Sprawled Out: The Search for Community in the American Suburb

Safe Routes to School gets some local press

From the FranklinNOW website:

Franklin — As a parent of a former Pleasant View Elementary School student, John Michlig knows as well as anyone how the conditions can be for students trying to get to school.

Subdivisions on either side do not have a sidewalk or path connection to the school. The road that brings vehicles to the school does not have a shoulder on which a child could ride a bike. Buses must squeeze onto narrow city streets.

It's bad enough that Michlig has seen children get picked up by a school bus a mere two blocks away because they do not have a safe route to walk to the school.

"You got this condition people refer to as, 'Nearby is far away,' " Michlig said.

Michlig has been a volunteer on the Franklin Trails Committee since it formed last year to address problems on 51st Street near Pleasant View, 4601 W. Marquette Ave.

Funding help In the last week, Franklin was awarded a $19,700 grant for a federal program called Safe Routes to School. The program encourages children from kindergarten through eighth grade to walk and bike to school by creaking safer biking and walking routes.

Franklin was one of 34 communities in Wisconsin to receive funding.

With that money, officials will plan possible improvements in the Pleasant View area, which may include anything from sidewalks to a foot bridge over a nearby creek.

After the planning stages are complete, the trails committee hopes to receive a much larger, possible six-figure second grant to pay for those improvements.

Planning the path

But first things first: coming up with the plan.

Part of the process includes soliciting feedback from businesses and residents in the area so everyone is on the same page about what the neighborhood needs, Michlig said. Their input will help assess the needs of the area.

Committee members want to find out how to make it easier for neighborhood kids to walk to school. Many city officials and those in the neighborhood participated in a "walking workshop" last spring and were struck by how difficult that can be, Michlig said.

"We heard it again and again - we as parents are stuck having to drive our child to school when actually it's so close," Michlig said.

Plus, by encouraging the idea of walking to school, kids would also be more physically fit without having to go out of their way to find exercise opportunities, Michlig said.

Mark Cloutier, the school district's manager of buildings and grounds, said that while the district does not have control over what goes on outside its boundaries, school officials support sidewalks and anything that makes pedestrian access better in the community.

He noted there is a sidewalk in front of the school itself and he did not expect the Safe Routes to School program to change the district's requirement to bus every student.

Pedestrian accommodations were recently improved near another school building just to the south, when 51st Street in front of Franklin High School was reconstructed and sidewalks were added with the help of federal stimulus money.

Read the rest at: Group eyes safer ways to get to school - FranklinNOW

More bike riders create "safety in numbers"

Another non-intuitive fact about non-vehicular travel and safety:

As ridership goes up, crash rates stay flat. It's happening in Portland (see page 11 of this report[PDF]). It's happening in New York City.

The phenomenon, dubbed "safety in numbers," was first identified in 2003, in an academic paper by public health researcher Peter Jacobsen [PDF]. After being asked by officials in Pasadena, Calif., if their city "was a dangerous place to bicycle," Jacobsen began looking at crash data from various communities where bicycle ridership had fluctuated over time.

What he found surprised him: The number of crashes involving bikes correlated with the number of riders in a community. As ridership fluctuated, so did the crash rate. More riders, fewer crashes; fewer riders, more crashes.

Read the rest at: TheWashCycle: Still more evidence of the network effect in bicycle safety

Excellent news: Franklin has won a Safe Routes to School Grant

I just found out today that a grant I wrote with my alderman, Kristen Wilhelm, resulted in Franklin being selected as one of 34 Wisconsin communities receiving Safe Routes to School funds!

Now the real work begins. Stay tuned ...

51st Street sidewalk - at long last

P1090471, originally uploaded by John Michlig.

Cement was poured and smoothed today to complete the portion of the 51st Street sidewalk located in front of the high school. Click on the photo to see a set of shots on Flickr.

Study links sprawl to obesity; light rail to the rescue - NYTimes.com

On the plus side: you'll never wear out a pair of shoes in a post-WWII suburb:

Car-loving Charlotte, N.C., home to strip malls and suburban sprawl, did everything right when putting in place its new light-rail transit system called the Lynx in 2007. The result: a ridership that doubled predictions, and an unexpected public health study that may be the first in proving that the built environment causes obesity.

Riding the rails can leave users an average of 6.5 pounds lighter than others, and 81 percent less likely to become obese over time, according to the study, published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.

Before this study, it was difficult to say for certain whether the features of the built environment, such as sprawl and miles of roadway, are directly responsible for obesity and related illness such as cardiovascular diseases and diabetes.

....

In its first year, at the peak of the gasoline price rise, Charlotte's Lynx saw about 18,100 riders, which was double the number expected, said Robert Stokes, researcher at University of Pennsylvania's department of culture and communication, and co-author of the study. The numbers have maintained. The city did all the right things when putting in place the light-rail system, Stokes said. It chose to put the line close to places where people lived, which increases ridership, according to studies. The corridor stretches 9.6 miles and has 15 stops.

