Does It Matter Who Pays For Sidewalks Or Is Walk Score Useless?

Some advocates for pedestrian access claim that the source of funding for sidewalks strongly affects a city’s walkability. Groups such as Atlanta’s PEDSargue that if cities fully fund sidewalk construction without any cost placed on adjacent property owners, walkability will be higher.

Measuring walkability is fraught with controversy. Walk Score is a popular tool that measures how pedestrian-friendly a city and its neighborhoods are. However, it is dependent on the proximity of residences to businesses. Their focus appears to be that it is more important to have somewhere to walk to than to have a clear path to get there. Such an assumption is a great way to start a bar fight among urbanists.

Let’s compare how the walk score for a few select cities varies under the following two circumstances: 

1.      1. The city spreads the cost of building sidewalks among all taxpayers, as with streets and highways via taxation.

2.      2. The city puts the onus of paying for sidewalk construction on the adjacent property owners.

The possible walk score range is 0-100. Higher scores reflect better walkability using this metric. Note that I am focusing on city policies for new construction to fill in sidewalk gaps.

Georgetown, a section of Washington, DC, features a dense grid, small blocks, and extensive sidewalks.

Washington, DC, updated its sidewalk installation policy in 2015 to ensure that gaps in sidewalk coverage were filled even when no new construction projects, such as road improvements or development projects, were planned. New sidewalk construction in gaps is prioritized as follows:

1.       School areas

2.       Routes that provide access to parks and recreational facilities

3.       Transit stops

4.       Locations where the absence of a sidewalk creates substantial pedestrian safety risks

5.       Roadway segments for which residents have petitioned to have sidewalks

The process is primarily staff-driven until the last criterion. It requires property owner input, but not their contribution of funds. Washington’s walk score is an impressive 77.

Fairfax City, VA, a city in the northern Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C., reserves the authority in its Residential New Concrete Sidewalk Policy to build new sidewalks via its tax-funded Capital Improvement Program. Neither payment nor permission from adjacent homeowners is required, though notice to them and nearby civic associations is. The city has a lackluster walk score of  52. 

Sure, Fairfax City will pay for sidewalks, but is this highway-choked sprawl really walkable?

Los Angeles, CA is often thought of as the stereotypical, car-centric American city, yet its walk score of 66 indicates that perception may no longer be accurate. Thanks to the settlement of a lawsuit over the city’s failure to make miles of broken and missing sidewalks comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act, L.A.  must commit $1.3 billion to pedestrian projects over the next few decades. That enormous commitment led the city to embrace a “fix-and-release” policy for sidewalks. 

Under this scheme, L.A. will pay to build new sidewalks, as well as reconstruct damaged ones, next to commercial, industrial and residential properties. It will then offer a limited warranty period that guarantees only one repair in the future. The duration of the warranty is twenty years for sidewalks next to residences and five years for those next to commercial properties. 

Nobody walks in LA, especially if they close off the entire street.

On the day the plan passed, L.A. Councilman Paul Krekorian claimed, “This fear that seems to be out there that suddenly people are going to have a burden dumped upon them – that just isn’t the case.” But, that’s exactly what will happen once the warranty’s clock runs out. For those of limited financial means, fixing a city sidewalk could be a heavy burden. 

Atlanta, GA mirrors Los Angeles by shunting the cost of sidewalks squarely on the shoulders of adjacent property owners, though without L.A.’s limited warranty. Sidewalk gaps in Atlanta are common and building new sidewalks can be costly, thanks to Atlanta’s use of hexagonal blocks instead of poured concrete. Atlanta’s walk score is a poor 48. 

Few would argue that Atlanta is a pedestrian-friendly city today, but that may be about to change thanks to T-SPLOST.

In response to this poor environment for walking, the city leadership backed a referendum on a special local option sales tax for transportation, commonly known as T-SPLOST.  Now that it has passed, $300 million in revenue will be generated over a five year period. Sidewalk projects will receive over $69 million of that amount.

Alexandria, VA, has a sidewalk policy that spreads the cost of sidewalks among all taxpayers, while effectively allowing adjacent property owners to veto a new sidewalk. Applications to the Residential Sidewalk Program require the signatures of five residents within that project area in support of the sidewalk. Those commuting through the area to reach a transit hub like King Street Metro station won’t be counted. Additionally, Alexandria “requires the identification of a project champion, who will be the main point of contact for the City.” That champion must then: 

…notify each household in project area with flyer distribution and provide signatures noting support for or against the project from 80% of addresses in project area. Property owners directly adjacent to proposed sidewalk MUST sign the petition and note if they support or do not support the project.

