Walkable Neighborhood Interview

Thursday morning, as a part of Mississippi Public Broadcasting's week-long "Battle of the Bulge" series, I was interviewed on the topic of how walkable neighborhoods facilitate better health. (Or, if you will, how the lack of walkable neighborhoods contribute to the problem of obesity.)

Click here for a link to the interview.

If you wish to help bring about a walkable environment in your city, town, or neighborhood, here is a comprehensive series of links to walkable neighborhood resources from walklive.org.

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Battle of the Bulge

Mississippi is home to the most obese people in the world. That's right. The fattest people in the world, on average, reside within the state lines of this small (3 million people) southern state.

I'm not bringing up the point to slam Mississippi. I was born in Mississippi. I grew up in Mississippi. Although I've lived other places, I'm here now and have spent the majority of my life living in Mississippi. So it's like family; I can talk about the "unmentionables."

Why is Mississippi so fat?

Sure there's the fried food, the fast food, and the proliferation of packaged foods available in the Wal-Marts dotting every little small town in the state. There's also the low level of education - Mississippi perennially grades lowest in the nation on any number of education statistics - which comes into play as the general population is less likely to have the honed critical thinking skills necessary for making the connection between diet and exercise and good physical health.

But there's another issue, seldom discussed when it comes to obesity, that contributes to obesity: the lack of walkable communities. When I moved back to Mississippi from Washington, DC, a very walkable city, I instantly gained 20 pounds. In Mississippi, as in most of America, the older walkable neighborhoods have been replaced by sprawling suburbs with no sidewalks and nowhere to walk to.

I believe our national obesity problem can, in part, be traced to the way we've designed automobile-only neighborhoods that are hostile to walking and bicycling.

This week, Mississippi Public Radio is featuring a series called "Battle of the Bulge" with helpful information about staying healthy, fit, and thinner. Check it out.

And here's a link to "Fat People Dont' Walk - a recent article I wrote on the relationship between obesity and non-walkable neighborhoods.

The Old Folks at Home

This week's newspaper column:

With all our assorted human differences, there’s one thing we all have in common: Nobody is getting any younger. Barring some unfortunate fatal illness (or a much-too-casual relationship with heavy machinery), we will all at some point negotiate the world as senior citizens.

A few generations ago, the elderly among us depended almost solely upon the good graces of extended family for support and care, often living in the home of a child or some not-too-distant relative. Absent those accommodations, senior citizens might have found themselves – if they were lucky – in what was popularly referred to as the “old folks’ home.” Neither was a panacea, but in the so-called good ol’ days, average lifespans were considerably shorter and family life was more predictable, so people made do.

But as recent advancements in medical care and public health have added decades to our lives, seniors make up a much greater percentage of society than ever before. (In the twentieth century alone, the average lifespan in the US has increased by over 30 years.) And now, as the baby boom generation grays, we are on the verge of seeing an explosion in the demand for senior-friendly housing.

Among architects and planners, what was once called “elderly housing” has now given way to more politically-correct terms such as “retirement community” or “senior living” facilities, in part for marketing reasons, but also in recognition of the fact that we can expect an increasing number of years living active lives as we grow old. But almost always, those facilities – by design – have segregated seniors from the rest of society.

Think about the happiest people you know who are, shall we say, “up in years.” To a person, they seem to embody a strong sense of independence along with a level of activity that belies their years. It is no secret that consistent physical activity and mental stimulation promotes longevity and healthy aging, and that means interacting with those across the age spectrum and having the ability experience the world without the help of others.

Getting around in modern-day strip-mall America can be challenging enough for able-bodies behind the wheel of a car, but for seniors who may not have razor-sharp driving skills, or who have given up driving altogether, striking out on their own is simply out of the question.

So, what is the future of elder housing? (I use the term elder because the word implies the qualities of someone held up as a community leader or sage rather than the word elderly, which infers the quality of being old, and possibly in the way).

Drop “retirement” from “retirement community” and I think you’ll have the answer. The next generation of healthy senior living environments will involve the complete integration of elders into the greater community. Thus, new community infrastructure must be designed for walkability; housing must be situated near services, and continuous sidewalks must be the standard in all new neighborhoods.

Walking may be considered old-fashioned, but for healthy aging, it’s the new frontier.

American Roadways: Dangerous by Design

In 2008 alone, over 70,000 pedestrians in the United States suffered injury in an accident involving motor vehicles. And over the past 15 years, 76,000 pedestrians have been killed on American roadways; that's the equivalent of twenty-five 911 terrorist attacks.

