Walkability and the Street Scene

 I frequently walk to work. I live about a mile away from my workplace, maybe two kilometers if you aren't a flying crow, and even in bad weather or freezing temperatures I can make my way to work in half an hour or less. This isn't always useful--if I need to pick my kids up from daycare, I can't do that well by walking (because of their age and difficulty walking home, plus poor public transit options)--but there are more days than not when it's a good option.

But I wouldn't call my area particularly walkable, even though I can do this and I do do it. In this post, I want to discuss why.

1. The proof is in the pudding

I cannot remember the last time that I saw another person actually walking any real distance in my neighborhood at the same time that I was walking. I have seen a person or two walking while I was biking or driving, and I have seen people (mostly children) in their own front yards, or walking from a car to a house, but I haven't seen other people walking from place to place at the same time that I am. There is a group of joggers--but see below about why I don't think they count. Otherwise, there's nobody but a couple kids going to school or their friends' houses, at most a block or two, and usually absolutely no one.

This is a good sign that the neighborhood is not actually walkable, because (as we can see in big cities) when places are walkable, people walk. It's free, it doesn't require much if any preparation except in bad weather, and it's a thing you'll have to do in most cases to access any other transportation (even a car parked on the street or in an unattached garage). 

But there are sidewalks! There isn't much traffic! What's the problem?

2. Walkability requires somewhere to walk to

Maybe I'm missing some large reservoir of my neighbors who are really good friends and walk to each others' houses, but otherwise, there aren't a lot of destinations to walk to in and around my neighborhood. There is a hospital--and I have indeed walked to it--and a very small handful of restaurants. There's a couple of elementary schools, and indeed the closest I see to walking routinely in my neighborhood is a few schoolchildren who do walk home after school. There is a nexus on one end of my neighborhood where two major streets intersect and there are more things, including my work and a couple grocery stores, but for reasons I'll detail below they aren't particularly appealing walking locations. And there are parks, but they have huge parking lots that actually make it hard to walk safely into them from the surrounding sidewalks. 

But there aren't many places to go on foot, and they aren't very close to each other, so there isn't any real incentive to go anywhere on foot in order to continue on to other locations. To be a walkable area, there has to be somewhere to actually go on foot, not just a path. 

3. Pedestrian infrastructure needs to be good, not just to exist

Here's an anecdote about how the sidewalks suck near me: there is the aforementioned group of joggers that come out about once a week, but they jog in the street.

This is a testament to how quiet my streets are, of course. But it's also a testament to how bumpy, irregular, and sometimes overgrown our sidewalks are. And with pedestrian infrastructure that pushes the most frequent pedestrian users into the car space, no wonder no one walks.

Add to this the fact that the only real destinations are across a pair of four lane one way streets that cars race down despite a theoretical 25 mile an hour speed limit (due to a school zone), and you have a perfect recipe for an area with theoretical but not real walkability. The sidewalks aren't usable, and the streets are only safe in the quiet residential areas that no one is in--if people were driving, the streets wouldn't be safe for the joggers, after all--and so there is nowhere one would want to walk.

I experience this myself, of course. For all that I do walk to work, I don't enjoy it very much, precisely because there are places I have to cross the street so as not to hit my head on branches, or to avoid tripping on tree roots that have ripped up the sidewalk. One place near my work I once took a photo (replacement photo below) of a tree actually growing out of the middle of a crack in the sidewalk, untrimmed and uncut. Basically, I can walk to work--but there's good reasons why I'm the only one who does.

OK, maybe not a tree yet, but a bush for sure.

Seriously, how are you supposed to get around that if you use any kind of accessibility device or if you have a stroller? The snow is covering the giant bump from the cracks in the pavement, but I assure you: even on two able feet you can stumble pretty easily.

Physical Infrastructure Is Good

This post is perhaps a bit obvious, but it speaks to one of the tensions I sometimes see between different waves of transit advocacy and different priorities placed on how transit dollars are spent. The key concept here is in the title: physical infrastructure is good. Flexibility is also valuable, but in seeking flexibility, transit cannot afford to forego the presence and visibility of physical infrastructure on the street. And this has implications for how cities and regions should invest in transit.

This is often phrased in terms of trains vs buses: trains (including here pretty much all variants thereof, from heavy rail or metro on the one hand to trams and light rail on the other) require a lot of visible physical infrastructure on the ground, from tracks to stations, while buses do not. A bus can run on any street. A bus can stop anywhere that there's safe space on that street for someone to board or alight. A bus, therefore, can run without physical infrastructure of any kind except the bus itself.

Except, my friends...except...

1. Where does it go from here?

Physical infrastructure gives key information about where the transit goes. The most obvious example is a train track:

It goes thataway.

Tunnels are even more obvious, as they constrain where the tracks could go in the future. And if the Cloud Car has (only) one advantage, it's that it's the most visible of all. 

This can be done with a good bus stop too, of course: there can be timetables, route maps, area maps, etc. But what it requires is somewhere to look and see where the bus goes, or the train goes, or something, without having to use an app or a website, because if you can't see it from just showing up, you only get people who were planning to take transit, and not people for whom it might be convenient but didn't plan ahead like the transit junkies (like me) do. Speaking of which...

2. How do you even know there's a bus?

Here is a bus approaching a stop in Davenport. 

I know a bus is going to stop here because...there is a bus stopping here. And because I trust my maps (and my reading of them, and where I am, and that the bus is not on diversion). And because I've actually taken this bus several times before.

But if I'm in the city for the first time, or taking the bus for the first time, or the bus doesn't happen to be there right now (and it runs once an hour, so that's more likely than not), I'm not going to know that. It's just a stretch of street. And this is true in most of Davenport. Actually, this particular stop is more marked than most: the other side of the street has a shelter, for the other direction of service, and this side has a small "no parking, bus only," sign, though it doesn't actually say it's a bus stop or what lines run there. 

So in most of Davenport (and the Iowa Quad Cities in general; the Illinois side is a bit better but still highly imperfect outside of downtowns), I will have no idea where the bus goes or stops except if I take active steps to look it up. And assume that it isn't in a diversion. Speaking of which...

3. How do I know if something is running off-route or off-schedule?

Where I grew up, in Seattle, there are a lot of bus stops marked just by a single pole or sign--but that physical infrastructure is where crucial information is posted about detours, delays, and diversions.

When there is not even that physical infrastructure, how do you communicate that? One way is via app or website--but then again, only those already actively seeking transit will find and use it. Another is this:

This is better than nothing, I guess. But it's also...not great. There is one small, text-filled sign at one intersection covering a multi-block area and a major diversion for several weeks, with no timing indicated. It's not at a stop, because there are no signed stops, so a rider would have to be here (and not, say, a block away) and looking at a generic Public Works sign (not anything inherently related to Citibus) to see it.

If there isn't predictable, visible physical infrastructure, you don't have a clear way to tell potential passengers about things like this. 

Now, none of these fundamentally say you need something other than a bus. A bus line with clear stops and signage can do this. A bus rapid transit line with stations, dedicated lanes (or even a busway!), and clearly visible presence on the street does basically all of this! Trains do it too, of course.

But what does not do it is the Davenport Citibus, or any similar service that relies on the "show up and hope it's a bus stop" model.

Physical Infrastructure Is Good, because it lets people use transit without being transit junkies. And much as I enjoy being one of those, I prefer a system where other people use it too.