There is no exception if an adjacent property owner refuses to sign and indicate support of opposition. Conceivably, that conveys a veto power to those who don’t cooperate with the process.

This is close to a schoolbus stop and along a busy pedestrian route to a Metrorail/Commuter rail/Bus transit hub. Pedestrians are forced into the street because the city gives homeowners a veto on sidewalks.

Alexandria maintains Silver level status as a Walk Friendly Community, a designation made by a coalition that includes the Association of Pedestrian and Bicycle Professionals, the League of American Bicyclists, and multiple federal agencies. However, that status appears to derive from a combination of staffing and a city Complete Streets policy, rather than sidewalk conditions. The city’s overall walk score is a mediocre 61. 

New York City, NY,puts all responsibility for construction of missing sidewalks onto adjacent property owners. That includes both installation and subsequent maintenance. If a property owner refuses to comply, the city will do the work, send them an invoice, and place a lien on the property, if necessary.  As with Los Angeles, this approach could be a burden on property owners in low-income areas.

Is a city walkable if the sidewalks are so crowded that pedestrians walk in the street? That's happening in NYC, but Walk Score rates them highly.

New York faces a serious pedestrian congestion issue in the city. Sidewalks in extreme high-density areas such as Manhattan simply aren’t wide enough to handle the traffic. The New York Times refers to this situation as “Sidewalk Gridlock.” However, despite this apparent infrastructural shortcoming, the city still has a high walk score of 89.

The funding source of new sidewalk construction does not appear to track with walkability as measured by Walk Score. That would indicate that either Walk Score’s methodology is utterly useless or that the importance of sidewalk conditions is overrated. Until a metric is developed that directly accounts for sidewalk conditions across multiple jurisdictions, this is a debate that will be impossible to settle, as measurement of walkability will remain largely subjective.

Will Bikes Eliminate the Need for Big-Ticket Highway & Transit Projects?

I like innovation. Creative thinking to me reflects intellectual vigor. When we become afraid of change, we age all too quickly.

Miami, a beacon of youthful vigor in a state with the opposite reputation, is the site of an idea that takes poorly-used space and makes room for one of the most sustainable transportation modes available: bikes. The proposal, which unsurprisingly comes from consultants from the Dutch Cycling Embassy, is to build a linear park and bike path under Metrorail elevated transit in the southwest corner of town. This Metrorail line already has a pockmarked, bumpy, sorry excuse for a path underneath it called the M-Path. However, like so many similar asphalt afterthoughts built by DOTs in the latter part of the 20^th century, it’s hardly used. The new path, entitled the Underline, would seek to recreate the same allure and excitement that the High Line created in Manhattan in these early years of the 21^stcentury, except the addition of a proper bike route makes it far more useful.

A usable, attractive corridor is bound to attract economic growth. Witness the sustained boom taking place in the intown areas of Atlanta, particularly near the still-unfinished Beltline. The Beltline may seem to be a bit grandiose, with its promise of light rail transit, redeveloped neighborhoods, and multiuser paths. Expensive light rail projects are getting harder to fund as infrastructure spending throughout the US withers under conservative pressure.  For example, Arlington, Virginia, surrendered to such antipathy when it chose to kill a streetcar project in a low-income corridor after strenuous objections from right-leaning county board members, Libby Garvey and John Vihstadt.  Luckily for Atlanta, the economic benefits of the Beltline are already coming in with only multiuser paths in place in some areas.

That raises a rather unsettling question for transportation and city planners: is the key to neighborhood vigor and economic growth a combination of low-impact, low-cost transportation infrastructure and parks? If the High Line, Underline, and Beltline are all successful in injecting vitality into close-in neighborhoods, with the latter two offering new connectivity, should we re-task funding away from elaborate road and transit projects designed to expensively move people between outlying areas and the central cores of metropolitan areas? If a rail transit system is too much for Arlington to stomach, for instance, should the county look to a long corridor of bike paths and parks paralleling the route of the defunct streetcar as a replacement?

Some signs of a new trend in this direction are starting to appear. In the early 1990s, the Georgia Department of Transportation (GDOT) finally realized its collective dream of building an expresswaythrough the heart of north Atlanta after years of opposition during Atlanta’s Freeway Revolt. Georgia 400 was initially built as a toll road with an expensive MARTA heavy rail line in the center. The road recently lost its tolls (cue massive backups).