Yet US spending on security-related issues dwarfs the funding of walkable infrastructure. According to Transportation for America's recent report - Dangerous by Design - federal funding for for walking and bicycling infrastructure last year in major metropolitan areas was a meager $1.39 per person. Conversely, appropriations for the Department of Homeland Security alone amounted to about $145 per person - over 100 times the investment afforded to sidewalks and bike paths.

Sadly, almost all of those deaths and injuries are avoidable. The culprit: automobile-only street designs. Taking pedestrians and bicyclists into account when designing roadways, a concept know as "complete streets," creates a healthy and safe environment for alternative transportation.

If this country is outraged by a terrorist attack that kills 3000 people, shouldn't we be at least as concerned about the continued design and construction of unsafe streets that facilitate the needless killing and maiming of much greater numbers of US citizens?

Link here to an NPR report on pedestrian-friendly roads. And check out the Transportation for America website for tons of info on walkable and bikable streets, including an index of pedestrian safety by state and for the top 360 metro areas in the United States.

Fat People Don't Walk

This week's newspaper column:

On a recent trip to Washington, DC, I noticed something on the streets of the city that’s very peculiar in modern-day America – the complete absence of morbid obesity.

A little background: In 1791, President George Washington commissioned Pierre L’Enfant, a prominent French architect and city planner – to lay out the new capitol city on the banks of the Potomac River. L’Enfant envisioned the city as a series of parks connected by diagonal avenues on an overlay of a regular rectangular street grid. Each neighborhood would have its own green space and business district; the distance between each would be determined by practical walking distances. Obviously, the ease of traveling great distances quickly by car was not a factor. So Washington, like every city designed before the advent of the automobile, became and fortunately still remains a very walkable city.

Conversely, as new development in the United States has sprawled across the suburban countryside, so have our waistlines. How common is it to see an overly-ample “waddler” dropped off at the front door of Wal-Mart?

One might protest and argue, “But you can’t expect a 300-pound grandma to walk all the way across a hot, tree-less parking lot, can you?” That’s a good point, but this may be a chicken and egg -shaped question. Which came first – the weight gain or the inactivity?

Since moving from Washington, DC to Mississippi, I’ve picked up about 40 or pounds or so. Some of that extra weight is due to age and the classic fat-filled diet of the American South, but I suspect the majority of extra poundage is a direct result of walking less in my daily routine.

While in DC, I walked 6 blocks every morning to the Union Station metro, rode the train for about 15 minutes, and walked another 3 blocks to my workplace downtown. In the evening, I reversed the routine. At lunchtime, there were plenty of restaurants to choose from in the immediate area –all accessible to “foot-traffic,” and on a nice day, I could stroll over to one of many parks in the area to enjoy lunch in an urban green space before walking back to the office.

That routine alone amounted to about two miles of walking every day. Add to that a multiplicity of errands made possible by virtue of a walkable infrastructure, and each day included several built-in cardiovascular workouts.

In today’s world of city planning, walkability seems to be, at best, a faint afterthought and certainly not the first thing most politicians and planners think of when thinking of city infrastructure. Real estate developers claim that being forced to build sidewalks on street-facing building lots is cost prohibitive and nobody likes the idea of higher taxes to see to it that connected sidewalks are the norm.

But with obesity-related health care costs escalating through the roof, isn’t that alone a reason for rethinking our investment – or current lack thereof – in walkable infrastructure?

Sustainable Health Care, Part 2 - The Way We Live

This week's newspaper column - second in a two-part series on sustainable health care reform.

The way we lay out our neighborhoods directly impacts how much we, as a society, pay for health care.

Let’s take an imaginary drive through a typical American subdivision. (I say “drive” because walking is usually not an option.)

Scooting down the main drag, we see strip malls and commercial buildings lined up end to end. With rare exception, everyone we encounter along this strip drove there in an automobile.

Huge parking lots in front of each establishment accommodate workers and patrons who park as close to the front door as possible. After all, who would want to walk on hot pavement with the sun beating down when all the trees have been removed?

And you’ll notice that all of the parking lots are disconnected. To get from one place to another – even if the destination is next door – people get back in their cars and drive. Don’t bother looking for sidewalks; in strip mall land, walking is so uncool.

Something else is striking about this landscape. Where are the homes? No wonder no one is walking. You can’t get here from there. Let’s turn off on one of the side streets and see if we can find where people live.

