Walkability for a Restorative Urbanism

Вот отформатированный транскрипт вебинара: Роб: allied fields related to the built environment. Today we have walkability for restorative urbanism with Jeff Speck and Joanna Lombard. And you can join us for an upcoming webinar next week. We have an author's forum, "New Building in Old Cities," which is going to take place on Tuesday, next Tuesday, also at 12 noon. Go to cnu.org/resources/on the park bench. Joanna Lombard is an architect and distinguished professor of architecture at the University of Miami. She is a founding member of the University of Miami Built Environment Behavior and Health Research Group. With projects in neighborhood design and health, she investigates the impacts of greenness and green initiatives. Jeff Speck is principal of Speck Dempsey, a planning firm based in Brookline, Massachusetts, with a nationwide practice. Speck is author of "Walkable City" and "Walkable City Rules," and co-author of "Suburban Nation." He was design director for the National Endowment for the Arts from 2003 through 2007. The greatest predictors of longevity and health are physical activity and social interaction outside of one's family circle. And research proves that the design of the neighborhood you live in can impact those variables. Lombard and Speck will explain links to declining health related to sprawl and how urban design solutions can help. I'm Rob Studeville, editor of CNU's Public Square. Welcome, Jeff and Joanna, to "On the Park Bench." First, there will be presentations by Jeff and Joanna, followed by a brief discussion with me, and then Q&A from the audience. Please use the Q&A function of Zoom to ask your questions as they occur to you. Now I'm going to hand this over to Joanna to begin. Джоанна: Thank you, Rob. Let me share. Okay. Well, I thought it would be interesting if we did a quick overview of the basics. So I'm going to talk about the triad of health. And you already mentioned this, Rob, but essentially there are three things. And we're going to start with social interaction because social interaction has been studied for the last like 50 years, and some important literature came out when House did his study in like 1988. He looked at societies across the world, different economics, different locations, and found that the one aspect that was consistently related to length in terms of longevity and health and reduced mortality, it was social interaction. So this study was repeated again in a meta-analysis in like 2010 by Holt-Lunstad. And they looked at something like, I don't know, 300 and some thousand people across about 158 studies. And they said, along all of these studies, there is a 50% increased survival rate associated with the level of social relationships one has. And if you go back to Granovetter, who in sociology wrote the really important piece on "The Strength of Weak Ties," which essentially said that these weak ties, not necessarily close family ties, but our connections with this larger network of people, are incredibly important to our well-being, our social well-being. And he looked at the North End of Boston, actually, as an example of how a highway could be cut through a neighborhood. And neighborhoods that had weak ties were actually stronger and able to come together and to create better policy together and advocate for themselves. And so there's this whole notion of the weak ties and social interaction and how this benefits health and well-being. So this is in the literature for quite a while. And then about the year 2000, some of you may remember Dick Jackson. He is a pediatrician. He was working at the CDC with Andy Dannenberg and Larry Frank was there. And they were looking at physical activity, and they were looking at rates of obesity and metabolic syndrome. And they started to see a correlation, and they looked particularly at neighborhoods around Atlanta because they were able to compare neighborhoods with sprawl and neighborhoods that were more walkable – places where people use cars, places where people could walk. And that's where an enormous amount of literature came out. And Dick Jackson did an American Journal of Public Health issue on this topic. And essentially what you're seeing here is a diagram of the World Health Organization, which essentially associates physical activity with decreased risks of heart disease, premature death. You can read this slide yourself for all of the pieces. And there's a new study that Harvard actually just published last week, which came out about sitting being bad for us. And just the fact that the more we sit, the more sedentary we are, the unhealthier we can be, and how we need to combat that. So all of you who are sitting, we should all just like stand up and move around right now. And then the third is an area where our group, our team here at the University of Miami, has been working, and now it's many, many teams have started this work. And we've looked at greenness levels in neighborhoods and found really impressive reductions of neighborhoods with high greenness versus neighborhoods with low greenness. The study that you're seeing illustrated there comes from our work with 250,000 Medicare beneficiaries across from Miami-Dade County. So if you say, okay, if this is the trifecta of social interaction, physical activity, and greenness, how does this play out in relation to children and elders and adults? So that's what we're going to take a look at. This is the first study that our group did in Miami where we looked at children, and we looked at kids on a residential block. And our study had to do with mixed use because our theory was that children who live on mixed-use blocks, as opposed to residential-only blocks, which are really said to or thought to be better, would have more interaction with adults, more people that look out for them after school. And in fact, we looked at conduct grades because those are a really good indicator of future delinquency and sexually transmitted diseases and a lot of other negative outcomes. And we found that our kids who were on the mixed-use blocks had better outcomes than children who were on the residential-only blocks. And the little diagram that you see over to the side is an indication of the kind of analysis we did because a lot of public health analysis is about the census block. You don't experience life on a census block; you experience life on a facing block. So that was an important step forward for us to be able to analyze this. And then while we were out in the neighborhood, we saw a number of elders who were sitting on porches or on their front stoops, you know, and children would walk by. And we wondered if we could see a benefit for these social spaces, these kind of transitional spaces in the neighborhood. And we found, so we launched another study, and we looked at elders on all of the blocks in East Havana. And we found that our, and it was over a five-year period looking at mental and physical functioning. And we found that our elders who had these socially supportive features were better off in terms of mental and physical health. So if you say to yourself, well, how does this happen? Part of it is you can imagine that if you sit on a balcony and people wave to you, you don't have to clean your house and invite them in. You don't have to take that extra step. So what's happening is the built environment, by virtue of its design, is giving you the framework for health. It doesn't require a person to make an effort to achieve that. And this is important. We'll talk more about that. So this is a picture of Bryant Park. This is one of the studies that say we know parks promote physical activity. But this study pointed out they actually mitigate stress because they provide social support. You're out, you're walking, you meet people, the bookseller, people that you haven't seen in a while, or you just see the same person reading their newspaper on the side of the park and you say hello. Those kinds of interactions turn out to be extremely important for our brain health. So now we're going to transition to physical activity. And this is from a study in Brazil. The image is from Texas. But what the study showed