Your Daily Inspirational Reading

[we vs us]

As unearthed by my brilliant wife Dayzella from Walkable.org, here is an excellent list of what distinguishes a walkable community from everything else.  Sorry to take up so much valuable internet white space with full copy and paste, but the list really seemed worth posting in its entirety.

quote: 1. Intact town centers. This center includes a quiet, pleasant main street with a hearty, healthy set of stores. These stores are open for business a minimum of 8 hours a day. The stores include things like barbers/beauticians, hardware, druggist, small grocery/deli, sets of good restaurants, clothing, variety store, ice cream shop, stores that attract children, many youth and senior services, places to conduct civic and personal business, library, all within a 1/4 mile walk (5 minutes) of the absolute center. If this is a county seat, the county buildings are downtown. If this is an incorporated town the town hall is in the town center. The library is open for business at least 10 hours a day 6-7 days a week. There is still a post office downtown.  

2. Residential densities, mixed income, mixed use. Near the town center, and in a large town at appropriate transit locations there will be true neighborhoods. Higher densities are toward the town center and in appropriate concentrations further out. Housing includes mixed income and mixed use. A truly walkable community does not force lots of people to drive to where they work. Aspen, for example, is a great place to shop and play...but fails to provide housing for anyone who works there. Granny flats, design studios and other affordable housing are part of the mix in even the wealthiest neighborhoods.

3. Public Space. There are many places for people to assemble, play and associate with others within their neighborhood. The best neighborhoods have welcoming public space within 1/8th mile (700 feet) of all homes. These spaces are easily accessed by all people.

4. Universal Design. The community has a healthy respect for people of all abilities, and has appropriate ramps, medians, refuges, crossings of driveways, sidewalks on all streets where needed, benches, shade and other basic amenities to make walking feasible and enjoyable for everyone.

5. Key Streets Are Speed Controlled. Traffic moves on main street and in neighborhoods at safe, pleasant, courteous speeds. Most streets are designed to keep speeds low. Many of these streets are tree lined, have on-street parking and use other methods that are affordable means to keep traffic speeds under control. There is an absence of one-way couplets designed to flush downtown of its traffic in a rush or flight to the suburbs. In most parts of the nation the streets are also green, or have other pleasant landscaping schemes in dry climates.

6. Streets, Trails are Well Linked. The town has good block form, often in a grid or other highly connected pattern. Although hilly terrain calls for slightly different patterns, the linkages are still frequent. Some of the newer neighborhoods that were built to cul-de-sac or other fractured patterns are now being repaired for walking by putting in trail connectors in many places. These links are well designed so that there are many eyes on these places. Code for new streets no longer permits long streets that are disconnected.
 
7. Design is Properly Scaled to 1/8th, 1/4 and 1/2 mile radius segments. From most homes it is possible to get to most services in ¼ mile (actual walked distance). Neighborhood elementary schools are within a ¼ mile walking radius of most homes, while high schools are accessible to most children (1 mile radius). Most important features (parks) are within 1/8th mile, and a good, well designed place to wait for a high frequency (10-20 minutes) bus is within ¼ to ½ mile. Note that most of these details can be seen on a good local planning map, and even many can be downloaded from the web.

8. Town is Designed for People. Look for clues that decisions are being made for people first, cars second. Does the town have a lot of open parking lots downtown? Are a lot of streets plagued with multiple commercial driveways, limited on-street parking, fast turning radii on corners. Towns designed for people have many investments being made in plazas, parks, walkways ... rarely are they investing in decongesting intersections on the far reaches of town. Towns designed for people are tearing down old, non-historic dwellings, shopping plazas and such and converting them to compact, mixed use, mixed income properties. Ask to review the past year of building permits by category. Much is told about what percentage of construction that is infill and independent small builder stock versus big builder single price range housing or retail stock.

9. Town is Thinking Small. The most walkable towns are boldly stepping forward requiring maximum parking allowed, versus minimum required. Groceries and other important stores are not permitted to build above a reasonable square footage, must place the foot print of the structure to the street, etc. Palo Alto, for instance, caps their groceries at 20,000 square feet. This assures that groceries, drug stores and other important items are competitive at a size that is neighborhood friendly. Neighborhood schools are community centers. Older buildings are rebuilt in place, or converted to modern needs. Most parking is on-street.