Now we’re talking. We were looking for houses and now we have it - blocks and blocks of houses one after another without a grocery store in sight. Don’t bother looking for sidewalks here either. When all services are miles away, where would you walk to anyway?

Now let’s tour a sustainable community. I’m stopping the car; we can walk from here.

Tree-lined streets provide a cool canopy for our leisurely stroll down the sidewalk as we wave to friends and neighbors. Homes are located in close proximity to businesses here, so it’s practical and pleasant to walk to the grocery store rather than – out of necessity - drive.

We can stop in at that little coffee shop around the corner and meet Aunt Bertha. She’s not driving any more since she turned 80, but she gets around just fine. She walks to the bank, she walks to the diner, she even walks to the senior center where she and her friends have a rollicking good time. They all kid Aunt Bertha about being “spry as a kitten” because of her independence and zest for life. Aunt Bertha doesn’t spend much time at the doctor’s office.

Her younger sister, on the other hand, lives in suburbia. She also gave up driving a couple of years ago, but unlike Aunt Bertha, Aunt Bea is housebound. When she needs to go somewhere, someone must drive to her house and act as chauffer. Aunt Bea gets virtually no exercise, and is in considerably worse health than her older sister with the medical records to prove it.

Communities where walking is a normal part of daily life are inherently healthier places to live than those where driving is the only option. Think about that when you choose your next home.

The Sprawl Tax

(Newspaper Column, Sept. 15)

With all the election chatter about who will or will not raise your taxes, there’s one self-imposed tariff that few people are talking about – the sprawl tax.

Our awareness of the added costs of suburban sprawl is not unlike the boiling frog syndrome. You know the story. It is said that a frog will jump out of the pot if thrown in scalding water, but if lukewarm water is heated slowly, the frog remains oblivious to the danger and soon, without realizing what’s going on, becomes soup meat.

As our built landscape has morphed from compact neighborhoods with most services within walking or short driving distance to sprawling suburbs and commercial strips, the cost to each individual of supporting this way of building – both in tax dollars and out-of-pocket expense – has gone up and up.

It wasn’t that long ago when the norm was one car per household. One car was enough because our physical connections to the places we lived, worked, and played were human scale. Neighborhoods all had sidewalks and people used them.

But increasingly, our built environment has become disconnected from what preceded it. We build large tracts of housing with no sidewalks and no place to walk even if there were sidewalks. Strip shopping centers and big-box retailers line up end to end with parking lots cut off from the store next door. Regional K-12 megaplexes have replaced neighborhood schools in outlying parcels far away from the homes of students and teachers who drive there every day.

Like the poor yet now tender and salted frog, many of us have lived with this disconnectedness for so long we don’t even realize the economic impact it has on our lives. But now, especially with the high price of gas, the economic consequences of living in a sprawl world are looming large.

According to the U.S. Department of Transportation, the average distance driven per household has increased from 12 to 21 thousand miles in the just the past 30 years, even as the size of households has diminished. That’s a direct reflection of our dependence on the automobile to negotiate our newly laid-out communities.

We are now a one-car-per-adult society. A family of 4 with two teenagers must own and operate four vehicles to lead a “normal” life. Sprawl, by its nature, demands that as the ante for full citizenship.

But it’s not just the price of gas. The bill to each taxpayer for longer and wider roads, expanded utilities, and storm-water management increases when the components of our built environment are spread-out and disconnected. In short, sprawl raises your taxes.

There are solutions. All over America, people are re-thinking the way we plan our communities. Neighborhoods are springing up where housing is clustered around neighborhood businesses and walkability is a prime asset

With sprawl as a new economic liability, the suburban McMansions of today may just be the slums of tomorrow.

Ernie's Epitome

A beautiful essay by my old friend Ernie. We met in nursery school, grew up together, and to this day, play each other dead even in "cut-throat" scrabble.

I live and work about 65 miles due South of Washington, D.C. in Southern Maryland. The political mindset and terrain of this region reminds me much of my hometown area around Hattiesburg, Mississippi. The region of Southern Maryland consists of four counties of rapidly vanishing farmland which for the last 40 years has been undergoing a transition into a bedroom community for suburban D.C. This land is tucked away between the Chesapeake Bay and the Potomac River so it has traditionally been isolated despite its proximity to D.C., but that isolation is disappearing as a result of suburban D.C.'s swelling population.