is that certain leisure time activities like cycling and walking and running were associated with lower odds of depression. And one of the things they did in this study is they looked at depression and medication, depression and outdoor activity. And the people who did the best had both. But the people with physical activity did better than people on the medication alone. And then this is an interesting study on elders because this looked at 52 elders who had hypertension, which is high blood pressure. What you're seeing here is a park in Miami-Dade County. Miami-Dade County created these senior zone parks. So the parks are sort of 24-hour use at this point. Well, I shouldn't say 24-hour; they're not open at night. But during the day, the elders are there. And then after school, the kids are there. And one of the things they found was, in addition to this sort of working memory, executive function benefits, they found a certain level of improvement in blood flow or IGFI, which is associated to a kind of glucose and related to diabetes, actually. But if you look at this, executive function is a huge element. A lot of people think when we talk about dementia, they talk about Alzheimer's, and certainly that's what our team has studied. But there are a lot of diseases related to like white matter disease where people have their memory, they know where they are, but your executive function doesn't work. Executive function is what helps you plan to go from A to B. And then we're going to look at children because thinking about physical activity in kids, we found that it reduces depression, it improves mental health, it improves quality of life. And there are other studies that show children with active physical activity during the school day are able to do better in school. And then if we look at greenness, sorry, let's come back to this. This is where our team looked at greenness over Miami-Dade County, 250,000 Medicare beneficiaries. And this block is the same block, really. It's just in one direction. You're looking at a block that's to the south and another block is to the north. But you can see the difference in the streetscape. The buildings aren't that different, the income levels aren't different. What's really different here is the tree canopy. And so when we looked at our high greenness neighborhoods versus our low greenness neighborhoods, we found this 16% lower risk of Alzheimer's disease, which is incredibly significant. And we also see it in relation to depression and a number of other outcomes. When you add to that the kind of climate benefits, greening our streets begins to be a major kind of policy endeavor. And then coming back to elders, for those who live in elder housing, greenness has a really big impact. And this is related, Roger Ulrich in 1984, I think, came out with a seminal article in Science, which for an architect to have an article in Science was a really big deal. And what he really pointed out is that people in hospital rooms looking at a brick wall or looking at green, the people who looked at green had better outcomes, and that turns out to be true for people in care centers. This is in a Dutch neighborhood, and it's showing the strongest relationship was actually the streetscape greenery. So something in the public realm has huge impact in the private realm too. This one is a quick study on children looking at asthma because some of you, if you start advocating for trees, you're going to find some studies that say, "Oh, but children with too much greenness can have asthma." This started to parse that out, and Aruni Batnagar at the University of Louisville's Christy Brown Environment Center is taking a deeper dive into this to understand. And they are part of the Green Heart Project, which you can follow. It's a combination of the NIH and the Nature Conservancy, and they've been greening Louisville neighborhoods to take a look at this. This one gets closer to where Jeff is working and walkability and mobility. This is an urban greenway trail, and the idea here, this was the Bearden Village in Knoxville, Professor Fitzhugh at UT Knoxville was looking at this. Introducing these greenway connections through the neighborhood, could those improve physical activity? And his studies showed that they did. I want to mention parks for a moment because a lot of people, when they think of parks, they think of something like the Marva Bannerman Park that I showed you, you know, where there's equipment and there's sports fields. In fact, this study showed that kids who live near aesthetically pleasing parks actually played longer and had more unstructured play. And those kinds of things probably tie into social interaction as well as physical activity, because in an environment like this, children use their imagination. So when you want to advocate for a park that's more naturalized, there's a lot of evidence to support that. Greenness in schools, I already mentioned for kids to see, to have their kind of reduced inattentiveness and working memory. If any of you had the misfortune of growing up in the 60s and 70s and going to schools where they decided we should only look at the teacher and not have windows, it's amazing really that anybody graduated because when you understand how important these views are for working memory and attention, you realize how important it is for schools to have views. This was a study in Michigan looking at trees and shrubs from cafeterias and classrooms. What's interesting about this one is looking out on the field didn't have the same benefit as looking out on the trees. And this one is a study that UPenn did when the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society teamed up with the city of Philadelphia over a 10-year period. They're greening lots, urban lots, and they find reductions in vandalism, gun assaults, but also for our purposes, residents reporting less stress and more exercise. And then finally landing back in Miami-Dade, Miami-Dade County is trying to go for a 30% tree canopy. These are people in the Million Trees Miami Initiative, where you can call the county and ask to plant trees in your neighborhood. And given the study that is recently out in Sweden about the lower levels of depressive symptoms when you have trees in your immediate environment, you can see that this is a benefit from both climate, individual health, and population health. So the last slide I wanted to show you is, well, what can we do about this? I'd recommend everybody on the call could go out and just start doing your own quick built environment audit for social interaction, physical activity, and greenness. You can study building frontages and uses because that's how you provide that social interaction. You can look at streetscapes and open spaces and see, do they make it easy to get around or do they inhibit getting around? Everybody should have an urban forester in their county or city or municipality because these are the people that treat trees not like objects, but in fact like the ecosystem that they are. And then connectivity and mobility, because all of these things require us to be connected and to be related. And then finally, we have to change policy. So if you begin to look at, well, where can we do that? I would say there's no better place to look than the CNU Charter and the new CNU Canons. Because all of these principles provide a framework for a built environment that supports health and well-being, are literally in the DNA of the charter and then the canon. So I think Jeff is going to follow up and give you some more tangible examples of walkability and mobility, and then we'll have some opportunity at the end for Q&A. Роб: Thank you, Joanna. Джефф: Am I being heard? Роб: Yes, you're good. Джефф: Wonderful. It's wonderful that we've had this opportunity to collaborate again after our many years together in Miami. And it's easy to see why you are a distinguished professor. I was wishing there was a similar nomenclature around consultants, like one could be a distinguished consultant, but I'll have to go back. So when we did this at CNU, and this is a reprise of a talk at CNU that somehow the taping didn't work, so we were asked to redo it. We