Household Opera

On walkability, part 4: City streets and safety

(This is part of an occasional series of posts on walkability. You can also jump to part 1, part 2, and part 3. Incidentally, I'm writing this at home during a snow day, which makes me think that my next walkability post should really be about snow removal.)

There's been a lot of talk lately about crime where I live. A fairly horrible and much-publicized stabbing happened in October, quite close to downtown New London and not far from where I live; there have been a couple of other incidents since then. Lots of people have said that they think twice about walking around downtown now, especially after dark. On the rare occasions when I keep late hours, I've been taking taxis even short distances rather than walking by myself through the (almost always deserted) streets.

Rebecca Solnit writes in Wanderlust: A History of Walking that most women are conditioned to avoid walking by themselves for fear of violence, and sexual violence in particular, and that this is, among other things, part of a long history of tactics to keep women confined in the home:

I was advised to stay indoors at night, to wear baggy clothes, to cover or cut my hair, to try to look like a man, to move someplace more expensive, to take taxis, to buy a car, to move in groups, to get a man to escort me—all modern versions of Greek walls and Assyrian veils, all asserting it was my responsibility to control my own and men's behavior rather than society's to ensure my freedom. I realized that many women had been so successfully socialized to know their place that they had chosen more conservative, gregarious lives without realizing why. The very desire to walk alone had been extinguished in them—but not in me.

—Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking, 241

I've been fairly fearless about walking around after dark for most of my life, even in some places where, in retrospect, I should probably have been a lot more cautious. In Chicago, as an undergrad, I probably ran a much higher risk of being mugged than in most of the other places I've lived. But I couldn't stand the university's constant warnings about how we'd all be murdered if we ventured off campus. I knew they were worried about student safety, but it smacked of fearmongering to me.

In Philadelphia, where crime does happen (albeit in much higher concentrations outside of Center City), I used to commute home from my Sunday evening reference shift via SEPTA train and bus, getting home at around 11:30. Waiting for the bus late on a Sunday evening was a little nervous-making at first, but I soon realized that if anything seemed not quite right, there was a 7-11 a block away where I could take refuge. I never had to, though. Sometimes there were other people waiting for the bus; sometimes there weren't; nobody ever made me feel threatened; and I probably spent more time worrying about my extremities getting frostbitten on the colder winter nights than about potential assailants.

This post on walking in Philadelphia by Kate Davies, whose needled is one of my new favorite knitting blogs, resonates with me for a lot of reasons:

I lived and worked in Philadelphia for much of 2006, and one of my greatest pleasures during that year was walking about the city. I particularly enjoyed, after an evening seminar at U Penn or Temple, returning to center city on foot, alone with my thoughts, admiring the flickering lights at a distance, seeing them draw closer, then walking among them at close quarters. The streets of Philly are full of life at all times of the day and night, and the idea that I shouldn’twalk about them did not really occur to me. Yes, of course there are crack weasels on street corners, but I have no business with them, nor they with me. And frankly I’d rather walk on a street with people on it (for whatever purpose) than one that seems desolate or empty. I agree with Rebecca Solnit about most things, but not with her view that a woman walking at night is inevitably disenfranchised by her sex, her sexuality.

I've felt the same way about most of the places I've lived in: what determines the safety of any given public space is the number of other people one is likely to encounter. Crime is less likely to happen in a place full of witnesses. I've seen Jane Jacobs' concept of "eyes on the street" in action any number of times.

But none of this is to say the fear isn't real, or that street harassment isn't a genuine and enraging problem. More eyes on the street makes the street a safer place. But the question of how to eradicate the gender-specific harassment and violence (apart from, oh, I don't know, maybe raising young men to not regard women as pieces of meat?) is a larger issue that doesn't get addressed nearly often enough, whether as an aspect of walkability or in and of itself.

 Bottom line: a place isn't walkable if people are afraid to venture out of their houses. And a place still isn't walkable if only half the population can move through it without fear of being hassled, intimidated, or worse.

 

On walkability, part 3: Things I learned in the UK

I've been meaning to get back to the walkability series (part 1; part 2) for a while, particularly after my walking-intensive summer vacation. Here are a few things I noticed on the great Scotland-to-England journey of 2010:

1. Street usability

One of the things that impressed me a lot about London, during my three days there, was the level of usability built into street infrastructure. Clearly, someone has been thinking about making the streets of London pedestrian-friendly. Consider, for instance, curbside signage:

UK traffic is on the opposite side of the road from many other countries, and if you're visiting from one of those countries, it's all too easy to forget which way to look as you step into an intersection into oncoming traffic. So in a lot of places, you see these directional signs painted right next to the curb. I particularly appreciated the arrows, as I am one of those people who can't tell right from left without stopping to think about it.

