GPPR Junior Editor Bela Walkin (MPP ‘25) discusses urban and transportation policy with Jeff Speck, a city planner and international advocate for walkable urbanism. His 2012 book “Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time,” was the best-selling city-planning title of the past decade. Jeff and Bela discuss the benefits of walkability, the political challenges associated with its implementation, and its implications for urban and transportation policy on all levels of government.
Check out more podcasts from the Georgetown Public Policy Review (GPPR) Podcast
Team: https://soundcloud.com/gppolicyreview
To follow GPPR podcasts, click the above link to GPPR’s Soundcloud Page, then click “FOLLOW” on the
right-hand side of the page to be sure to know when our podcasts drop! GPPR Podcasts are also
published on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
[Intro]
Bela Walkin:
Hi everyone. It’s Bela Walkin here with the Georgetown Public Policy Review podcast. Today, I’m thrilled to share with you a conversation I had with Jeff Speck back in November. Jeff is a city planner by trade. As the former director of Design at the National Endowment of the Arts, he worked with mayors and governors to improve urban design in cities across the country. He is also a lecturer and author. His 2012 book, Walkable City, is the best-selling city planning title of its decade. Jeff has dedicated his career to advocating for and implementing sustainable urban design practices across the country. At the core of his practice is the concept of walkability: the idea that urban environments should cater to the enjoyment and safety of pedestrians, rather than center around motorized forms of transit. I recently sat down with Jeff to discuss walkability and its cross-cutting implications for urban and transportation policy across all levels of government. I hope you’ll enjoy our conversation.
[Begins]Walkin:
So it seems to me like the concept of the walkable city and walkability have become really popular amongst the general American public in the past few years. And your work is certainly a contributing factor to the growth of the concept’s popularity. It feels like more and more people want to live and to work, to shop, to socialize all in the same neighborhood, one where they don’t need a car to live a fulfilling life. So in the 10th anniversary edition of your book, Walkable City, you mentioned that you don’t have to sell most of your audiences and clients on why making cities walkable is so important anymore. But for any skeptics out there who might be listening to this podcast, can you give me the quick pitch? What’s so great about walkable cities?
Jeff Speck:
Yes, so in the original version of Walkable City, I listed 3 categories, and they were the first three chapters that fell under the topic of why walkability: health, wealth, and sustainability, as the three principal reasons for making places more walkable. And in the 100 pages that I added to the book in its 10th anniversary, and also more explicitly in my book, Walkable City Rules, which came out in 2018, which is a book oriented more towards professionals and activists than general readers, I identified two other categories, community and equity, that are also very powerful drivers for why walkability is so important.
Community wasn’t so much an addition because it fell under the health rubric. When I looked at individual health and psychology, I was also looking at sociology and the epidemiologists, the doctors who turned me on to the connection between urban sprawl and public health, with the book of that title, which came out in 2004. Frumkin, Frank, and Jackson also talked a lot about social health and that kind of dovetails really nicely into the 1980s studies done by Donald Appleyard, where he demonstrated how social bonds are formed much more effectively in walkable communities and how, for example, in the same neighborhood surrounding a street that was either busy or not busy, the people on the busy street on average claim to have 0.9 good friends, and the people on the less busy street, on average, to have more than three good friends. So that work was already done and was kind of folded into the health argument, but I broke it out because I think it’s worth talking about. And that there are new studies that show that there’s pretty much nothing that’s more determinant of your degree of activity outside the home, in clubs and groups, and political action, nothing seems to correlate more clearly with that, and I would say it’s causal, than the walkability of your neighborhood.
In terms of health in general? This book, Urban Sprawl and Public Health, just made it very clear, in my own words, that the reason why we have a morbid population, the reason why fully 1/3 of the people born after 2000 are expected to get diabetes, the reason why we now have the second generation of American kids who are expected to live shorter lives than their parents, according to these doctors, is because we’ve designed out of our communities the useful walk. And walking no longer serves a useful purpose, so we don’t do it. People sign New Year’s resolutions to exercise, and then they stop a few weeks later. But when active mobility is a part of your everyday life, you’re going to be much healthier.