About a dozen years ago the Federal government's Base Realignment Committee moved my job and about 20,000 other military and civil servant jobs to Southern Maryland, along with all the support contractors and thousands of other workers needed to work in the chain department stores and other required support services. What was once a sleepy community of farmers, fishermen, and workers at southern Maryland's Naval Air test station founded during WWII has now become a sterile community composed of a six lane, six mile shopping strip populated with a BestBuy, fast-food restaurants, a Super Walmart, an Old Navy store, a Target, an Outback, and other national and regional retail chains. What this area also has in common with other exurbs is its lack of sidewalks and lack of good public transportation for all. Common with Mr. Polk's description of the short-sightedness of commercial "strips", southern Maryland, despite its unprecedented growth in the last dozen years, was unable to engage in forward thinking, so southern Maryland, even that six miles of strip malls, still requires the absolute necessity of a personal automobile to conduct such basic living requirements as grocery shopping and transportation to work.

One of the things that lured me to the D.C. region over 20 years ago after I graduated from the school of Engineering at Mississippi State University was D.C.'s cosmopolitan environment: D.C. has the Smithsonian and other museums, the National Zoo, several ethnic neighborhoods like Chinatown and Adams Morgan's multi-ethnic mix of Hispanic, Afghan, and Middle Eastern restaurants in addition to D.C.'s beautiful architecture in its historic communities. I learned to appreciate architectural sensitivity by hanging around my high school friend James Polk when we were both undergrads at MSU. There are also numerous festivals to be enjoyed in D.C. throughout the warm months of each year.

For the first five years I lived in basement apartments in D.C. until I bought a quaint Cape Cod home in the D.C. area town of Cheverly. Cheverly has been described as "a diamond in a coal mine"; its three boundaries are isolated by two limited access highways and access from the third state highway is limited by a clever implementation of one-way roads which all but one lead only out of the town of Cheverly. The houses of Cheverly are not cookie-cutter duplicates, each house is distinctive. Every street in Cheverly has public sidewalks allowing its residents to walk anywhere in town. If you know Mr. Polk you will not be surprised that it was he who made me aware of the advantages of Cheverly when I was in the market for my first home. Incidentally, Cheverly also has a Metrorail subway stop which allows the Cheverly residents to take the subway to almost any community in the D.C. area. The Metrorail allowed me to get to my office if I had car trouble or if there was snow or frozen roads - something which seems to occur less each successive year due, perhaps, to global warming.

After my job was transitioned to southern Maryland about a dozen years ago I commuted the long hour and a half to my new work location for about 9 years. The long commute made my once enjoyable job an ordeal. I still enjoyed the engineering work of my job, but now I'd have to wake at 5 AM, and I wouldn't get home until at least 7 PM or even later if the weather was inclement or if a highway accident caused congestion. I didn't dislike my job, I disliked my commute. After nine years of this craziness and after I turned 40 years old I started falling asleep behind the wheel. Sometimes I'd have to pull off the road and take a 15 minute nap so I wouldn't fall asleep behind the wheel and kill myself and other commuters. The quality of my life kept disintegrating. In desperation I finally bought a house on two little two acres of land only seven miles from my southern Maryland office and then sold my Cheverly home in the middle of this last crazy housing boom.

I exchanged one over-priced house for another over-priced house so that I could be closer to work. All my new neighbors are friendly and, like me, keep well-manicured lawns. One of my new neighbors is about ten years younger than me with two girls in elementary school. Ironically, he's a manager at a warehouse in the area of D.C. which I moved away from so that I could be closer to work. He is one of the many commuters in the exurbs of southern Maryland who forfeits three hours of each day commuting so that his two girls can go to a decent public school and he and his wife don't have to worry about the crime of a large metropolitan community. Also ironic is that the dozen years that I lived in Cheverly I was never a victim of crime. Go figure.

I like living in my new community. There are numerous white-tailed deer in my new semi-rural community which causes me consternation when they use my shrubbery for food. There are also bald Eagles, Ospreys, owls, and geese which make each weekend day and each warm night very entertaining to the nature lover in me. I can also take my canoe and shove off into the creek behind my house and paddle into a serene area of the Patuxent River which empties out into the Chesapeake Bay and enjoy aquatic nature.

Most importantly I'm now only 15 minutes away from my office so my job has become enjoyable again, and I no longer dread waking and making the long commute to work. But I miss the walkable community I once lived in; I miss the convenience of the Metrorail, and I miss the public radio station that I once so easily received on my FM radio - thank goodness for NPR's streaming audio via my broadband internet access!