had more time, didn't have much opportunity for Q&A. Today we decided to each speak, and I'm going to start my timer, each speak for only about 15, 20 minutes. And given that what I spoke about at CNU, which was more about how to achieve walkability, really needs more time than that. I thought it would be good to just keep the topic going of health as it relates to urban design and walkability and dig a little bit deeper into some of the issues that Joanna mentioned, with a focus on the sort of issues that I like to talk about. So it's wonderful that there are like a quarter of a thousand people here or more. Great to see so many of you tuned in. I hope to keep this entertaining. In "Walkable City," the first segment of the book, "Why Our Cities Need to Be More Walkable," and health or epidemiology, as I refer to it, is the third topic that I like to discuss after talking about economical reasons to be more walkable and climate reasons to be more walkable. So we're just going to focus on that today. And the issues I like to talk about principally are inactivity-caused obesity and car crashes, which of course, if you die in a car crash, you're not very healthy afterwards. So that is an important part of health. And of course, so many of us are injured in car crashes as well. The most valuable document that I've ever seen on this topic of health and design is this book that came out. I like to say that August 7th, 2004, was the best day to be an urban planner in America because this book came out, written by a planner and two epidemiologists. You might recognize Dick Jackson, Howard Frumkin, surrounding Lawrence Frank. Of course, the planner is the best looking in the group, we can expect that. But this book just laid out in no uncertain terms all the different ways, several of which Joanna alluded to, that suburban sprawl is killing us. And foremost among them is obesity-related illnesses and a shorter lifespan. We are the worst among the developed nations in the world. And the real question people ask is, can we, that there's certainly plenty of correlations, but can we with confidence relate driving, car ownership, and a car-dependent life to our obesity? And the answer was found most recently in this perfect randomized experiment that happened in Beijing, where in order to own a car, you had to win a lottery. And so it was a completely random choice of citizens. And if you did win the lottery and did purchase a car, then if you are over 50, you gained about 22 pounds almost immediately following that victory. So clearly, with everything else held constant, car ownership is a source of obesity. In this book, of course, the obesity is not discussed as the problem itself, but all of the illnesses that stem from it. And I got this slide years ago. You've probably all seen this. I speak to a lot of non-planning audiences, and this slide, which I recommend that you ask me for if you don't have it and want to show it, always gets a great laugh. Howie Frumkin gave me this slide back in the 90s. And I like to say, you know, the fact that we've created a society in which it's considered normal to park, to drive, to take the escalator to the gym, to get on the treadmill to walk, is why we have a morbid society. We have lost our life expectancy gains. We now have the second generation of Americans who are expected to live shorter lives than their parents. If you add together both not just obesity, but also drug-related issues, shootings, and car crashes, and principally car crashes. This was a fascinating article I read in The Atlantic Monthly, written by someone in their 40s not that long ago. And basically, someone in their 40s is this year six times more likely to die in the US than in a civilized country. Dick Jackson, Howie Frumkin talk about the fact that we can't walk. And there's also the conversation and the whole Blue Zones movement about what are the characteristics shared by those communities in which people live the longest. And walking is one of the Power Nine, the nine lessons, the cross-cultural distillation of the best practices in health and longevity. One of them is to live in a place. Actually, it's not to live in a place, and this is a flaw in the book that they corrected in the sequel. It's not to live in a place where you can walk more; it's simply to walk more, which of course isn't possible in a lot of the places where Americans live. But lesson one, move naturally. Rather than exercising for the sake of exercise, make changes to your lifestyle. Build that into your lifestyle. So, this is what most people think as they age as the way to stay healthy. But the Blue Zones message is that, you know, most people don't do that. They do it for a year, they do it for a month after their New Year's resolution, and then they stop. And that it's the environmental impacts of being in a place where walking just gets you through your daily life that you're going to have a healthier future. And we talked about that. Now, if you compare the amount that people walk, cycle, and take transit among different countries and the amount of obesity in that country, you see a nice inverse proportion in those two graphs. And that ends the obesity segment. Moving on to all the car crashes that kill so many Americans, more than 40,000 Americans per year. This man being interviewed right after a car crash. We are again among the worst in the world. And car crash victims have dropped every year, with the exception of COVID years where there was less congestion and people were speeding more as a result. Car crashes, fatalities, car crash fatalities have dropped pretty consistently over the years. But pedestrian fatalities haven't, as we'll describe. But the US is still the worst. So we're really bad among different countries. But what's interesting when you look within the US is how bad some places are related to other places based on when they were designed and therefore how they were designed. So our older cities with intact grids like New York and San Francisco lose about four people per 100,000 per year in car crashes. More modern cities like Dallas, it's closer to 10. Orlando, where you spend much more of your time on highways just getting around and people drive more, is 17.8. And then I was shocked to learn this statistic: Hillsborough County is the suburban county surrounding Tampa. And the message here is, yes, it's in Florida, and Tampa's stats are bad, and people drive a lot in Tampa. But this is when you look beyond the urban core at the auto zone. So if you isolate it much more to a suburban environment, it's literally, you know, almost 20 times as bad as our more walkable places. So shocking. And then there's the issue of pedestrians themselves. This book, you probably know, it comes out every year, issued by Smart Growth America and Complete Streets. And they just have their head in their hands. And every year they kind of wonder, why do we still publish this book when it's done nothing to change the negative trends? But it also points out the inequity involved and who dies in car crashes, or I should say who dies as pedestrians. The less you earn, the more likely you are to die as a pedestrian. If you're American Indian or Black or Alaska Native, you're more likely to die as a pedestrian. More per mile, walking at night and cycling even worse. If you have a high school diploma only or less than a high school diploma, I should say, you're much more likely to be killed as a pedestrian. And of course, children, the greatest risks to children who find themselves on streets principally as pedestrians, the greatest risk by far is cars. In many of our societies, particularly more automotive places, like Staten Island compared to downtown New York. But even in places like San Francisco, a lot of hospitals find that half of their business, if we can call it that, is car crash business. And of course, I collect these, people send me these wonderful anecdotal stories about that can become kind of funny if they weren't so sad, of car crashes and their impact on our lives. But here's what you need to know, which is over the last 15 years, your chances of being killed as a pedestrian have gone up 82%. And we asked