The wealth argument, big picture, talks about the costs of living an auto dependent lifestyle and then the benefits to business people of providing an underserved market with a product which is vastly underrepresented compared to the demand that exists for it, that being walkable urbanism. That second issue, that there’s just so much unmet demand for walkable urbanism that whatever you provide of it will be tremendously profitable, also has the negative side that almost everything we do as designers, we have to be very careful to fight gentrification, I should say displacement, while we’re working because we anticipate that there will be displacement if we do a good job because there’s so much demand for what we have in mind. But the negative side is simply that we’ve doubled the percentage of our incomes that we spend on transportation since the 1970s. So we used to spend 10% of our income on transportation, and we more and more and more organize our metropolises around the absolute least efficient, most expensive way to get around. So we now spend 20% of our income on transportation moving no faster than we ever moved. Before, in terms of averages, the typical American pays twice per year for transportation what the typical Swiss person pays for transportation. So it’s an incredible inefficiency that really hamstrings our ability to afford our lifestyle.
Equity is a discussion about who drives the most, who walks the most, who bikes the most. The surprising data that fully 38.5% of the people who for whom biking is the way they get to work are from our poorest 25% of income earners, so this misunderstanding about urban cycling being some elite activity when, in fact, when you invest in cycle lanes, you’re investing in the poorest people. Similarly, poor people are much more likely to walk to work, or just to not have cars, so when you invest in a driving economy, you’re investing in those people who are wealthier, and of course, the wealthiest people have the most cars per capita. So that’s straightforward. And then the astounding data about who dies in car crashes, demographically, and who’s suffering from the tremendous burden of poor air quality. Demographically, where the highways are located, whose school or daycare is feeding them health-corrupting air. If you’re black or Native American, you’re twice as likely to be killed as a pedestrian than if you’re white, right? So there’s lots of factors like that. They make it very clear that anything you can do to improve road safety or limit the construction of roads is going to benefit people who are marginalized, or less wealthy, or of color. So, that’s part of the equity argument.
And then finally, the environmental argument doesn’t need stating, because everyone knows the principal way that we pollute as individuals in our lives is through our driving. However, it’s worth mentioning that what I’ve seen in my lifetime is the environmental community absolutely shift 180° in terms of its attitude towards cities. Because when I was young, it was pretty much understood the cities were bad, and they were the problem. And that was only reinforced by carbon mapping, which mapped carbon output per square mile rather than per capita. But when you map carbon output per capita or per family, the maps completely reverse and the greenest places to live, again, in terms of our individual contributions to climate change, are the densest places. We planners have known that. of course, for many decades, but the environmental community, particularly in the Sierra Club, which has been historically an anti-urban and anti-equity institution in terms of the outcomes of its efforts to stop growth. The mainstream environmental movement has only slowly come around to understanding that the best thing you can do if you love nature is to stay the hell away from it and live in denser urban places.
Walkin:
So, it sounds like walkability isn’t quite a cure-all for all societies problems, but it might come pretty close.
Speck:
You know, I’m someone who’s trained as an architect and eventually urban planner and is really into design, and I didn’t approach this from a pro-walking angle or even a health angle. It’s taken me all these years to realize – and, by the way, I grew up just idolizing automobiles. I’d still love to have a Ferrari. But the thing I’ve come to learn over all these years is that, you know, let’s not trademark it with glib advertising language and say walkability is the cure all. But let’s just say that allowing our society to develop around the automobile is responsible for, I would say the majority of our society’s problems.
Walkin:
So today, what I really would like to focus on is the intersection between walkability and policy. In your experience, would you say that current public policy, as-is, is conducive to or constraining of investments in walkability?
