclist a place to wait if he or she is caught in the middle of a broad intersection is very important to comfort.

Bicycling will increase in a community when the connections are more plentiful. Wherever possible, think of providing off-street paths. These can be multi-use paths accommodating not only cyclists but also pedestrians, strollers, wheelchairs, rollerblades, and so forth. You can see an abundance of examples on the American Trails website. To begin a bicycle trails program for your community, look for long linear corridors that are underused. Often these will follow a stream or a utility corridor. There may be unused road right-of-way, old streetcar lines, old railroads, or old canal roads. The abandoned railroads may be claimed by organizations that will convert them to trails, providing the organization will relinquish the use of the right-of-way if the railroad needs it again.

Many of the these Rails-to-Trails projects have been built across the country and frequently serve as the backbone of a community's trail system.

Increasing bike friendliness appeals to younger people, the retired folks, and an increasing number of adults in between who simply want to get some exercise and see life at a slower pace than cars allow.

Another important battle to fight in the community is to make sure that the transit system is bicycle friendly in both its equipment to handle bikes on buses and trains, and in the actual attitudes of transit personnel toward allowing cyclists enough time and leeway to board safely.

Biking to Work

You can encourage bike commuting to work within your community by assuring a network of cycling facilities near employment centers. But equally important, you need facilities at the workplace to accommodate the bike. This might include bike lockers, safe bike racks, or a tolerant attitude and physical accessibility of the workplace to allow the bike to stay inside.

A second very important accommodation for the bike-to-work crowd in many climates is the ability to take a shower after arrival at the workplace. Somehow pedaling for 45 minutes on a hot summer morning makes that cyclist less desirable in the morning meeting unless there's a shower available!

Like most community-wide change, both walkable community and bicycle-friendly innovations will require some awareness raising and some campaigning. But walking and especially cycling events are photogenic and fun, and the fun is contagious.

Biking and Walking as Part of Quality of Life

Get going, because having a walkable community that's bicycle friendly is a potent ingredient in the quality of life that will attract and retain the best and the brightest of young people. Not to mention it is a key element of reliable transportation to a job in community poverty situations. And lastly, preventing childhood obesity and remedying adult obesity are incredibly important to the sustainability of the health care system.

A walkable community needs to think of pedestrian safety and bicycle safety as indispensable parts of their transportation planning.

Speaking of that, need we say that building sidewalks and multi-use paths is less expensive than building more lanes of road?

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