the question, why? You know, in Europe, it's actually gone down. Norm Garrick here presenting at an earlier CNU, in 1975, it was in 1975, you were twice as likely to be killed as a pedestrian in the Netherlands than you are now. I'm sorry. No. In 1975, your chances of being killed as a pedestrian was twice what it was in the Netherlands. And now it's 20 times what it was in the Netherlands. But I should add that the pedestrian death rate in the Netherlands has dropped significantly. They've cut the EU has cut pedestrian deaths by about 40%, while ours have soared. And of course, there's all sorts of interesting techniques being offered to us about how to stay alive while walking, whether we should be wearing bright clothing that's more fashionable or less fashionable. But of course, the color of your outfit doesn't matter if this is the sort of experience that you find yourself in. A wonderful book you're probably aware of, "Right of Way" by Angie Schmidt, talks about why. Why is this happening? And she comes up with a number of reasons, or she doesn't come up with, but she's very astute in analyzing a number of reasons. The first is the suburbanization of poverty. And you have this condition in America where you have this whole swath of a landscape that was created without any anticipation that anyone would ever be a pedestrian in it, right? So you see no sidewalks, you see folks crossing who are pedestrians because what's happened is this auto zone has become the only affordable place for a lot of Americans. And therefore, this landscape that was never meant to be safe for pedestrians is holding pedestrians. And of course, it wasn't designed in order to make it safe for them to occupy it. Secondly is cell phone use. And the fact is that they have cell phones in Europe as well. And so this was once thought to be the biggest cause of pedestrian fatalities, the advent of the cell phone. It is a factor. People have noted that in Europe there are more stick shifts. So drivers may have cell phones, but they're using them less when they drive. I think cell phone use is a factor. Not too much we can do about it. But I bring this slide up to compare it with this slide. And of course, what many of us believe with great confidence is the single greatest factor in that 83% increase in pedestrian deaths, which is the shift from sedans to SUVs as the standard vehicle in the American fleet. Of course, when you're hit by an SUV, you end up under it and not on the hood. The impact is much greater due to the weight. The data are very clear. Basically, when a car goes from two tons to four tons, the impact about triples in terms of the risk to the pedestrian. Of course, many people buy bigger cars in order to protect themselves from bigger cars. Many people buy bigger cars because it's cool. Of course, the connection of car brand to ego is a huge part of the American car buying experience. And I want to get a license plate like this. But, you know, the experience of having these folks behind you. And then there's the high hoods, which are both associated with the car design, but also a stylistic choice. And of course, the higher the hood, the further in front of your car you can't see. One test found that a normal height woman in an Escalade could only see the 12th child sitting in front of the car. And front-overs, front-over fatalities, which used to be extremely rare, have now become very common. And it's mostly parents killing their own children in their own driveways due to the height of the cars. But it's also a design issue. The front end was the focal point. We want to make sure when you stand in front of this thing, it looks like it's going to come and get you. It's got that pissed-off feel. So that is the designer's intention. It may serve some other functions if you have the electric version. But this idea that the hood is actually much higher than it needs to be is something that the NHTSA, if I've said that right, is finally looking into, but I don't think we can expect any progress in this from the federal government. And if we do see progress, it'll be over a long period of time. So the question is, what can we do? And what we can do, particularly as urban designers, is try to influence the speed of the vehicle. Speed is the single greatest factor in the damage, the death and destruction that is caused in a car crash, even greater than vehicle weight. A car going 35 miles an hour is about seven times as likely to kill you if it hits you than a car going 25 miles an hour. That doesn't take into account the fact that a car going faster takes much longer to stop. And also the fact that as you drive faster, your cone of vision narrows and you see much less. So all of these things add up to every mile per hour making a big difference. According to Don Ho Chang, it's between 7% and 22% difference in death and injury for every mile per hour that we can get drivers to go more slowly. And we have this ridiculous condition in the US that Chuck Marone has talked about for many years, that we're actually required to design streets for speeds higher than we post them. This is a key factor that distinguishes American street design from Vision Zero in Europe. The whole idea of Vision Zero is you just design the streets so that drivers are uncomfortable going above the speed limit. In America, street design has derived from highway design. In highway design, you set your speed based on the speed limit. If you're like me, you look for the speed limit and you set your cruise control for nine miles an hour over the speed limit. Because the speed limit determines the speed, then anything you can do to add forgiveness or elbow room makes the streets safer. What are those things? Wider lanes, more lanes, shoulders, clear zones, no trees, no opposing traffic, few intersections, big swoops. These things all make the highway safer, the speed is constant. But that's not how we set our speeds in neighborhoods. And because we set our speeds in neighborhoods based on our perception of what speed is safe, everything that I just listed that improves elbow room, that improves forgiveness, actually creates speeding and creates the danger that we're trying to avoid. So this is the fundamental misunderstanding underlying traffic design and why we have to post signs like this and use radar detectors because when you design a highway, people drive like it's a highway. The speed limit is not taking care of it. And of course, this is the heart, this is the middle of Salt Lake City. Some of our cities in America are designed as highways. This is my wife and one of my sons crossing in Salt Lake City. I'm sure you've all seen this story where they give you flags to wave, but have you seen Granville Island, Vancouver, because they have a new technique there called "Grab a Brick." And I think this is much more effective than waving a flag as you cross the street. Make sure you establish eye contact. Now, this is Canada, of course, and Canadians are very polite, so it turns out the bricks are made out of foam. But you get the idea. So in conclusion, this is not the talk I'm giving today, but what do you do about it? What do you do to cause drivers to go more slowly? And the way that we have come to address this is through what we call a walkability study. So when we do a walkability study, we focus on the useful walk, the safe walk, the comfortable walk, and the interesting walk. But the safe walk, of course, begins with speed limits. It eliminates multi-lane one-way streets. We've done that in a dozen cities. It eliminates lanes that are extra. Many of you joined us in Oklahoma City where I described how we eliminated a third of the lanes in downtown Oklahoma City. It looks at the cycling network and how that takes advantage of the fact that we can reduce the number of lanes, and we reduce the lanes in proportion to the traffic on them. We typically find that rather than fighting people and telling them that we're going to cause congestion, we often find streets, as we did last week in Chattanooga doing one of these exercises, we find streets that have more lanes than they have traffic. And that's where we propose the reduction. Then we optimize each