Speck:
Well, “investing in” is an interesting way of framing it. The fundamental multitrillion dollar taxpayer investment that we make in fossil fuel extraction and refinement has probably got to be the single greatest disincentive towards making walkable places or a healthier society. And on the one hand we have, you know, the EPA telling us that, you know, along with the IPCC telling us that we’re on track for catastrophic climate change. And on the other hand, we have Joe Biden and others who politicians, who I admire, making it easier, cheaper, and encouraged for oil companies to keep pulling oil out of the ground. It’s very clear that any policy, and there are many, any policy that supports petroleum extraction or refinement is destructive, not just to walkability, but to our future as a human race on this planet, so that’s got to be the big one, right? The biggest one is the collective federal investment in oil, gas, and the automotive industry as a whole. Which, of course, you know, in the 30’s the head of GM said what’s good for GM is good for America and what’s good for America is good for GM, and that’s when he was actually a cabinet member in the federal government, and that hasn’t changed.
Now, the other principal answer to your question is that if federal policies were interested in making places more walkable, there’s the big picture and the small picture. The big picture is there would be a moratorium on any highway spending that expands capacity. Like we can spend money on highways to repair them and to keep them from being dangerous from a decrepitude perspective, but any federal investment that involves enlargement, because often enlargement is pretended to be fixing. So, the big picture is federal and state policies to the degree that they aren’t actively trying to reduce road miles as opposed to increase them, are destructive to making a more walkable society. But then there’s the small details that Pete Buttigieg and others are trying to fix with, you know, what are the designs of the streets in our communities. I think it’s a $5 billion program running right now, that Pete Buttigieg is overseeing right now, about making neighborhood roads safe. But the federal government is still, for example, through the MUTCD, the Manual of Uniform Traffic Control Devices, is still enforcing details that are dangerous. For example, if you have a road that carries, I think it’s more than 15,000 vehicles a day, which is not that big a road, if the federal government’s going to fund it, you have to paint a double yellow stripe down the middle. Well, we know that when you remove the double yellow stripe, drivers go 7 miles an hour slower, which is precisely the amount they were speeding before. So, one thing the federal government could do tomorrow to make communities safer is to say that you need permission to paint a yellow stripe down a two lane street, and the standard is to have no stripe, because we’ve now seen the studies that show that people will drive the speed limit and not over it if you get rid of that yellow stripe. There’s a dozen rules like that in the federal manuals that localities need to follow that make our cities more dangerous. So both at the macro level and the micro level, there are important policy changes that would tomorrow make our cities much, much more walkable and safer.
Walkin:
Yeah so, I appreciate that you are jumping straight into this federal lens, because I think that so often, when we think of urban policy, we think of it being driven on a municipal or city level, which is often the case, but not always. Have you personally been involved in or heard of any type of litigation or legal challenges preventing the implementation of walkable projects within a city, whether it was a challenge coming from the federal, local, or even the state level?
Speck:
Legal challenge, as in papers filed in a court of law, never. Laws that prohibit me or policies, local policies that prohibit me from optimizing a design, constantly. The fact is, though, that almost anywhere I work, you need a strong mayor or a weak public works department, but the typical policy in many American cities and particularly suburbs is for 12-foot driving lanes. Well, a 12-foot driving lane is a 75 mile an hour highway lane. It’s not appropriate in a city street. And you have to change it to 10 feet, or even 9 is being advocated for now by Bloomberg and others, to create slower speeds. And there’s a hundred things like that. I’ll just give you one more example. I was working in the city of Albuquerque doing a downtown walkability study, and they had applied a functional classification system, which is completely standard, of arterial, collector, sub collector, local to their downtown streets, such that fully half of the downtown streets were labeled as collectors or higher, major collectors and higher, which then in their streets manual required a 50 mile an hour design speed. Now, what a 50 mile an hour design speed determines, for example, is the sharpness of curves, so when you have a curb that rounds a corner, if you make that curve tight with a small radius, people go slowly around the corner. If you make the curb massive with a huge radius, people speed around the corner, incredibly endangering pedestrians, and when you cross at a crosswalk, you have to walk twice as far. Well, the city of Albuquerque was enforcing 50 mile an hour design speeds in its downtown, and that’s just, that’s par for the course. You find that in city after city, and that’s an example of laws and policies that, or I should say, laws and regulations that grow out of policies, that are incredibly destructive towards both walkability and I would say downtown vitality.
Walkin:
So, what about the flip side of that example? Can you give me an example of some public entity, whether they be in America or elsewhere, who’s really getting it right when it comes to implementing policies that encourage walkability and better urban design?