10. In Walkable Communities There Are Many People Walking. This sounds like a silly statement at first ... but think again. Often there are places that look walkable, but no one walks. Why? There is always a reason. Is it crime? Is it that there is no place to walk to, even though the streets and walkways are pleasant? Are the downtown stores not open convenient hours? You should be able to see a great diversity of those walking and bicycling. Some will be very young, some very old. People with disabilities will be common. Another clue, where people walk in great abundance virtually all motorists are courteous to pedestrians. It is true.

11. The Town and Neighborhoods have a Vision. Seattle, Washington, Portland, Oregon and Austin, Texas are just three examples where neighborhood master plans have been developed. Honolulu sets aside about $1M per year of funds to be spent by each neighborhood. Visionary, master plans provide direction, build ownership of citizens, engage diverse people, and create opportunities for implementation, to get past sticky issues, and deal with the most basic, fundamental, necessary decisions and commitment. There are budgets set aside for neighborhoods, for sidewalks, trails, links, parks. The community no longer talks about where they will get the money, but how they will change their priorities.

12. Decision Makers Are Visionary, Communicative, and Forward Thinking. The town has a strong majority of leaders who "get it". Leaders know that they are not to do all the work ... but to listen and respond to the most engaged, involved, broad minded citizens. They rarely are swayed by the anti-group, they seek the opinions and involvement big brush citizens and retailers. They are purposefully changing and building policies, practices, codes and decisions to make their towns pleasant places for people ... reinvesting in the town center, disinfesting in sprawl. These people know the difference between a green field, brown field and grey field. They know what Active Living by Design is all about. The regional government understands and supports the building of a town center, and is not attempting to take funds from the people at the center to induce or support sprawl. Often there is a charismatic leader on the town board, chamber of commerce, planning board, there is an architectural review team, a historic preservation effort, and overall good public process. Check out the web site of the town ... if they focus on their golf courses, tax breaks, great medical services, scenic majestic mountains, or proximity to the sea ... fail to emphasize their neighborhood schools, world class library, lively downtown, focus on citizen participation ... they are lost, bewitched and bewildered in their own lust and lure of Walt Disney's Pleasure Island.

[TheArtist]

Here are some I found.


Factors that are driving the popularity of large houses: "First, with less of a sense of community and public life in our culture, the home becomes a fortress which needs to contain everything we need, including multiple forms of entertainment, rather than basic shelter..." - designer-builder John Abrams of the South Mountain Company in West Tisbury, Mass.



A common mistake people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools. -Douglas Adams

...It does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority keen to set brush fires in people's minds. - Samuel Adams (1722-1803)


Suburbia is a collection of private benefits and public nuisances. - Anonymous

If car ownership is mandatory, [the place is] not urban. - Donald Baxter

In a quality city, a person should be able to live their entire life without a car, and not feel deprived. - Paul Bedford


Those who buy into the suburbs because they want to be close to nature are going to keep doing so.  The point of parks in cities is not to satisfy that urge, but to make better urbanism for those who want real urbanism. - David Brain

Automobiles need quantity and pedestrians need quality. - Dan Burden

We must not build housing, we must build communities. - Mike Burton

Cars are happiest when there are no other cars around. People are happiest when there are other people around. - Dan Burden

Freedom is not constituted primarily of privileges but of responsibilities - Albert Camus:

Anyplace worth its salt has a 'parking problem'. - James Castle


Planning of the automobile city focuses on saving time. Planning for the accessible city, on the other hand, focuses on time well spent. - Robert Cervero

The food would have to be pretty horrible for this not to be a perfect lunch.  --Buff Chace sitting down in a Roman piazza


Vancouver killed the freeway because they didn't want the freeways to kill their neighborhoods. The city flourished because making it easier to drive does not reduce traffic; it increases it. That means if you don't waste billions of dollars building freeways, you actually end up with less traffic. - Rick Cole

When we build our landscape around places to go, we lose places to be. -Rick Cole

Increasingly, we live in a world where cities compete for people, and businesses follow. This trend has largely been ignored by many cities, which are still focused on business climate and tax incentives. But I think the big question businesses will ask in the years to come is going to be 'Can I hire talented people in this city?' Cities need to be able to answer 'yes' to succeed. - Carol Coletta, president and CEO of CEOs for Cities.