Charlotte also changed its zoning laws to allow development closer to rail stations, and a greater concentration of units. It was a policy change, said Stokes. Since World War II, zoning laws in the nation promoted a separation between commercial, residential and recreational land use in the built environment, leading to more sedentary lifestyles. About half of all Americans do not get enough physical activity to promote health, and about 25 percent do not get any exercise at all, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's 2007 statistics.

Read the rest at: Study Links Sprawl, Obesity - NYTimes.com

Walking and Bike Trails: Mere recreational frills, or connective infrastructure to strengthen a community?

At Thursday night's Trails Committee meeting, I got into an exchange with a member of the Franklin Parks Commission regarding trails. Though this individual -- an alderman -- is also on the Trails Committee, he expressed his belief that the Trails Committee is in "direct conflict," "confrontation," and "competition" with the Parks Commission for Impact Fee dollars. 

"We're not partnering with anybody," he said.

I was a little disturbed, to say the least. It appears that the city of Franklin needs to decide if trails and bike paths are mere recreational facilities (which has been the trend thus far, and seems to be the viewpoint of the Parks Commission, whose trail network thus far connects nothing useful), or if they are to be treated as useful, connective infrastructure, which I believe is the goal of the Trails Committee.

This same alderman was a vocal champion of a Common Council Motion dedicating future Community Development Block Grant funds to extending the new 51st Street farther north, making it possible to access a road that gets you to Pleasant View Elementary School. This leads me to believe that once old "territorial imperatives" are overcome, we can work constructively to make the city traversable by foot and bike as well as cars. 

Agenda item 1 for the next meeting: Discuss cooperative efforts and collaboration with the Parks Commission.

Also in attendance at Thursday's meeting was Alderman Steve Olson, there to contend that the Trails Commission initial mission is limited to 51st Street and the area around Pleasant View Elementary. Our agenda inexplicably included a discussion of sidewalks on Puetz Road, which disturbed him. 

Alderman Olson made a point that needed making: The Trails Committee has accomplished the limited goals originally spelled out for it, and we need to go back to the Common Council to expand our scope city-wide. We'll be making our case at a future Council meeting.

In the meantime, a link to a story about bike paths as community-strengthening infrastructure:

My friend Mia Birk bicycled to my house to deliver her new book: Joyride: Pedaling Toward a Healthier Planet.

Joyride is about her 20-year journey helping to lead Portland, Oregon's transformation into the country's most bike-friendly city and then spreading the gospel (and the tools) so that all communities can integrate bicycling into everyday living.

Why? So that the places we live, work and play can be healthy, affordable, safe and splendid. Safe and splendid. Those are Mia's words.

Safe and splendid. That's a wonderful vision because at a minimum, our communities deserve to be safe for people traveling in different ways. But why stop there? Let's make them splendid, healthy, affordable places where people of all ages have freedom to move in a landscape that is not polluted and congested but alive with activity, commerce and beauty.

....

Portland built its entire 300-mile network of bike ways for the cost of a single mile of urban freeway.

Bicycles are the great connectors. If a community is rich in people who feel comfortable bicycling, you know it's a community rich in connections. Bicycling has the power to reshape ourselves and our communities from flabby to fabulous.

One of my favorite passages quotes the head of the Chamber of Commerce of a Houston suburb built around the oil refinery industry. That hefty man gets up in a public meeting about a new bicycle and pedestrian plan and declares "I've got my SUV idling outside. I just came for the free donuts."

Then he says: "Seriously, y'all. I'm a business person, and this is what I'm hearing: Businesses say they can't attract workers to come live here if we don't provide parks, exercise and safe places for their kids to ride. Bottom line: Businesses need fit and healthy employees, not couch potatoes."

 

Read the rest at: Diane Dulken: Joyride: Bicycling Our Way to Safe and Splendid Communities

Kaid Benfield's Blog: "Why doesn't the public health community get it about walkability?"

 

To say the chart above is startling is an understatement. The date in the "before" map is not 1935, or even 1975 -- you're looking at the spread of obesity in the time since THE SIMPSONS have been on TV.

That, my friends, is an epidemic.

Research proves that sprawl is significantly associated with inactivity and obesity, now perhaps the nation's foremost public health menace.  The results of overweight and obesity include increased coronary heart disease, type 2 diabetes, cancers (endometrial, breast, and colon), hypertension, dyslipidemia, stroke, liver and Gallbladder disease, sleep apnea and respiratory problems, osteoarthritis, and gynecological problems (abnormal menses, infertility).  Research also shows that walkable neighborhoods and transit improve fitness and the health of communities.  Sure sounds important to me.