So after my grass is mowed and my shrubbery is deer-proofed I make my way some weekends to D.C.'s Dupont Circle community. I stroll the streets of Dupont Circle, sit in the public parks in the area and watch the occasional artist engaged in a public performance, rub shoulders with people who many times look and think differently from myself and from my neighbors in southern Maryland, and I take in museum displays and thought-provoking theatre and movies which never come to southern Maryland.

I would never want to forfeit my memories and experiences of camping, fishing, and hunting with my blue-collar Father in the wilds of Mississippi. I would never want to forfeit the experience of hunting the woods with my fraternal grandmother for sassafras root which would then by cleaned and boiled into a slightly intoxicating tea. Every child is not lucky enough to have my Father and grandmother.

But back to the subject of this blog response: One certainty, along with death and taxes, is change, and the United States has now become a debtor nation, and its time for us to pay who we came to the dance with. Gasoline is now over $3.00 a gallon, and with the depreciating value of the U.S. dollar and the growing middle class of India, China, and other areas of the World, the price of gasoline will undoubtedly keep climbing.

Walkable communities, which were once valued only for their social advantages will soon become an economic necessity. Perhaps this necessity of economics will force humans to re-engage with their fellow humans.

Ernest C. Suggs, Jr.

Park It !

Is it possible to go an entire day without driving your car and go about "business as usual"?

I am happy to report that Tuesday, Earth Day, the answer for me was yes.

A dozen blocks on foot began the day - breakfast with Ed at IHOP. Ed is a long-time friend and running buddy, an Episcopal priest (who single-handedly revived my faith in his profession) and "ombudsman" extraordinaire. You should hear his sermons. Very inspirational, full of insight and love and woven with razor-sharp wit. I call it "stand-up homily."

Took care of an errand along the way.

After a hearty breakfast, and several hearty laughs, we carpooled downtown and took care of a few "necessaries". Employing some cerebral strategic planning (ok, we were really just driving and yacking) we breezed through our to-do lists in one car, not two.

Ed dropped me off at my place and I rode my bike for the rest of the day. It helps that I live only a couple of miles from my office.

So there you go; I did it.

It wasn't easy. The walking infrastructure has deteriorated over the past two generations as sprawl-centered development ignored anything but the car. And there are no bike lanes, so urban jungle rules apply. A rails-to-trails project will soon link the university with downtown with a walking/biking trail and that is a very positive initiative.

But it is possible.

What if every other day, we leave our cars at home. The result: half the cars on the road. Faster commutes, fewer traffic jams, less stress.

I understand that these options are not open to everyone. Some live in the county, and there, the car is really the only way to get from here to there. I live in a city, so I have options. Even though there are few sidewalks and no bike lanes, you can get around without a car. Sure the bus line could have longer hours, and could run more frequently, but with some personal planning, that's an option as well.

The more people insist on alternative modes of transportation, the easier it is for politicians and community leaders to move forward and initiate policies to fill in the gaps.

If we all look for options and engage in our community's effort to expand and enhance transportation alternatives, we can move in the direction of more livable, more humane existence and reverse the destructive trend of sprawl.

What can you do?

Top 100 Walkable Cities

Prevention Magazine has a wealth of information on walkability, including a walkability ranking of the ten largest cities in each state and the top 100 walkable in the United States.

The top 10:

1. Cambridge, MA
2. New York City, NY
3. Ann Arbor, MI
4. Chicago, IL
5. Washington, DC
6. San Francisco, CA
7. Honolulu, HI
8. Trenton, NJ
9. Boston, MA
10. Cicinnati, OH


Take a look and see where your city ranks. You will find the criteria used by Prevention on the bottom left of the article front page. And, of course, the article has links to some helpful health-related tips for walkers.

http://www.prevention.com/bestcities/

When Good Neighborhoods Go Bad

Contiguous sidewalks are the lifeblood of a walkable neighborhood.

Any mode of transportation, including walking, must be thought of as a “system” and planned as such. Otherwise, viability and practicality is compromised.

According to Dictionary.com, “system” is defined as an assemblage or combination of things or parts forming a complex or unitary whole.

Think about other systems and how they work.

If the electrician does not connect the fixture to the switch, would you expect light?

If the carpenter decides to omit an exterior wall, would you expect your house to stay warm in winter?

If the plumber installs pipes randomly here and there with few connections, would you expect water to appear when you turned the faucet? Forget about flushing.

So why should it be different with sidewalks.

I took the first photo (above) in my neighborhood, 3 blocks from the university. Notice the conspicuous absence of sidewalks; walkers are forced by default to share the road with cars or walk on the occasional boggy lawn.