People yearning for community are like people at a party who crowd into the kitchen because they like it. - Bruce Donnelly

Parking is a narcotic and ought to be a controlled substance. It is addictive, and one can never have enough. - Victor Dover

To most Americans the cures for traffic congestion are worse than the congestion itself. – Anthony Downs


Climate has little to do with [how much people walk]. Toronto residents, New Orleanians and Manhattanites, with extremes of weather, walk more than Atlantans. The variable is the quality of the urbanism. Not the weather. People in Stockholm walk more than people in the suburbs of Seville. People in Stockholm's center walk more that they do in Stockholm's 1950's new towns. The variable is always the quality of the urbanism--not the weather. - Andres Duany


In [the traditional New England town], one can live above the store, next to the store, five minutes from the store or nowhere near the store, and it is easy to imagine the different age groups and personalities that would prefer each alternative. In this way and others, the traditional neighborhood provides for an array of lifestyles. In conventional suburbia, there is only one available lifestyle: to own a car and to need it for everything. - Andres Duany, "Suburban Nation

We are not running out of land. We are running out of urban places. - Andres Duany

The Department of Transportation, in its single-minded pursuit of traffic flow, has destroyed more American towns than General Sherman. - Andres Duany


The 5 Bs - bricks, banners, balloons, benches and berms - do NOT create streetlife. It is the available shopping that provides it. - Andres Duany

The loss of a forest or a farm is justified only if it is replaced by a village. To replace them with a subdivision or a shopping center is not an even trade. - Andres Duany

Amateurs accustomed to emulation made great places. It is the professionals of recent decades that have ruined our cities and our landscapes with their inventions. - Andres Duany


Higher density housing offers an inferior lifestyle only when it is without a community as its setting. - Andres Duany

In the suburbs you have backyard decks; in towns you have porches on the street. - Andres Duany


What you need is a system of zoning based not on use, but on the quality of street frontage. Then develop your street grid with a rhythm of "A" streets and "B" streets. Designate those streets like your Walnut Street as "A" streets, where every building on these blocks must be high-grade, pedestrian-oriented and reinforce continuity - no parking lots, no curb cuts. Then assign all your anti-pedestrian frontages to your "B" streets, your service streets. There is absolutely nothing worse for a city than to make every street excellent. If you try to make every street excellent, every street will be mediocre. - Andres Duany


If you design communities for automobiles, you get more automobiles. If you design them for people, you get walkable, livable communities. - Parris Glendening and Christine Todd Whitman

Urbanism works when it creates a journey as desirable as the destination. - Paul Goldberger

If what you sell is the perception of privacy and exclusivity, then every new house is a degradation of the amenity. However, if what you sell is community, then every new house is an enhancement of the asset. - Vince Graham

If buildings are beautiful, higher density compounds that beauty. Conversely, if buildings are ugly, then higher density compounds that ugliness. - Vince Graham

I've always described Density in terms of dollars: The more you have of it, the more you can "buy" with it -- referring to amenities, of course (cultural, entertainment, dining, etc.). When I get asked what's the single most important thing that can be added to a city to help revitalize it (they are always waiting for the latest retail or entertainment thing...), I always say "housing." - Seth Harry



The "suburban conundrum": As density goes down in a suburban setting, both arterial sizes and retail format sizes tend to go up, while the frequency of both go down, resulting in longer trips, to fewer boxes, of ever increasing scale.

- Seth Harry

Adding lanes to solve traffic congestion is like loosening your belt to solve obesity. - Glen Hemistra


Nothing will ever be attempted if all possible objections must first be overcome. - Samuel Johnson

Architecture without sensibility to its context is like sex without love: entertaining perhaps, but not the source of lasting joy. - Mark Wilson Jones

The more parking space, the less sense of place. - Jane Holtz Kay


Any city planner who thinks that easing the traffic flow will decrease the city's congestion is simply living in a dream world. Likewise, the addition of parking facilities will not, and never has, eliminated parking problems. When you improve a small congested road, you wind up with a big congested road. Likewise, the better the traffic pattern, the more traffic on that pattern; the more parking lots, the more people looking for a place to park. - John Keats

If you plan cities for cars and traffic, you get cars and traffic. If you plan for people and places, you get people and places. - Fred Kent

Whatever a traffic engineer tells you to do, do the opposite and you'll improve your community. - Fred Kent

Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it. - Matthew 7:13-14



Men do not love Rome because she is beautiful; Rome is beautiful because men have loved her. - Leopold Kohr.