The other thing I appreciated immensely: not only do the "You Are Here" map kiosks in central London offer detailed maps, the maps are oriented so that whichever direction you face as you're looking at the kiosk is the direction that points upward on the map. This made map-reading so intuitive (how many times have you squinted at a dot on a map kiosk and tried to figure out which of a confusing tangle of streets is the one right in front of you?) that I wondered why this isn't the standard practice everywhere. (I'm looking at you, Boston, City of Total Disorientation.)

2. Intersection density

A while back, I came across a blog post about a study that found intersection density—the number of street intersections per square mile, typically much higher in older, denser cities than in newer suburbs—to have a surprisingly high impact on overall walkability. It's one of those things that aren't immediately obvious but make a lot of sense when you think about them. The greater the number of intersections, the more possible routes there are, the less often pedestrians will have to take the long way around, and the easier it is to vary one's route and avoid boredom.

Old Town in Edinburgh is full of tiny narrow alleys, or "closes," that break up longer blocks of buildings and increase the overall number of intersections quite a bit. Some of them are wide enough that they're open to car traffic; others are for foot traffic only; and some consist of a flight of stairs, sometimes sheltered by the upper storeys of adjacent buildings and sometimes open. They have wonderful names, too: World's End Close, Writer's Close, Sugarhouse Close. This is Fleshmarket Close (there's also a Fishmarket Close nearby):

One caveat: I don't know how safe the closes are after dark; I wasn't out all that late while I was there. But during the day, I loved having a set of built-in shortcuts all over the city.

3. Walking culture

It's not that people don't hike for fun in the States. But the UK has much more of a culture of recreational walking,* with a whole history of walkers' associations and disputes over public rights of way. My time in the Lake District, an especially popular walking destination, made that clear: every town I visited had a tourist center that offered directions and sold Ordance Survey Explorer maps and Kendal Mint Cake, the hill-walker's favorite snack. Outdoor stores were everywhere, peddling breathable clothing, sturdy boots, compasses, and mountaineering equipment. And I kept meeting fellow walkers of all ages everywhere.

The big cities I visited had spaces for taking a rural walk as well: Edinburgh's Holyrood Park, with scores of people strolling the paths and bluffs, and Hampstead Heath in London, which on a sunny July afternoon was full of wanderers and picnickers. Recreational walking seemed there to be more about enjoying the surroundings than about getting Serious Exercise, although there's certainly some of that as well. (Rebecca Solnit makes much the same point in Wanderlust: A History of Walking, which I'm currently reading.)

Most of all, I loved that I could walk right to the edge of a town like Grasmere or Keswick and keep going, on side roads or paths through fields, up the side of a fell or all around a lake, and on for as many miles as my feet could take me. Whereas on this side of the pond, if you want to go for a long semi-rural walk—at least in my part of the US—you generally have to drive there first.

* See this post on the walking habits of Wilkie Collins on one of my new favorite blogs, Steamboats are ruining everything. While visiting New York, Collins found that his daily walks puzzled the natives:

Biographer Catherine Peters reports that during an 1873 book tour of America, Collins was dismayed to discover that Americans did not carry walking-sticks and did not like to go on walks. From New York, Collins wrote home to a friend of his chagrin:

I . . . thought nothing of a daily constitutional from my hotel in Union-square to Central Park and back. Half a dozen times on my way, friends in carriages would stop and beg me to jump in. I always declined, and I really believe that they regarded my walking exploits as a piece of English eccentricity.

I've had the exact same experience more times than I can count, only with much shorter distances than Collins' five-mile Union Square to Central Park stroll.

On walkability, part 2: Giving people something to look at

(This is part 2 in an irregular series of posts about walkability. For those of you just tuning in, part 1 is here.)

You don't always hear about aesthetics being a factor in walkability; usually the discussion is focused on distances between places that people need to get to, and obstacles in the way of their walking to and fro. But I've thought for a long time now that the look of a walking route is important. A street with nothing but blank walls, or parking lots as far as the eye can see, makes for a dull, boring, dispiriting slog; a street with interesting buildings or bits of greenery or lots of shop windows or good views makes the same distance seem much less, because there's always something interesting to look at. All the places I've lived in have illustrated this to greater or lesser degrees. Charlottesville has glimpses of the Blue Ridge Mountains everywhere you go; Ann Arbor has beautiful old houses*; Baltimore has fabulous bits of kitsch and wackiness (including things like Elvis shrines and painted window screens).

In Philly, there were some streets that I always found dull and highway-esque (especially certain stretches of Market Street in University City), but there were others that harbored weird and delightful surprises for anyone strolling by: a street of tiny houses, a building covered in mosaic tiles and mirrors...

