The Notion of Walkability

The following is an excerpt from a story which we believe is worthy of reading, but would lose too much of its value if it were re-written for presentation on this blog. Please link through for the rest of the story, but hurry back! ... Editor

by Alan B. Ehrenhalt

"Where should we start?

How about in lower Manhattan, around Wall Street and the territory near Ground Zero, on an ordinary Saturday morning. It's not the number of people on the sidewalk that's striking; this part of New York is bound to attract tourists. It's the number of children's strollers. The lower Manhattan streets are dense on weekends with families out for a walk, going to the park, going to the grocery store.

In the Dallas area, one of the most interesting new residential projects is Legacy Town Center, an urbanist experiment whose promoters tell prospective residents that 'the beat of the city surrounds you. You're in the know, everything is close at hand. You can walk, skate, or bike and find everything you need.' An interesting thing about Legacy Center is that it's not in the city at all. It's in the suburb of Plano, 15 miles from downtown. The management has sold buyers on the notion of walkability in a place where hardly anyone has walked anywhere by choice for the past two decades...

The problem for walkable urbanism in the next few years, Leinberger says, won't be an absence of demand. It will be a shortage of supply.'The demand is so great,' he insists, 'that we are going to have a difficult time keeping up with it.'..."

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