Speck:
Many cities and some states, for example, California and Massachusetts are two states that come to mind, that have specific laws that are designed around increasing the density of neighborhoods, and particularly around transit. So, here in in Massachusetts, we have the MBTA Communities Act, which is requiring cities to increase the zoning around T stops. That does not guarantee that new development will come, but it makes new development possible, and it’s actually a very powerful law that’s beginning to impact community after community when they realize that if they want to keep getting state funding, they need to change their zoning around transit stops in order to allow a ton more housing there. So that’s a great example.
But the other really important example that I’ll bring up is, in many cases, one of the greatest impediments to making walkable places is the on-site parking requirement, which requires a certain amount of parking for every use that you put on a lot. It means that you end up with auto oriented site planning, right, and parking lots in front of buildings and a general ground plane that is much less welcoming to active transportation than would otherwise be the case, but it’s also an incredible constriction on both residential and commercial development in the sense that Donald Schupp talks about in his famous book, The High Cost of Free Parking. That, for example, if a piano store in a downtown wants to become a restaurant, it has to miraculously, in following the the parking code, it has to miraculously discover 30 extra parking spaces that it doesn’t have room for, and so the piano store does not become a restaurant. Right? And the parking reform network is a group that, among many of us actively working, has been effectively getting cities to change their rules, including, just last week, the entire city of Austin, was perhaps the fifth large city to entirely eliminate its on-site parking requirements, following, I believe, Seattle, Minneapolis, and a couple others. Maybe there aren’t 5. Many cities, any city that has intelligent planning and leadership is investigating its parking requirements. Many of them are reducing them, and some of them are eliminating them. So, these laws to allow denser housing, to eliminate or limit single family housing, and to eliminate or limit requirements for off-street parking are having a profound impact. And I do believe, as I told someone yesterday, I believe that the work of the parking reform network is snowballing. I think we’re going to see a massive change over the next decade in that category.
I would also mention the ADU movement accessory dwelling unit movement, granny flats. We’ve been advocating them for them since the 1980s. Our book Suburban Nation helped to popularize the idea, and not long after that book came out, I was contacted by state legislators in Pennsylvania and elsewhere and informed by a number of cities that I visited, that they were creating their own ADU ordinances to allow anyone who wants to to put a second unit on their lot. And, famously, California has changed its laws so that every single-family lot in California can now hold up to 4 dwellings. In Walkable City Rules, I talk about how the number of permits for ADU construction prior to the state law, you know, was in the handful and went into the many thousands once the state passed its law, which overruled all of the local communities’ ordinances in favor of a more lax and supportive set of rules around placing these on properties. So there’s some great examples of legislation making a big difference.
Walkin:
So it sounds like a wide variety of cities and public actors are taking a wide variety of approaches to the question of urban planning. But do you think that walkability should even be a policy goal? I mean, of course, urban code is going to influence whether or not walkability can be implemented in a place, but is the government the appropriate actor to be spearheading this type of change in urban environment? Or is this goal better left to be tackled by the architects, the urban planners, and even the private investors?
Speck:
As big a fan of walkability as I am, kind of owning the term, in a sense, not single handedly, but, you know, I like to think that I’m the person most associated with the term among people who look at it, I still would not push for framing it, necessarily, as walkability. I think walkability is a great way to sell good planning. But I think when it comes to public policy at the local level, absolutely. At the local level, walkability is a great window through which to implement good planning. But I think at the state and the national level, while I would love to see a movement around walkability or some other word for it, I think that it’s probably better sold and implemented through other windows like health and economy and sustainability. So, I think when people think about where they live and making their lives better and the lives of their neighbors better, it’s a wonderful tool. I think at the federal level, we tend to follow Europe. And I don’t mean we follow what they do, but I mean when they do something, we usually figure it out a generation later, like good bike lanes out of the street, up on the sidewalk edge. I have not seen a European policy movement around walkability that I’m aware of. There’s the 15-minute city movement and all that. Again, they didn’t call it walkability, and calling it the 15-minute city and implementing it as a series of tolls on vehicles has caused its own political backlash and, probably not crippling, but certainly troubling reaction. But I think that the best way to sell it at the federal level is probably through the issue of an affordability crisis and a housing crisis. And I think that can be a very effective way to frame it.
