KCRag Forum

One study says we’ve built eight parking spots for every car in the country.

pash wrote:
It's also clear that PPS is caused not just by car culture, but is just one of the many inefficiencies created by the "separation of uses" that Jane Jacobs warned against so many years ago. You create "central businesses districts" and zone commercial out of residential areas and you end up with everybody parking one place during business hours and everybody parking another place nights and weekends. You need twice as much parking, and half of it is always empty.

Our results show that the number of businesses per acre is the single most robust indicator of whether people are likely to walk in their neighborhood. We find that people living in neighborhoods with more business establishments per acre conduct more of their travel within their neighborhood and are more likely to travel by walking.

This suggests that walkable neighborhoods are often places where there are many nearby destinations. Measures that might correlate with large establishments—retail employment or sales—did not predict walking travel nearly as reliably as the number of businesses per acre, suggesting that the key is not simply sales but a large number and variety of businesses in a relatively small area.

The tricky part is that the business concentration needed to encourage walking appears to be larger than most neighborhood residential populations can support. Given that, suburban regions should focus both on fostering pedestrian centers and on knitting those centers together with transportation networks, though such networks need not accommodate only cars.

pash wrote:The full paper on which the Atlantic Cities and Access articles are based is here [PDF].

On the population needed to support local businesses:

Retail sales in these two centres are approximately three to four times as large as what could be supported by the resident and employee base in the centres. Businesses in Riviera Village and Torrance Old Town import a substantial share of their customers from outside their study areas. For both centres, ERA (2008b) estimates that the commercial core serves a market area that is approximately three miles in radius.

But that should surprise no one. The surrounding areas are heavily residential, so of course the residents of those areas will have to do their shopping in the more commercialized Riviera Village and Torrance Old Town. If you want to promote walking over car travel, this suggests to men that you want a more uniform distribution of residential units and businesses. The trick is that to achieve that, you must condense residential, not spread out businesses.

In other words, I think the idea of "retrofitting the suburbs" for walkability is basically a non-starter. People are just too spread out not to drive. Yes, you can "urbanize" the suburbs by building more high-density housing and end up with more people walking. But the residents of the old, low-density housing stock will still be driving everywhere.

pash wrote:Kansas City, Mo. overall comes in 43 out of the 50 largest American cities by average Walk Score.

pash wrote:By the way—this has been posted before—there's a neat website called Walk Score that quantifies the number of businesses and attractions within walking distance of any address. (It ties into Yelp's API.) There is a neat feature that draws a heat map of scores over a city—here's KC's.

chaglang wrote:

pash wrote:Kansas City, Mo. overall comes in 43 out of the 50 largest American cities by average Walk Score.

Even at 43, I feel like KC's ranking is slightly inflated by WalkScore's counting of QuickieMarts as grocery stores and home business (like someone selling Silpada out of their house) as shops. Incidentally, those are the closest two "shopping" options to my house.

chingon wrote:

chaglang wrote:

pash wrote:Kansas City, Mo. overall comes in 43 out of the 50 largest American cities by average Walk Score.

Even at 43, I feel like KC's ranking is slightly inflated by WalkScore's counting of QuickieMarts as grocery stores and home business (like someone selling Silpada out of their house) as shops. Incidentally, those are the closest two "shopping" options to my house.

But they do that everywhere. And there are a lot of bodega-style places in big cities that are less well-provisioned than he average QT.

FangKC wrote:Most people in NYC don't buy those from chain grocery stores anyway, but the corner bodega. Most convenience stores don't carry them.

The New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene's Healthy Bodegas program seeks to make healthier food choices available in communities where fresh produce, whole grains, and low fat dairy products can be hard (or impossible) to find

Some people might say, "Healthy bodega--isn't that an oxymoron?"

Most of the food that's distributed to the bodegas now is the prepackaged convenience foods, the chips, the cookies