street to optimize safety, yes, throughput, but also cycling and parking provision. And then we look again at intersections, at the curb radii of intersections. We eliminate signals wherever we can because when you replace a signal with an always stop sign, severe pedestrian injuries dropped by about two thirds. And of course, we look at all the different factors like trees and parklets and too many curb cuts and that sort of thing. But that's a talk for another day. I always like to end with some resources. If you haven't read "Walkable City," it is the gateway drug for these conversations. If you're doing more technical work, probably like most people on this call, if you don't have "Walkable City Rules," I hope you will make it a tool that you are able to take advantage of. Angie Schmidt's book, I mentioned "Right of Way," is a wonderful synopsis of the pedestrian crisis. Everyone should read Chuck Marone's book that gets to the fundamentals of why American traffic engineering is so bad, and supplement it with the new book by Wes Marshall that you've probably heard about, profiled in Public Square as well, "Killed by a Traffic Engineer." Very useful. And then, Joanna, in response, I added this to my talk as you were speaking. Because you talked about weak ties and the importance of social connection. And I'm reading this book right now, finally got around to it. This book, "Palaces for the People" by Eric Kleinberg, is extremely useful in explaining and selling us on the concept of how civic infrastructure, be it, you know, buildings like libraries and churches, but also just public spaces and good streets, make all the difference in health outcomes due to the relationships that they create. If you want to hear all three reasons about walkability that I mentioned – economics and climate as well as health – I have a TED Talk that discusses all three at TED.com. And then if you want to get into some of the details of street design, as I ended with, I have a second TED Talk right here that I would direct you to as well. All these resources can be accessed on our website, we are Speck Dempsey. And there's a lot of even longer videos, like hour-long version of the discussion of how to make our streets more safe. And then finally, in particular for this audience, I teach with George Proekus, who many of you may know. I teach a two-day class at Harvard every year. I hope some of you might consider joining us. It's basically two days of this with some case studies, site visits, and a design exercise, and I think I'm done. So I'll stop sharing. And I'm excited for questions. Роб: Wonderful. Thank you very much, Jeff. Thank you, Joanna. And I wanted to remind everybody, if you have questions, put them in the Q&A, and we will answer these. As we get to them, I'm going to ask a few questions just to kick things off. One thing that occurs to me is like, the book came out in 2004, which really described all of this. And it's been 20 years now. I still don't hear many healthcare professionals talking about this. You know, I have an excellent family doctor, and he describes all the aspects of what makes my life healthier, and he's very much on target, but he never mentions the physical environment. And also, you know, I wonder, there really doesn't seem to be platforms, even if he was aware of this. Are doctors not aware of this? And if they are aware of this, do they lack platforms to really address it? Джоанна: Well, I think it depends on the field. Pediatricians certainly have been leaders in trying to, like, when you do a child's physical, right? Then they'll talk about, "Well, where do you live? How close are you to a park?" A lot of neighborhoods or a lot of communities have park scripts that physicians can actually write, and they can be presented to a local parks department for children to be in parks programs. And then at the other end of the spectrum, gerontologists are paying attention to this. So they should be in the annual physical. They'll ask an elder, "Well, where do you live? What is your social support network? Can you walk in your neighborhood?" So I would say the fields that look at the whole person, which tend to be pediatricians and gerontologists, I think that, you know, Rob, they are aware of it. Now, when you look at the rest of the medical field, I suspect everybody on this call has a challenge because internists and the kind of people that we might see for physicals, they're looking for pathologies, right? They're doing a million tests, and sometimes you get the results before they do, and you're like, "What the heck is this?" So I think that there has to be a change in that. Medical schools are thinking about the change. So for example, Dr. Joan St. Ange here at the University of Miami was an author with a group of UM faculty at the medical school for the Next Gen Med Program. So the Next Gen is kind of turning the medical education around to put medical students into patient relationships right up front. And they are very much aware of the impact of the built environment. And then there's one more thing, which is that a lot of medical schools are starting MD/MPH programs, where you get your MD degree and you get a Master's of Public Health at the same time. And I think that's where we're really starting to see because now public health is definitely attentive to the impacts of the built environment. And I think that that's an opportunity. And I'm looking here in the chat too, is, yes, and the merging of public health is absolutely happening, and primary care providers in Colorado. This is from NYSA. Birmingham primary care providers in Colorado are beginning to ask about food access and physical environment regarding basic needs. I also think our Surgeon General, Vivek Murthy, you know, he did the, he listed the epidemic of loneliness as an issue. One of the things that struck me about it, and I was going to write to him because he's in Miami. He grew up in Miami. He went to Palmetto High School, which is kind of a suburban high school here. And he has a lot of things that are in there, but he doesn't really focus as hard on the built environment as we would like him to. So I think it's really important. And then the last thing I'd say about it is I feel that architects and planners, our schools tend to be a bit isolated in our institutions. And so it's up to us to make these interdisciplinary teams and to create this information flow and to teach interdisciplinary courses. And I think that's a place where that kind of thing can happen. I don't know if that answers. Роб: The question as to how much of this is in control of planners and urbanists. Car size is obviously pretty much out of our control. DOTs also, like "Killed by a Traffic Engineer," the book Jeff mentioned, really shows how DOTs are completely impervious to what New Urbanists have been saying for years, for decades. So I'm wondering, you know, if the streets are not really in our control, the cars are not in our control, what can we control? I mean, what are the areas where we really can put our efforts to the best use? Джефф: I'm sorry, I ignored the question because I was reading another question. So repeat your last sentence, and then I'll answer both questions. Роб: It was sort of, you know, what is in our control if traffic engineers control the design of streets, and they have been? Джефф: So the good news is that, I mean, DOTs are always a struggle. And depending on what state you're in, the amount that the DOT controls varies greatly. I've done three walkability studies in Pennsylvania, which have been among my least effective because PennDOT controls many downtown streets in most Pennsylvania cities, as well as almost all the signalization. But most cities own most of their streets. And most city public works departments, in my experience, have gotten better and better. And it's been a tremendous experience over 30 years seeing the change. And seeing now that in most of the cities I work in, either the public works engineers are enlightened, or there's mayors or other leadership, city council, who force them to become enlightened. And the change has been really, really comforting. We do more and more walkability