[Image credit: Toni at Flickr under a Creative Commons license]
Cars are among this country’s greatest polluters, emitting 20 pounds of CO2 for every gallon of gas they burn along with lead, ground-level ozone, and a slough of other greenhouse gases. More walkable neighborhoods mean fewer cars on the road, and that means less pollution. Period. So what makes a neighborhood walkable?
Walkability has been on my mind since reading yesterday’s post on World Changing about the CDC’s walkable communities video. I think it struck me because the CDC is right here in Atlanta. The video they posted uses shots of neighborhoods not too terribly far from my own.
Walkscore.com defines a neighborhood’s walkability based on 10 criteria. According to their database, my neighborhood here in Atlanta is pretty walkable! The proximity to the train station, a grocery store, restaurants, and bars was a huge reason that my husband and I chose the house that we’re in. We were able to go from being a two-car family to sharing one car, and that car spent most of its time unused. I basically was hoofing it everywhere. That was, until this past August when I was mugged on my street while walking home from the train station.
Suddenly, that grocery store just a few blocks from my door felt like it may as well have been across town. I was bumming rides to the train and home from work on days that my husband couldn’t walk there with me. It’s gotten to a point now where I feel somewhat safe riding my bike, but it’s going to take a long time to feel comfortable traveling alone again on foot. The point of all this is that, in all of the discourse about building denser, less car-dependent neighborhoods, folks aren’t talking that much about making these places safe. Walkability is about more than proximity – it’s about feeling safe when you step out the door, and that sort of makes safety an environmental issue.
Walkscore touches on the safety issue here. I guess what I wonder is how we can move away from a car-centric life without considering how to make the streets safe for walking. Maybe just like more cyclists making the streets safer for bikes, more foot traffic makes a safer pedestrian environment? What do you think?
About Becky Striepe
One point that makes me happy about walking and biking is that I think that the (good) human interaction is increased, like making eye contact with the people in your neighborhood and on your commute. With that, not only can you improve someone’s mood just by smiling at them (something that’s much harder to do when you’re both in cars), but hopefully make a little difference in the connectedness between people that helps reduce crime, because people know each other and watch out for each other.
I know those little differences are not always enough when you’re worried about safety, but sometimes (when some guy I’m considering crossing the street to avoid gives me a genuine smile and says “How’re ya?”) they’re just enough.
This is such a good idea. The traffic where I live on a morning is mums/dads taking children to school. I was thinking of cycling to work but its like whackey races on the roads near me.
Cycling in traffic is definitely tricky at first. Folks in Atlanta drive like maniacs. It’s gotten a bit less scary as I’ve ridden more, but real bike lanes would make it feel a million times safer!