Walkin:
So it’s not necessarily about walkability being in and of itself a goal on these higher federal levels, but about repackaging a lot of the tools associated with walkability as a means to create more sustainable, more economically rich, more healthy communities.
Speck:
You’ve said that perfectly.
Walkin: So my final question is if you could pass a single policy on the federal level with the goal of bettering city planning across the country, what would that policy be?
Speck:
Well, I could craft a very detailed set of policies around all the things that add up to walkability. So to answer your question precisely, I would love to create a bill that included everything that you need to include, because there are 100 things to include. But if you could pick a single instrument, it’s the simplest, the most directly impactful, and the most politically expedient, yet politically impossible, thing to do, would be to drastically raise the gas tax. That clearly gets to the heart of the problem, which is the degree to which we incentivize driving in this country. But to think about it more broadly, I would certainly remove all subsidies for oil extraction and refinement while simultaneously asking drivers to pay their fair share with a gas tax that reflects the true externalities of driving, which would be probably about $20 a gallon. And that sounds hilarious, but that does not even cover the ten-to-one cost of driving’s externalities that are present. So, I say that understanding it’s completely impossible, but I do think that the sad thing is that we’ve created such incredible car dependency through the way that we’ve designed our communities, that there would be massive political opposition on either side of the aisle. There is massive political opposition on both sides of the aisle to increasing the fuel tax, even to its real level of what it was when it was created, right, because it hasn’t been raised in decades, and there’s been a lot of inflation. Sadly, I don’t think it’s even possible to accomplish that, to sell that to the public, which is we just want to bring the big gas tax back to where it was, so that people make better choices about their transportation, because so many people now don’t have any choice about their transportation. So, I don’t want to end on a negative note, but the cleanest, clearest and really appropriately, directly impactful angle is also the one that’s probably the least possible to achieve, which is why it’s great to be doing these other things, right? To be investing in safer streets like the Department Transportation is doing. And then to be investing in transit, to be investing in clean energy. That’s possible and that’s what we’re seeing.
I tried for many years to remove any politics from this conversation, but it’s become very clear, particularly under Trump. That pro-single-family housing, pro-driving, you know, pro-diesel belching, modified trucks that are intentionally designed with aftermarket parts to pollute the environment, that’s become a red position. And pro-density, pro-urban living, pro-sustainability has become a blue position. And what’s concerning to me is that not even blue leadership is willing to or is politically able to make the tough choices when it comes to both climate and the organization of our landscape. So, I’m not encouraged about future trends, but every little bit helps and the idea that every little bit helps has been what’s motivated my practice for all these years and will continue to do so.
Walkin:
Right. I mean, in a lot of ways, the typical American dream that everyone thinks of, you know, with the big house and the big yard with a white picket fence, in some ways, is incompatible with the kind of urban design that is necessary to create walkable environments.
Speck:
But that’s only one, that’s only one American dream. And if you poll people, just as many people would like to be within walking distance of their daily needs, as would like to have their own yard. And miracle of miracles, you can have both if you just have some good urban planning.
Walkin:
Yeah. Well, thank you again, Jeff. I really appreciate you having this conversation with me today.
Speck:
My pleasure, Bela, and I will look forward to hearing this podcast. Well, sharing, I should say sharing this podcast. I’ve already heard it, but I look forward to sharing it.
Walkin:
If you’re interested in more of Jeff’s work, you can check out his TED talks or read his books, including the co-authored Suburban Nation: the Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream and Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time. Thanks for listening to the Georgetown Public Policy Review Podcast. If you enjoyed today’s episode, please subscribe and check out more from GGPR at GPPReview.com. Thanks.
[End]
Established in 1995, the Georgetown Public Policy Review is the McCourt School of Public Policy’s nonpartisan, graduate student-run publication. Our mission is to provide an outlet for innovative new thinkers and established policymakers to offer perspectives on the politics and policies that shape our nation and our world.