...a Stikman or a mystery tile embedded in the street:

...an old bay window with a fancy vintage sign:

New London has its points of visual interest, too: there are the views of the Long Island Sound that you get when you head south from the Connecticut College campus...

...the riverfront, with docks and ferries and the Groton Monument across the river:

...the pretty old buildings along State Street (Bank Street, too):

But there are also plenty of places where the historic buildings give way to endless I-95 on- and off-ramps. It's hard to get very excited about my walk home from work when the view of the Sound gives way to the view of, well, this:

Even with the sunset light on it, that's a vista that I got tired of really fast. A big stretch of my homeward walk goes through gas-station-and-interstate territory, and I walk it with my headphones plugged in, tuning out the visuals as much as I can, because they're just depressing. (Which is not to say that I walk along ignoring traffic. I'm not suicidal.) And there's really no other way between campus and New London proper. Interestingly, there's a group of people currently tackling this very issue. I missed their first open forum, but I'm hoping to go to the next one.

No one group of people is responsible for creating the kinds of visual details that make walking pleasant rather than boring; architects and designers and planners and business owners and arborists and home owners and street artists and a host of others all contribute. There's no one way to go about making a place visually interesting, and band-aid solutions (a grassy median here, a mural there) aren't going to make an ugly place all that much less ugly. But we can at least think about building environments that aren't meant to be driven through at top speed and never looked at.

* That house in the photo was my favorite building in all of Ann Arbor, and I used to walk past it whenever I could because I loved it so much.

On walkability and how to measure it: part 1 of an intermittent series

I've been wanting to write a post about walkability for some time now, but the more I think about it, the more I realize it should be a series, because if I tried to say everything I wanted to say in one post, it would approach book length, and it's long enough already. So consider this the initial post in an occasional series on walkable urbanism, interspersed with your regularly scheduled poetry, opera, and bibliogeekery.

Among the myriad of nifty mappy things the internet has enabled in recent years, Walk Score is among my favorites. You type your address into it, and it gives you a walkability score based on your proximity to various necessities, which you can then view on a map. Pretty sweet. But when I moved from Philadelphia to New London, I started to notice some of Walk Score's flaws. It rates my previous address in Philadelphia at 89 out of 100: "very walkable" but not quite ideal. My address in New London, by comparison, gets a 92, "Walkers' Paradise." I actually think my current location is a good deal less walkable than my previous one: while I can easily walk downtown and avail myself of an organic food co-op, a couple of good coffee shops, a bunch of small boutiques, various art galleries, and the local arts center (all good things), there aren't really any large grocery stores within easy walking distance (Walk Score has an annoying habit of classifying small convenience stores as "groceries"; it also counts the local porno shop and a small "Christian bookstore" in a nearby church as "bookstores"), and other necessities of life are farther off.

In Philly, I lived two blocks from a post office, a drugstore, a hardware store, a dry cleaner, a couple of laundromats, many restaurants, a great coffee shop, and a wine shop. Within a ten-block-or-so radius were my favorite used bookstore, a Whole Foods, a small local grocery, a tiny farmers' market, and the central branch of the Free Library of Philadelphia. What's more, I could walk all the way across the city, mostly on streets that weren't too wide to cross safely or too traffic-clogged to be enjoyable; many of these streets were shaded by trees and lined with lovely old brick and brownstone buildings. If I didn't feel like walking, there were three bus routes within a couple of blocks of my building, and I could get to regional rail and Amtrak easily. (I can walk to the train station here, and I use the bus system—but any bus system that runs once an hour, stops service at 7 p.m., and doesn't run on Sundays is all but unusable for most people.) When I was out and about in Philly, I saw my neighbors; here, I'm often the only person on the street. There's a whole subjectively perceived (but no less real) culture of walking (or not walking) that tools like Walk Score miss.

So I was pleased to see that there's now a project afoot for an open source use of the Walk Score algorithm. I've signed up to be notified when it's released; I hope it'll allow for citizen walk-score mappers to update their local maps, to re-flag misclassified businesses, identify streets where there are no sidewalks or many lanes of traffic or lousy snow removal, and offer some commentary as well as concrete data.

And I was even more pleased to find Walkshed, a tool rather like Walk Score but with fine-tuned controls you can adjust to specify your greater or lesser need to be near various amenities—so if you really want tree cover and parks but would rather not live near a bar, or if public transit is a must but you don't particularly care about hardware scores, you can adjust your map accordingly and it'll show you a nice "heat map" of your city, with the most promising areas shaded in green. And it takes street connectivity and barriers to walking (like highways and rivers) into account. Alas, it's limited to New York and Philadelphia right now, but I really hope the concept catches on.