Read This: Walkable City, + Unity Books

Unlike 2012 where there was a bit of internal contention, Walkable City by Jeff Speck was a clear standout for the best book of 2013, and will be included in our upcoming Unity Bookstore selections (more on that in second).

Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America One Step at a Time follows up a massive 2012 that had amongst other great urban reads the 1-2  punch of Human Transit and Straphanger. Where Jarrett Walker’s Human Transit provided a technical clarity to the practice of PT network planning and design, Taras Grescoe’s Straphanger Saving Our Cities and Ourselves from the Automobile was more of a travelogue devoted to the  largely unrecognized and under appreciated people who get around in cities without cars. (Please can we have an Anthony Bourdain No Reservations-style tv series that drops Taras into various cities for 24 hours?).

Speck’s Walkable City fits nicely with those books by again wrapping technical expertise into a story that appeals to a exponentially growing audience of interested urbanites. And like his earlier work Suburban Nation co-authored with Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, Walkable City is an opinionated, sometimes polemic piece that is backed by extensive professional experience, heaps of data, and miles of chutzpah. In many ways Walkable City is a snapshot of the latest thinking on the American practice of urban planning and design.

In Walkable City Speck describes the practice of urban planning using a lens of ‘walkability’, though the act of walking is really a supporting activity. There is plenty of content here sourced and credited to the giants of the field including Jane Jacobs, Jan Gehl, and Andres Duany. Walkability it turns out is a nice framework to describe the practice of people-first urban design and planning. Speck outlines 10 “steps” that cities take to become walkable  (read: a place that is interesting, economically vibrant, and attractive to tourists and millennials).

Here is a sample of a couple of steps.

Get the parking Right
As innocuous as it may seem, parking plays a key role in supporting vibrant downtowns. Parking in addition to gobbling up a huge proportion of our cities also unfairly subsidizes car drivers over other city users. Donald Shoup figures prominently in this chapter and the content will be familiar to the regular readers of the blog.

“Shoup calculates that the subsidy for employer-paid parking amounts to twenty-two cents per mile driven to work, and this reduced the price of automotive commuting by a remarkable 71 percent”

Speck advocates that parking be priced appropriately to ensure that there is always parking available for the people willing to pay a premium to turn up and pay for on-street parking in front of their destination. This supports local retail and removes the significant level of traffic simply associated with ‘cruising’ for parking. Speck is also a strong proponent for on-street parking for the following reasons- it slows traffic due to the friction created between parked and moving cars, it reduces the number of  kerb cuts that intrude onto footpaths, and it provides a physical barrier to protect pedestrians.

Put the cars in their place

In this step, Put the cars in their place, Speck has a go at the practice of traffic engineering and the emergence of siloed ‘specialists’. If you thought engineers are given an unfair rap on the blog, best to skip this chapter. Here is a taste:

..It would seem that almost no traffic engineers in America possess the necessary combination of insight and political will that would allow them to take the induced demand discussion to its logical conclusions which is this: stop doing traffic studies. Stop trying to improve flow. Stop spending people’s tax dollars giving them false hope that you can cure congestion, while mutilating their cities in the process.

Perhaps less entertaining than professional posturing, are a series of vignettes on trends in street design. Take for example ‘road diets’ the widely accepted practice (outside of NZ) of converting four lanes of travel to two with little noticeable impacts to traffic, while having plenty of upside for local business and people on foot. Another is the practice of returning one-way streets (‘an epidemic’) back to two, which according to the evidence provided, has instant benefits.

Most importantly here, Speck shines a light on the practice of traffic studies which he calls “bullshit”. He back this up with three points:

1. The computer model is only is good as its inputs, and there’s nothing easier than tweaking the inputs to get the outcome you want.
2. Traffic studies are typically performed by firms that do traffic engineering…. As long as engineers are in charge of traffic studies, they will predict the need for engineering.
3. The main problem with traffic studies is that they never consider the phenomenon of induced demand.

Technically, there are things that are worth debating in the book, for example, the opportunities for pedestrianising streets or the utility of on-street parking. To his credit Speck caveats most of his advice with exceptions to rule. Many of the quibbles I have with the details are based on the context to which they are proposed. Luckily in Auckland we have a mostly flourishing city centre that has not been entirely cratered by surface parking and auto-priority which allows us to critically explore more advanced levels of urban design.

Debating the finer points, which we have the luxury of doing through the blog format, misses the big picture. Walkable City presents a professional body of understanding in a platform that practitioners, policy makers and the general public can both understand and associate. Importantly, it reinforces the progression that cities around the world are making to satisfy both the demand and advantages of walkable urbanism. It isn’t since David Sucher’s City Comfort that I can think of a book as well suited to be issued to every councilor and local board member, and one of the many ideas they would take away is this:

We can have the kind of city we want. We can tell the car where to go and how fast. We can be a place not just for driving through but arriving at.

As we move into the next urban era it is critical to improve the narrative of how cities and urban design can make our lives better, Speck does this spectacularly as seen in this TED talk. Speck’s entertaining, fact-filled book Walkable City provides a powerful example of how quickly cities and downtowns are assimilating and deploying best practice to remain relevant both locally and at the global scale.

Unity Books, High Street, Auckland

Speaking of downtown, this year we will be teaming up with Unity Books to provide a shelf of books that we think our readers will enjoy. In addition to a few classics, there will be Walkable City, Human Transit, and Straphanger.  We’ll have more details on this soon along with some more Read This book reviews.

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