In a glaring oversight, GDOT chose not to include a bike path alongside the new road, as Virginia’s DOT had done years earlier along I-66 inside the Beltway (the Custis Trail).  GDOT is now going a little way towards rectifying that error by donating right-of-way along part of GA 400 to Atlanta’s PATH organization. PATH is part of a consortium constructing a multiuser path through north Atlanta’s Buckhead community that will connect to the Atlanta Beltline. The beginnings of a citywide bike network are starting to form.

That this is occurring in Georgia is positively earthshaking. This is the same state that gives no money at all to Atlanta’s MARTA transit system. That’s not to say that the Republican governor, Nathan Deal, has turned his back on that most traditional of congestion relief measures, the widening of urban expressways. Years of repeated failures of such projects to alleviate congestion have yet to have an impact on the governor’s transportation policy. However, big changes often have small beginnings.

In this era of diminishing budgets, more regions should look to these innovative ideas from Miami and Atlanta. It’s better to build something cheap that will keep its full functionality many years after completion than waste time on projects that will never get off the ground (Arlington Streetcar) or will ultimately fail to relieve congestion (any given urban highway expansion). If the Underline and Beltline can be completed and grow in popularity, as well as economic impact, the consultants at the Dutch Cycling Embassy will get a lot busier.

Five Steps to Successful Transportation Planning (and how to tell a NIMBY from a Naysayer)

Imagine yourself as a political official with authority over a city's transportation system. Your task is to build an efficient, functional transportation system in your city.
Let's assume that, for external reasons, exponential growth is headed your way. Your current infrastructure can't possibly handle it all. What do you do?

Step 1: Don't freak out.
All too often, planners faced with exponential growth panic. They propose outlandish plans to double, or even triple, the capacity of primary roadways. Georgia's Department of Transportation (DOT) did this with Atlanta's expressway network in the 1980s. For their trouble, they got some of the worst congestion resulting from induced demandthe US has seen.

Step 2: Learn from the failures of your predecessors.
California built a staggering number of freeway lane-miles in the 1960s and 1970s, many of them in urban areas. It was very impressive-from the air. From the ground, it was bad enough to give rise to a new phrase, "road rage." Unfortunately, in the 2000s under Governor Schwarzenegger, California planners went old school and started building urban freeways again.  Neither the former governor nor his advisors connected the dots and realized that their approach had no more chance of success than did their predecessors'. Indeed, despite of the continuing gridlock, the former governor claimed in a recent interview on The Nerdist Podcast that his freeway construction was one of his great legacies. That's an odd way to feel about a collection of what are effectively parking lots during rush hour.

Step 3: Don't just react to circumstances.
If you simply take a reactive approach, you'll end up with a mess. Consider this hypothetical scenario: Main Street is jammed with cars, buses, and pedestrians. So, you decide to add vehicle capacity to the road by widening it. This penalizes pedestrians, of course, but maybe you're hoping to fix that later.
The added capacity induces demand, as it always does in urban areas, so you decide to build a bypass. That induces more demand, so you widen the bypass which induces still more demand. Lather, rinse, repeat.
The reactive approach, wildly popular in the mid-20th century US and currently in vogue in China, is great for keeping construction companies happy, but lousy for actually accomplishing anything. Try to anticipate conditions so that your solutions are sustainable.

Step 4: Get some vision.
This is easier said than done, as engineers and technocrats are seldom trained, or even asked, for creative vision. Vision requires the capability to step back and imagine the best result. Engineers and technocrats are usually expected to just make sure the details are right.
No, you need not be an artist (though that could lead to some amusing results), but you must have knowledge in a broad variety of fields so you can synthesize them into a holistic view of the urban environment. For instance, psychology gives insight into how pedestrian pathways tend to gravitate towards a straight line, even if it leads to walking a muddy track or jaywalking across an expressway. Sociology offers perspective on why Americans tend to shun buses, but ride streetcars, even when there's no difference in travel times. Political Science might give you a clue as to why mass transit is unpopular in the GOP-dominated American South, but highly prized in Democratic strongholds on the East and West Coasts. Bottom line: read outside your professional box.

Step 5: Don't confuse naysayers with NIMBYs.
Naysayers are those who reflexively say no to any change, even if it doesn't affect them directly. NIMBYs (Not In My Back Yard) are, as the name suggests, directly affected opponents.
However, someone who is adjacent to project doesn't necessarily start out as an opponent. For example, suppose a redevelopment project that will boost homevalues by eliminating ugly, decrepit warehouses ends up with strong NIMBY opposition because someone in a neighborhood association excitedly spread wordthat traffic would be awful. Never mind that the site is well-connected to transit and in a highly walkable area. Professional staff opinions will count for nothing, because those opinions are grounded in evidence. The naysayers who are whipping up the NIMBYs into a frenzy are manipulating emotions and have no need or use for evidence.