The majority of sprawl in this country is produced by those who are fleeing from sprawl. -Alex Krieger


It matters that our cities are primarily auto storage depots. It matters that our junior high schools look like insecticide factories. It matters that our libraries look like beverage distribution warehouses. It matters that the best hotel in town looks like a minimum security prison. To live and work and walk among such surroundings is a form of spiritual degradation. It's hard to feel good about yourself when so much of what you see on a typical day is so unrelentingly drab. - Jim Kunstler

...there's a reason that Elm Street and Main Street resonate in our cultural memory. It's not because we're sentimental saps. It's because this pattern of human ecology produced places that worked wonderfully well, and which people deeply loved. - Jim Kunstler


What's bad about sprawl is not its uniformity, but that it is so uniformly bad. - Jim Kunstler

The 20th Century was about getting around. The 21st Century will be about staying in a place worth staying in. - Jim Kunstler


It actually took more effort, and a deeper background in principle and technique, on the part of the 19th century architect to contrive proportioning schemes that would nourish the heart and soul of a normal human being. Today it is the common citizen, forced to live among the baleful monstrosities of 20th century architecture, who must expend extreme mental effort to keep from shrieking in agony at every turn. - Jim Kunstler


I have never seen a fact that would stand up to a myth at a public hearing. - J. Gary Lawrence

You say what you think needs to be said. If it needs to be said, there are going to be a lot of people who will disagree with it, or it wouldn't need to be said. - Herb Lock


Growth is inevitable and desirable, but destruction of community character is not. The question is not whether your part of the world is going to change. The question is how. - Edward T. McMahon


What kills a city are people who want only low taxes, only want a good deal and only want cities to be about . . . pipes, pavement and policing. - Glen Murray, mayor of Winnipeg, Manitoba

We are making great progress, but we are going in the wrong direction. - Ogden Nash

Each on-street parking spot that is lost costs an adjacent business about $10,000 a year in sales. - National Main Street Program


Infill development is publicly cheap but privately expensive, while sprawl is publicly expensive but privately cheap. - James Nicholas

Cities are for people. A city is where people come to work and raise their families and to spend their money and to walk in the evening. It is not a traffic corridor. -John Norquist

There is no greater form of subsidized social engineering than the interstate highway, which hastens the flight out of the city without doing much to ease traffic congestion. -John Norquist

This used to be Main Street USA. It's now a code violation all over America. - John Norquist

With modest roads, Big Box retail is impossible. With large roads, Big Box retail is inevitable. - Dom Nozzi

This nation is drowning in a sea of free and abundant parking. - Dom Nozzi


Working adults formerly enjoyed an hour of "community time" after the workday was over and before they were expected home. It has been replaced by an hour of "commuting time." The former warmed us to our fellow human beings, the latter conditions us to hate them. – Ray Oldenburg, Celebrating the Third Place

A good plan today is better than a perfect plan tomorrow. - George S. Patton


Anything you do to make a city more friendly to cars makes it less friendly to people. - Enrique Penalosa

The desire for community is a constant of human nature. - Stephen Price

Nothing looks so dated as yesterday's vision of the future. - Christian De Quincey


Every freedom has a corresponding responsibility. - John D. Rockefeller

The measure of any great civilization is in its cities, and the measure of a city's greatness is to be found in the quality of its public spaces, its parks and squares.  - John Ruskin

For a concert hall, Los Angeles requires, at a minimum, 50 times more parking spaces than San Francisco allows as the maximum. This difference in planning helps explain why downtown San Francisco is much more exciting and livable than downtown Los Angeles. - Donald Shoup, The High Cost of Free Parking


Minimum parking standards are fertility drugs for cars. - Donald Shoup

Staunch conservatives often become ardent communists when it comes to parking, and rational people quickly turn emotional. - Donald Shoup


If the earth was an apartment, we wouldn't be getting our security deposit back. - Jim Shubert

A suburban through street is similar to a New Urbanist through street in the same way that a concrete flood channel is similar to a babbling brook. - Patrick Siegman

The great thing about urbanism...is that the more you build, generally the better. The opposite is true of sprawl. - Robert Steuteville

There are three rules of urban design [for the establishment and preservation of walkable commercial areas]. Build [buildings] to the sidewalk (i.e., property line), make the front of the building 'permeable' (i.e., no blank walls), and prohibit parking lots in front of the building. - David Sucher, City Comforts (2003)


The paradox of transportation in the late 20th Century is that while it became possible to travel to the moon, it also became impossible, in many cases, to walk across the street. - Joell Vanderwagen

The only way you run into someone else in LA is in a car crash. - Susan Sarandon, on why she moved to NY.

[we vs us]

Holy geez, Artist, are you writing a book?

[TheArtist]

quote:Originally posted by we vs us

Holy geez, Artist, are you writing a book?

Naa I snagged them right off some website.lol Might have been the one you used.

[PonderInc]

And here I was being so impressed that Artist took the time to compile this amazing set of quotes!  Thanks to both of you for the thought-provoking material!  (I'd love to see several of these quotes made into inspirational posters and spread around town!)