studies where we try to actually embed in the public works department because they're the ones who are ultimately going to be, or the engineering department, because they're the ones who are ultimately going to be implementing the work. Philip asks, "Do you have a good example of a city that's not a walkability study?" A bunch of our walkability studies, which I'm happy also to send to anyone, you can find them online by just Googling the names. So for example, if you were to Google "downtown Mobile walkability study, Mobile, Alabama," you'd probably find it. And if not, just let me know. If you Google "downtown Scranton, Pennsylvania, walkability study," you'll probably find it. "Tulsa, downtown Tulsa, walkability study," "downtown Albuquerque." We've done about 20 plans that are either called walkability studies or are referred to as them. But start there. Another great question is, "Should we have more pedestrian-only streets in downtown areas?" And the answer is yes, but to try it out first before you build it. The experience of the 60s through 80s was more than 200 main streets in the US were pedestrianized, and about 180 of them failed. And I say that not to tell people to not do it, but to share that the mistake made was that they were expensively built as pedestrian streets without ever testing them first, as opposed to what Jeanette Sadakhan and others did in New York City where you try it out. You try it out for a Saturday, then for a whole weekend, and then for a weekend. If the shops do better, which they often do, then you pedestrianize it. You test it because what's going to make a pedestrian street successful isn't going to be the quality of the materials or the beauty of the design. It's going to be the way that people get to it, the demographics surrounding it, and other more practical issues that will arise as you test it. There are lots of other questions, but Rob, maybe you want to moderate what gets answered first. Роб: Well, we had a question: "To what extent are the digital tools that have been increasingly implemented in urban spaces in recent years, such as smart lighting, digital signage, and navigation apps, are they effective in enhancing walkability or addressing these health issues?" Maybe Joanna can answer. Джефф: I have very little experience with that and limited confidence that those make as big a difference as the issues that I focus on. Джоанна: Well, I mean, I think that the digital tools are really useful from the analysis point of view, to be able to assess what's going on. People are starting to use Google Street View to look at issues. So from a research perspective, I'd say they're analytical tools in terms of changing behavior. And, you know, I think that's a whole other realm, to be honest. Джефф: I think navigation apps, though, play a real role because what the navigation apps do... Джоанна: Mm-hmm. Джефф: They distribute traffic in the most effective way. And so actually we were doing, we recently did a plan for downtown Watertown Square here outside of Boston. Джоанна: Mm-hmm. Джефф: And it was very clear that half the traffic in Watertown Square was cut-through traffic. People who were choosing to go through the square... Джоанна: Mm-hmm. Джефф: ...rather than take other highways and other ways to get home from work and to work. Джоанна: Yeah. Джефф: And it was clear, I held the app up and showed it to the audience how at any given time, the amount of time it took to drive through Watertown Square was exactly the same amount of time... Джоанна: Yeah, yeah. Джефф: ...as the high-speed path or the congested path on the highway alternative. And when you use that tool and you share it to the audience, with the audience, they begin to understand that actually they can decide how much traffic they want to have in their downtown... Джоанна: Yeah. Джефф: ...because so much of it is cut-through. And the apps, not everyone needs to use the apps. Only a small number of people need to use the apps for it to cause the traffic to redistribute in the most efficient way. So it's actually a good tool. Джоанна: But if you're in one of those neighborhoods where the traffic's been redistributed, there's a lot of pushback. Джефф: Yeah, that's true. But it means that... Джоанна: Yeah. I was in New Orleans recently, and they were, the streets in New Orleans, for those of you that are there, tons of potholes, and there's a lot of repair work that needs to be done. And one of the architecture faculty at Tulane told me that neighbors actually resist having the city come and fix the street because then that will become the street of choice that everyone will drive through. And they'll get the traffic on their street. So it's complicated, right? Джефф: It is complicated, but at least it gives you the ability to make the decision... Джоанна: Yes, yes, yes. Джефф: ...to redistribute, right? I want to answer Hannah or Hanna, who talks about congestion pricing, just because it's such a hot topic right now with New York City finally apparently, the governor finally accepting, although at maybe too low a price to be fully effective... Джоанна: Uh-huh. Джефф: ...the congestion pricing scheme that was held up for so many years and then vetoed quite idiotically, I can say, by the governor. The question is, the question exposes the misinformation that is often put out about congestion pricing. Someone always mentions, you know, the poor, you know, apprentice plumber from Staten Island who has to take his mom to the hospital in New York City, and how he or she is being penalized by congestion pricing and its impact on poor communities or marginalized communities. The simple fact is that congestion pricing is a progressive activity, and that anything you do that supports driving is a regressive activity. Driving trends rich, walking trends poor, biking trends poor, despite the image of the elite bicyclist. 30.9% of people who bike for work or school are from the lowest 25% of income earners. And also, of course, it is marginalized and poor communities who, as I shared, who are most impacted by vehicular violence, also by the asthma and other environmental diseases that come from being located close to congested roadways. Congestion pricing is one of the most progressive things you can do. It also, and people don't discuss this, and it took me years to realize this, congestion pricing causes more cars to move. Congestion pricing causes our roadways to be more effective in having a throughput that's larger. Because when a street has 100 cars on it and they're moving, that's a lot more throughput than 200 cars that are standing still. And so what congestion pricing does is it attempts to make driving cost what driving is worth. And it causes therefore the free market to kick into the decision-making that's happening around people's choice of transportation mode. So there's a lot of smoke screens around it, but every place it's been tried, it's had tremendously positive impacts, and that should be enough to give us confidence in it. It's going to be implemented in basically half of Manhattan very shortly. Роб: Does it have an application beyond a place like Manhattan? How many cities would congestion pricing, you know, could it be applied to? Джефф: Well, I live in Boston. It could certainly work in Boston. Any city that has, any city that a limited number of ways in and out, bridges and tunnels, and the ability to identify the roadways on which tolling could happen and not, as Joanna alluded to, not encouraging cut-through traffic in a way that could be very destructive, is if that city is experiencing congestion, then it could happen. Роб: Averol. I wanted to ask myself a quick question for Joanna. Because it occurred to me that there is, it does go both ways in your personal health in terms of walkability. When you're walking, you're, you know, you're healthier. Obviously, there's studies that show that you're reducing your weight and long-term disease and so forth, but also you're increasing your risk in terms of the traffic accidents. You know, if I'm riding my bike into the village and back and forth, I'm obviously exposing myself to traffic. How does that work out in terms of the trade-off