If you consider yourself a leader, you will have to be able to disregard dishonest naysayer objections and push forward. Luckily, in politics memories are surprisingly short. Those NIMBYs who want to burn you in effigy today may reluctantly admit you were right tomorrow, especially if the results of your projects are discernibly different from the apocalypse forecast by naysayers. But, this favorable outcome won't happen if you skip any of these steps.

Traffic Is Water, and Other Bad Assumptions in Transportation Planning

Here’s a question for you to consider: if a road is congested, should it be widened? If you answered yes, can you name a major urban highway widening project that didn’t revert within five years to the same average traffic speed as before the expansion?

Widening a road to alleviate congestion is an intuitively obvious solution to most Americans.  Generations of planners reinforced this thinking when they told Americans that traffic is like water: if you have too much flowing in a channel, you need to widen it. 

You can see this attitude in play all over the US. Whenever a road gets busy, planners and commuters look for ways to widen it, no matter what the effect may be on communities abutting the road. Arlington, Virginia homeowners along Interstate 66 near Washington are constantly under threat of a major widening because commuters further out think a wider road will speed up their drive times.

Too bad it wouldn’t work. Atlanta widened the Downtown Connector (I-75/85 from just north of downtown to just north of Atlanta Airport) from six lanes to twelve lanes in the 1980s. HOV lanes were added in the 1990s. Guess how much faster traffic goes today versus the 1980s? If you answered “no faster”, pat yourself on the back and send your resume to your nearest DOT. 

The ever-expanding Downtown Connector in Atlanta, GA. Look, in the distance you can see it growing AGAIN! Photo courtesy of Connor Carey/Wikipedia.

Need another example? Try this: a project infamous for its $15 billion cost is The Big Dig, or Central Artery Project, in Boston. The Big Dig’s main source of fame is the removal of an ugly elevated highway that divided the city, but it’s also supposed to provide some congestion relief. However, the Boston Globe reports that commutes are actually worse than ever with travel times actually doubling several years after completion. Removing one traffic bottleneck, as in this case, does no good for the bottlenecks that remain and may exacerbate the problem by tempting more drivers onto the roads. 

One of the tunnels built for the Big Dig in Boston, MA. Photo courtesy of Rene Schwietzke/Wikipedia

This demonstrates the basic fallacy with the traffic-as-water theory: water is not a rational actor. Water can’t be tempted. Likewise, if water’s flow is too great, it can’t opt to move its source closer to its destination. Nor, for that matter, can it move its destination closer to its source. 

Human beings do this all the time. That’s why home prices in close-in, walkable neighborhoods around large urban centers throughout the US held steady or increased in recent years, while prices in far-flung neighborhoods melted down faster than a Japanese nuclear power plant. 

In the Washington, DC area, home foreclosures in the suburbs form what some real estate experts describe as a “ring of fire”. The center is nice and cool---at least, the fires of foreclosure don’t rage there. But in the outer counties such as Loudoun in northern Virginia, empty McMansions abound. Derelict subdivisions are seldom viewed by young buyers as great places to bring up families. 

The inner suburbs and downtown areas were already enjoying resurgence thanks to their vastly shorter commute times, so their vibrancy was a natural lure to these new homeowners. Why live in a depressed area a long drive from work when you can live in a fun place that allows you a multitude of commuting options?

So, the debate is settled: there’s no more need to expand transportation options to the suburbs because they are emptying out, right? Well, not everyone agrees with that assessment. Kenneth Johnson, senior demographer at the Carsey Institute at the University of New Hampshire, thinks that the migration into the cities could reverse once the economy recovers. The flight to the suburbs that outweighed central city growth in every decade since the 1920s would restart once mortgages became obtainable.

As a result, some planners think we should expend resources expanding suburban commuter options just as we did in the past, even if the assumptions behind that decision appear uncertain. But is it smart to spend billions of dollars on a scenario that, while once was almost a certainty, seems to be fading into history?

If we look to other developed nations, such as those in the European Union or Japan, where do we see the most expensive real estate? Inevitably, it’s in the urban core where transport links are the most robust. The low-income residential areas are located on the distant periphery. 

Perhaps that’s the hidden story here: America’s urban development isn’t taking a pause from its normal pattern of urban rot and suburban boom. It’s resetting to what is the normal global pattern: popular cores with declining demand further out. If so, America’s planning meme is in need of a reboot, or else a lot of money will be wasted.