There is actually one sidewalk up ahead in between sidewalk-less blocks. A very good thing, but without being plugged into the system, it is rendered practically useless. A couple of weeks ago, a contractor parked his van right in the middle of that one lonely pedestrian consideration and left it there for the day. When I asked him if he had ever considered that he might be blocking pedestrian traffic, he told me to “walk around” and “nobody walks here anyway.”

“Who could?” I asked pointing to the van. Could have used a laugh track. Tough crowd.

The second photo is of a neighborhood in Baton Rouge. Again, here is a sidewalk - very nice. But wait! It ends abruptly as it “dies” into a brick pier. The same density of housing is just beyond this terminated sidewalk. Another disconnection.

This on again-off again patchwork frustrates and discourages walking even in very dense areas. The contractor was very observant when he indicated that nobody walks here.

And really, how could they?

A Walk On The Wild Side

In the abstract, my neighborhood is perfect for walking.

A major university is 5 blocks away. A grocery store is 4 blocks in the other direction; a park and zoo just beyond that. Restaurants, a pharmacy, an elementary school, retail shops, churches, bars, and liquor stores – a veritable smorgasbord of life’s basic necessities.

But there’s one big problem.

Its completely unwalkable.

According to my neighborhood’s walkscore (see previous post), the area around my house should be moderately walkable. The density sets the stage. Approximately 30,000 people occupy the real estate (during the day) within a mile of my home. But with very few sidewalks, and even fewer crosswalks, getting from here to there on foot becomes entirely impractical.

Over the past 50 years, neighborhoods have been planned as if pedestrians do not exist. Planners and politicians, aided and abetted by architects and engineers I might add, have orchestrated land development with the assumption that the car is the only viable means of transportation, the silver bullet, the one-size-fits-all solution.

That predisposition brings us to where we are today: Sprawl - even in the midst of dense urban development. And walking, as a means of transportation, has been forgotten.

The university chronically complains about a lack of parking. Yet my neighbors (and in fact my Dutch roommate who is accustomed to walking) drive the 5 blocks to campus and park there instead of taking a 10 minute stroll.

Why? Because lack of any planning for pedestrians has created an urban frontier. Walking in this environment means taking your life in your own hands. Pedestrians must share the road with zooming cars (driven by distracted cell-phone yappers) and race across major thoroughfares without the benefit of crosswalks or overpasses.

In fact, in a current “improvement” project on Hardy Street at the edge of campus, crosswalks have been removed with none added. The local Department of Transportation came up with a design that widened the roadway and removed a couple of intersections effectively channeling the traffic and increasing the average speed noticeably. With restaurants, coffee shops, bookstores, campus parking, and even a dormitory across the street, pedestrians now have to run for their lives with no crosswalks in sight. The photo above is of just that.

A few weeks ago, I was in a conversation with a couple of women on the university track team. I suggested that the team be housed in the dorm across the street. Those who survive the semester without being hit by a car keep their scholarships. “Yeah,” one girl replied laughing, “that’s how we can hold tryouts!” They knew what I was talking about.

The real consequence of America’s addiction to the automobile (my friend Doug Michels of Ant Farm fame called it “autonationalism”) is that we create problems that did not exist before.

Sprawl related traffic jams and long commutes suck up time, energy, and money. Same applies in a densely developed area when you are forced to drive to your next destination just around the block.

Urban space is eaten up (and heated up) by too many parking lots. Modern car-centered zoning regulations result in stretching out the space between buildings to accommodate parking making the surrounding area even less walkable.

Public transportation of any kind is not viable when the metro stop is inaccessible by foot traffic. Lack of bus or train service adds inconvenience on top of inconvenience to the traffic weary commuter and would-be walker alike.

Studies have shown that people living in non-walkable neighborhoods are on average more obese, causing or exacerbating many health problems.

Maybe one of the most tragic aspects of an unwalkable neighborhood is its negative impact on our culture. When driving, there are only two ways to communicate to your neighbor – wave or flip them off! Walkable neighborhoods, by design, offer unlimited opportunities to meet and get to know your neighbors on a more personal level. In an unwalkable neighborhood, people generally know each other by their cars. Not much of a cultural exchange there.

As the trend of sprawl plays out, many are coming to a greater awareness of the inherent problems. The benefits of walking are many – I’ve just outlined a few. Here's a site for more info on walking (and biking) in neighborhoods:

http://www.walkinginfo.org/