there? Джоанна: Yeah, no, I think that's definitely true. And that's probably why, like in Miami-Dade County, which is such a sprawling county, Maria Nardi, who's our director of parks, had worked on a kind of master plan for open spaces across the county with the idea that parks should be within a five or 10-minute walk of every house. So you might end up finding people driving to a park, but once you're inside the safety of the park zone, you can walk. We just did a project with them where we looked at parks that had sort of traditional one-entry parks to see if you could make cut-throughs from neighborhoods where you didn't even have to go out on the street. You could kind of cut through sort of little passageways through different houses. So for example, if you say, "Well, there are these easements, the Florida Power and Light has, what if that easement becomes a greenway? And then I can get from my house along the greenway to the park, and then I'm never interacting with the cars." So I think that's, that's an important part of it. And then there are the streets and neighborhoods where we live. And to Jeff's point, I mean, if you happen to live on one of those cut-through streets, that's pretty dangerous. But not everybody does. So to the extent that your own street can be made as safe and green as possible, you know, that's a possibility. And then I mentioned this in one of the questions that came up that someone asked. Victor Dover makes the point about how much land is eaten up in right-of-ways, not just the actual street we see, but the right-of-way that's on either side of the street. So for example, our street in Coconut Grove, the city of Miami passed a law that all of the streets had a 50-foot right-of-way, but our little street is 17 feet wide, and that works for everybody. So we petitioned the city to reduce the right-of-way on our particular street. And this was years ago, and they did. So I do think people could start looking at what's happening in the right-of-ways as an opportunity. We've talked about right-of-ways as being a place to do resilience and, in our case, bioswales for water retention. I think that Victor's right about if we really think of the roadways as open space and not just as these kind of arteries of circulation, we would have a different looking, our environment would look different, and your question would be solved because it would be beautiful and it would be safe. I don't know, Jeff, what do you say? Джефф: Right. People walking, and we need it safer, obviously. Роб: And so we have a question: "What are the types of local statistics or other information that has been effective in convincing municipalities to take that first step, the walkability study? What's the argument you make?" Джефф: I mean, the most effective... Someone asks if we do suburban walkability studies. It depends on the type of suburb. I believe I got an inquiry once from, I think it was Snowmass, Colorado, and if we could do some work there. And I looked at Snowmass, Colorado, if I remember right, and it was entirely a post-war landscape. So it was arterials, collectors, cul-de-sacs. And I said, I said, "I don't think we can help you because the bones are wrong." Now, that's independent of the safety improvements that can be made to any landscape that are important to make. It's just not, you know, we're urban designers, so we don't focus on opportunities where it's only about safety. But you can certainly take any landscape and narrow the lanes, narrow the shoulders, improve the crosswalks, improve the signalization, just with a straight-ahead safety angle. And I should say a proper Vision Zero approach, like we're working on, for example, in Worcester, Massachusetts, on a Vision Zero plan. You look and you see where people are dying, and that's where you go. So it doesn't matter where it is. It probably is the purest suburbia. But then you find opportunities to fix the killing zones, that's super important work. The more archetypical walkability study looks at a place where walking is actually possible as a useful, safe, comfortable, and interesting way of getting around so that people will make the choice to do it. And of course, that can be found both in our pre-war cities, our pre-war towns, our pre-war suburbs. Any place that hasn't been designed first and foremost around the automobile. Роб: And I'm going to say that we are just after one o'clock now. And so I want to tell folks, we still have plenty of people on. We have plenty of questions that have not been answered. And so if we can, we can continue to talk for a little bit longer and answer some questions if that's okay. And we have a question: "And what do you see as the role of tactical guerrilla urbanism in promoting walkability, getting people to notice gaps and connectivity, and are pushing a city to make connectivity to take more permanent steps?" Джефф: I can talk to that. I mean, tactical urbanism, you know, I like the mention of guerrilla because there are different types of tactical urbanism. The guerrilla urbanism where you as a citizen go out unauthorized and paint stuff on your street or rip out a sign you don't like or put up a sign you want to see up. I won't officially write a plan that suggests that, but I love to see it happen when it is done well. And that's all I'm going to say about that. However, a lot of cities are using tactical urbanism, more, you know, authorized tactical urbanism, to solve problems quickly that they don't have time to rebuild. Less than a year ago in Chattanooga, where we were last week, a family was hit by a drunk driver in a road rage incident on the sidewalk. The wife and the child were killed on a street that was a four-laner, the main street on the north side of the river in Chattanooga. And finally, after neighbors and others having been concerned for many years, the city had the political wherewithal to act on it. And they initially internally, and then eventually with our firm, redesigned the street in a way that's being striped right now. This is independent from the walkability study we're doing for the whole downtown currently. But we turned four-lane two-way into a two-lane, two-way with occasional left turn lanes at intersections and a protected cycle track and sidewalk expansion. And we're doing it all with paint. We're using a paint you've probably have seen, it's called EnduraBlend. And the manufacturer has not paid me to say that, but I believe it's the best, the best paint instead of, it's that thick epoxy paint that really looks like more than paint. It's what Jeanette Sadakhan used or something similar, but basically an epoxy blended paint that kind of feels more like a change to the surface of the street. It's got a tactile quality. And we're putting in green bike lanes. We're putting in tan sidewalk extensions. We're adding planters and other things. And it's understood as a temporary fix, but it might be there for 10 years before the city raises the money to actually rebuild. So those sort of tactical interventions often are the best way to quickly attack a problem area. Sarah asks, "NHTSA recently passed new federal motor vehicle safety standards to ensure passenger vehicles are designed to mitigate serious fatality and pedestrian crashes. Are there any similar positive federal or otherwise regulations for walkability street design that been put forth recently? And is there any concern that these will be reversed with the change in administration?" Well, many of you, especially those of you in municipal government, know that there have been some great well-funded programs under Biden and Buttigieg, SS4A, Safe Streets and Roads for All, and other similar programs that I believe the funding pools still exist and can be applied to. Even as the administration changes to one that probably is not likely to give a rat's ass about those issues, if I can say that. Melina asked, "My city just added a raised pedestrian crosswalk on our most dangerous and most pedestrian street outside of the university. They failed to add bump-outs or other common infrastructure in the intersecting streets. So the college kids get up to 30 on a quarter of a mile and then whip out into the