Read the rest at: Why doesn't the public health community get it about walkability? | Kaid Benfield's Blog | Switchboard, from NRDC

More evidence that walkability is marketable | Planetizen

From Planetizen:

A few days ago, I was in a Chicago neighborhood called Lincoln Square, on Lincoln Avenue just south of Lawrence Avenue.  Lincoln Avenue looks like many posh urban neighborhoods- narrow, walkable streets inhabited by gelato-eating, prosperous-looking people.  Even on a weeknight, the shops and streets of Lincoln Square betrayed no evidence of a recession.*

Lincoln intersects with Lawrence Avenue just a block from the core of Lincoln Square.  Lawrence Avenue resembles a suburb more than it resembles Lincoln Square; it is six lanes wide (though unlike in most suburbs, two of them are used for parking), and some shops are behind parking lots.  But Lawrence's retail is far less prosperous than that of Lincoln; a good number of Lawrence's storefronts seemed to be vacant, and others were occupied by dollar stores and other non-carriage trade businesses.**

Both Lincoln Avenue and Lawrence Avenue have the same housing stock and thus the same neighbors, the same city government (and thus the same tax rates and school districts) and the same distance from downtown (about seven miles).  Thus, these two intersecting streets constitute the perfect controlled experiment on the popularity of walkable urbanism.  If people basically liked shopping on car-oriented speedways, Lawrence would have fewer vacant storefronts than Lincoln.  Yet the opposite is true.  It follows that where everything else is equal, shoppers prefer walkable urbanism to car-oriented suburbanism.

At this point, readers may be asking themselves: why, then, do some suburbs continue to prosper?  Because not everything else is equal: an unwalkable suburb may be further away from troubled neighborhoods (usually leading to more prestigous schools and less crime), in a less poverty-packed jurisdiction (thus leading to lower taxes), or have a newer housing stock.  Thus, not every suburb will look as scruffy as Lincoln Square.

But the tale of these two adjacent streets nevertheless tells us something: that city life with walkability is appealing to American consumers, while city life with less walkability is anything but.

*For a few pictures of Lincoln Square, see

http://atlantaphotos.fotopic.net/p66205703.html

http://atlantaphotos.fotopic.net/p66205709.html

http://atlantaphotos.fotopic.net/p66205702.html

**Although I took no pictures of Lawrence, you can see the street by going to the 2200-2600 blocks of West Lawrence Avenue on Google Street View.

Michael Lewyn is an assistant professor at Florida Coastal School of Law in Jacksonville, FL, where he teaches a seminar on sprawl and the law (as well as numerous other courses).

Read the rest at: More evidence that walkability is marketable | Planetizen

Terms, mind-sets must be changed to encourage and enable more walking in cities

Walkable community advice from Roger K. Lewis, a practicing architect and a professor emeritus of architecture at the University of Maryland:

How can we encourage and enable more walking? What will motivate people to change long-standing perceptions and deeply engrained behavior? We must plan and develop -- or redevelop -- metropolitan environments so walking becomes safe, comfortable, enjoyable and stimulating. This requires satisfying several design criteria:

-- Street patterns must be easily navigable and latticelike, with blocks that are not too big and intersections that are not too far apart. Streets must be continuous and interconnected, providing motorists and pedestrians with more than one path for traveling to a destination.

-- Public streets must be artfully proportioned. Widths of sidewalks, planting strips, cart ways and medians are critical, as are the heights and setbacks of buildings flanking streets. Well-configured street spaces balance a sense of architectural definition and enclosure with desirable exposure to sky, sunlight, air movement and views.

-- To make walking truly pleasurable, streetscape quality and amenity are important. A thoughtful mix of shade trees and vegetation beautifies streetscapes and makes them ecologically greener. Good lighting and signage, convenient street furniture and attractive paving materials enhance a streetscape experience visually and functionally.

-- It must be safe to walk, day or night. In addition to good lighting and durable walkway paving that doesn't trap high heels, streets need well-marked crosswalks and synchronized traffic-control signals. Police or other public safety officials should be seen regularly patrolling streets.

-- Buildings facing public streets need lots of windows, entrance doorways and storefronts. These benefit merchants looking for customers and pedestrians looking for merchandise. Because there is safety in numbers, streets lined by eateries with outdoor seating are even safer, not to mention livelier. People will walk along such streets because walking is delightful.

Read the rest at: Roger K. Lewis - Terms, mind-sets must be changed to encourage and enable more walking in cities

U.S. Secretary of Transportation: "Transportation is a public health issue"

Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood: "People want options. They want to be able to be more physically active on streets that are friendlier to pedestrians and bicyclists. And when adults model physical activity, our kids see it, and they get it."

From LaHood's blog:

Yesterday, DOT Undersecretary Roy Kienitz talked about how transportation decisions that value things like "vehicle throughput" instead of pedestrian safety affect America's communities. And about how transit decisions that emphasize "minutes-saved" pit outlying suburban commuters against their inner-lying urban neighbors. Recognizing that those policies have had an effect on public health, he said, "Transportation is about more than engineering."

But, as Undersecretary Kienitz told yesterday's meeting, DOT has taken steps to fix the formula and find a different approach.

Through our work with HUD and EPA in the Obama Administration's Partnership for Sustainable Communities, through our TIGER discretionary grants, and through a range of other programs like Safe Routes to School, we're funding the kinds of projects that will help develop livable communities and provide opportunities for people to walk, bike, or take transit.

Everywhere I go, I hear from Americans that this is what they want. In fact, walking and biking have increased by 25% in the last ten years.

Read the rest at: Transportation is a public health issue; DOT doing its part to keep kids moving - Welcome to the FastLane: The Official Blog of the U.S. Secretary of Transportation