raised crosswalk, nearly hitting those on the raised crosswalk. How can we convince the city to add calming infrastructure after they already spent so much money on the road?" Convincing is, is, is place-based. You know, the techniques that Joanna and I bring to places where we speak or work are somewhat generic. But the act of making them law or implemented is typically a very local and, you know, human-based endeavor that is hard to advise on. So Joanna, I don't know if there's anything you want to add to this conversation, but I would say that the techniques that we use is just to always insist that we run an evidence-based practice and provide examples. And to remind folks that there's really nothing new under the sun, and it's our job as planners to copy what works and not copy what doesn't. In this particular case, it sounds like, you know, the city has put a lot of money into something and it's not working, they might ask themselves what they did wrong. And maybe explaining that they kind of half-built it would be effective. But I think the author of the question knows more about it than either of us, probably. Роб: We get a question: "Now the most expensive neighborhoods are the walkable ones. We need to retrofit suburbia. All of that space in the parking lots could be used for affordable housing instead of paving over farms, et cetera, especially in the south that is developing at an extremely rapid rate in Nashville area. How do we bring these health-related planning ideas to the suburbs that need it the most, I suppose?" Джоанна: No, I mean, you know, I, I, I'm going to back up for a minute. After Hurricane Andrew decimated Miami-Dade counties, especially the southern portion and especially the suburbs, and people were stranded, there was an idea that came out. Liz Plater-Zyberk led, you know, charrettes, Dennis Hector worked on codes, and one of the things they said is if you could actually start to think about the area where we live, each of us, and what our walkable distance is around it. And we can kind of group together with those people, and we can start to see what do we need for this place to work? And in this case, we were talking about literally like get water, get supplies, get food. Because when you couldn't drive on the roads and there was no electricity and there was no water supply, like there's no life, right? So that approach has stayed with me always. It's kind of like, what can I fix that's close and what can I think of that's far? And I do believe in the policies. I think that right now we're at a moment where people who are interested in climate resilience and people who are interested in health and people who have had these ideas about what roads and highways should be are all at a moment where they could be working together. And to the extent, I mean, that's really why I believe so much in what CNU is doing. CNU is one of the organizations that is not a single professional. It's not a bunch of architects, not a bunch of planners. It's traffic engineers and everybody coming together and looking at how we live and how we can make it better. So I think that the question about suburban retrofit, Galina did a terrific book on that ages ago. And people have been inspired by it. McMansion can be a senior living, which it kind of becomes naturally because sometimes people age in place and they need help, and people move in, and voila, that mansion is now actually a senior living center. I really think there's a lot that we can do as individuals. And then I think there's things we can do as policy. But I have to say, I think CNU is the place where we can make this happen. And I'm very confident that the issues of health, climate, and well-being are really grounded here. And that's why I do think people should take a look at some of the new items that have been added to the charter. I think they begin to address this holistic view. Джефф: Joanna, you mentioned Galina's book. That's Galina Taccheva. It is "Retro," no, it is "The Sprawl Repair Manual." Джоанна: Yes, "Sprawl Repair." Джефф: Is the name of that. Someone asked me, and I typed in the names of the books that I had mentioned. Джоанна: I saw that, yeah. Джефф: "Repair Manual." There's also "Retrofitting Suburbia" and "Retrofitting Suburbia Too," or "Case Studies in Retrofitting Suburbia" by Ellen Dunham-Jones and... Джоанна: Right. Джефф: ...June Williamson. Those are tremendously valuable. Джоанна: Great. Those are great. Джефф: Someone asked the question, "Do we think the transition to electric vehicles can help reduce traffic congestion? Or the opposite will happen?" The transition to electric vehicles will reduce the pollutants that come from cars, and it's too little too late, but it's very important that if you can buy an electric vehicle, you should. Just don't use it as an excuse to buy a bigger vehicle and feel virtuous about driving it. And of course, electric vehicles weigh more. They're more dangerous for that reason. And also 85 to 90% of the particulates that come off of our cars are from our tires and brake pads. And those are much more extreme from electric vehicles because of the weight. So they don't really solve many problems, and they don't solve congestion. The statement that that question prompts in me is to say, well, the biggest change that people are touting in vehicles is autonomy. And some are suggesting that autonomy will reduce congestion. Anyone who's truly studied the unlikelihood of true swarming where every car is networked and interacting with each other in the swarms that they try to depict with videos. And B, the fact that being in an autonomous vehicle will make driving more productive. You can do other things like you're on a train, and you're more private, so you can watch cat videos or engage in intimate moments with your partner or do all sorts of other things that will cause you to be much more willing to sit in traffic, caused most people to believe that autonomous vehicles will be traffic generators and a sprawl bomb. So we need to be careful about that. Джоанна: Well, don't you think, I mean, in an ideal world, driving a car would not be something you have to do. You would be able to get basically what you need. I mean, and that's really the 15-minute city or the five-minute walk, and CNU is based on the idea that we should be able to come back into our communities, and driving a car is a choice for very specific kinds of things, but most of our life can be conducted on foot, in wheelchairs, with baby strollers and walkers and whatever it takes. And people do not relate well car to car. People are mean to each other when they're in cars. But when you pass someone on, you know, you're walking on the sidewalk and the person in front of you stops, you don't start like swearing at them in your head, you stop to see like what's happening. But when that happens in a car, you've thought all kinds of terrible things about that person and their level of intelligence. So I just think we need to get out of the cars and on the roads and on the streets, and we need to own them as people, and not as machines. And that would help in every way. Джефф: Yeah, Andres, Andres Duany once related, and it stuck with me, that when someone else is on the road, they exist in relation to you in one of only two ways: they're either competing for asphalt, or they could kill you. Джоанна: Yeah. Джефф: So that creates a truly antisocial service. Джоанна: Yeah, it's adversarial from the get-go. Yeah. Yeah. Роб: I think we're going to end it there. We can't get to all these questions, but we will post a video on CNU's website tomorrow. So, you know, you can watch it there. Pass it along. I wanted to wish everybody a happy Thanksgiving and thank you so much, Joanna and Jeff, for a wonderful presentation. And thanks to all the participants. Джоанна: Well, thank you. And Rob, thank you to everybody. Yeah, I mean, this is Thanksgiving week. I'm so impressed that you're all like here on this call, and you, Rob, set it up, and thank you very much for having us. It's just really an honor. Джефф: Thank you, Rob. Роб: Yeah. Have a great day. Джефф: Hi, everybody. Джоанна: You too. Джефф: Bye, everyone. Джоанна: Thank you.