Municipal mixed-use zoning is a public health strategy to create more walkable neighborhoods by creating integrated, un-siloed access to daily activities—such as going grocery shopping and traveling to school and work. A recent study in a special issue of the Journal of Health, Politics, Policy and Law funded by Public Health Law Research, a program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, evaluated municipal zoning ordinances in 22 California cities to see whether the ordinances improved walkability in those communities. NewPublicHealth spoke with the study’s two authors, Sue Thomas, PhD, senior research scientist at the Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation-Santa Cruz (PIRE) and Carol Cannon, PhD, formerly with PIRE and current associate research scientist at the CDM Group, Inc, a consulting firm in Bethesda, Md.

>>Read the full study.

NewPublicHealth: What was the scope of your study? 

Carol Cannon: We looked at ordinances that create municipal mixed use zoning, and whether these laws seem to have an impact on the potential for walking to destinations. 

NPH: In what ways were the study and findings innovative?

Got five minutes? Spend it viewing a recent video on walkability from Dan Burden, a reigning expert, who took NewPublic Health on a walkability audit of San Diego during the recent New Partners for Smart Growth Conference. Burden is executive director of the Walkable and Livable Communities Institute.

The video is a veritable travelogue for walking as the best possible way to get around locally. Burden discusses metrics, safety features and fixes to current streets while video scenes, including happy walkers of all shapes and sizes, flash on screen. Burden makes some pivotal points about walkability, including creating destinations for walkers, adding landscaping to enhance the enjoyment of the walk, and making changes to traffic technology such as replacing some lights with traffic circles to improve safety for drivers, walkers and bikers.

Walkable 101: The Basics from Martin County CRA on Vimeo.

How walkable is your community? Try this checklist from the Pedestrian and Bicycle Information Center, a national clearinghouse.

This weekend at the New Partners for Smart Growth Conference, NewPublicHealth attended a walkability audit of downtown San Diego with the inventor of the tool and "Johnny Appleseed of walkability," Dan Burden. In 2001, TIME magazine named Burden one of the world’s six most important civic innovators. He is currently a senior urban designer and executive director of the Walkable and Livable Communities Institute, and previously co-founded Walkable Communities, Inc., and the Bicycle Federation of America. Burden has worked in more than 3,000 communities and led more than 4,000 walking audits throughout North America.

Walking audits have been happening for about 25 years now, though they are a skill and a field now coming into their pinnacle—the first official course on walkability audits was taught recently in Tucson to a mix of health, planning and engineering professionals. “A very big part of the walkability audit is to start to break down the walls between disciplines. It really helps open people’s eyes. It’s been a very powerful tool.”

A walking audit is an assessment of the walkability or pedestrian access of the built environment in a community. Burden created this tool to help communities understand how their environment encourages or discourages its residents from walking.

“America became something different. We lost our focus. We stopped designing cities for people,” explained Burden.

Dan Burden began to run walking audits about 25 years ago during his tenure at the Florida Department of Transportation. He realized that the engineers never went out and walked the streets they’d designed. “As we went out, we realized more and more how wrong the designs were.”

In his presentation, Burden shows photos of places that make you want to stay inside your house (or get in a car) rather than walk anywhere—deteriorating or no sidewalks, dangerous intersections built for cars that leave scarcely enough time for a healthy person to cross, acres of asphalt littered with bottles and trash with no green space in sight, and unlit alleyways that seem built to shelter crime.

“Over 80 percent of Americans want to be able to seamlessly switch modes of transportation,” said Burden. “That’s not what we’re funding.” In fact, he said, less than 1 percent of federal transportation dollars go toward supporting walking and biking infrastructure, and even those scarce funds are under threat.

Burden typically takes anywhere from one to 100 people with him on his walkability audits (though he recommends a group of 30 for less seasoned walkability gurus), inviting city planners, elected leaders, citizens, advocates, police officers, persons with disabilities and public health officials—anyone with a vested interest in creating a better community.

Before he brings in the whole group, though, Burden tries whenever he can to take a first pass through a neighborhood on his own to connect with residents, kids and local retailers to get their take about what’s working and not working in the community. One six-year-old told him all she wanted to do was to walk to school and play with her friends, but she was afraid to be outside by herself. The goal of the walkability audit is to find out what steps the community needs to take to get it to be a place its residents can be proud of and happy to live in.

The components of a walkability audit get very nitty gritty: the exact width of the “walk-and-talk zone” of a sidewalk (ideally four feet, leaving another two to four feet on either side as a buffer and a place for sidewalk “furniture” such as benches, bus stops and street lamps), the number and width of lanes for cars, the average speed of cars and average traffic volume on each block, and more. But what’s most critical is not the sidewalks or traffic patterns—it’s how the land is used, how connected are the hubs of activity, and how much open space there is. While sidewalks are important, they’re useless if they don’t lead somewhere people want to go, said Burden.

While the walkability audit of San Diego at the Smart Growth conference was quite literally, at times, a walk in the park on a beautiful, sunny day, that’s not always typical. Burden’s longest audit spanned 16 miles on a day when the temperature peaked at 120 degrees. Another audit could only be conducted 10 minutes at a time because the temperature dipped below a frigid –54 degrees. Yet on the 16-mile, 120-degree day, a woman in a wheelchair stuck it out for the entire audit to help show her community the challenges she faced daily in navigating a city that simply was not built for her.

What makes a community work? Five key aspects, said Burden:

1. Security
2. Convenience
3. Efficiency
4. Comfort
5. Welcome

There’s both an art and a science to walkability. The science involves a set of measures and ratings, described in detail in the Environmental Protection Agency’s Walking Audit tool, co-designed by Burden (and admittedly still “in beta”—more will likely be added to the tool as it is continually tested and refined).

Though health is not the primary goal of a walking audit, it is a critical outcome of a walkable community.

>>Read more NewPublicHealth coverage from the New Partners for Smart Growth Conference.

Town and city streets are an important part of the livability of communities, says Barbara McCann, Executive Director of the National Complete Streets Coalition and a presenter and moderator at this week’s New Partners for Smart Growth conference in San Diego. McCann says streets ought to be for everyone, whether young or old, motorist or bicyclist, walker or wheelchair user, bus rider or shopkeeper. “But too many of our streets are designed only for speeding cars, or worse, creeping traffic jams.”

But in communities across the country, a movement is growing to complete the streets and these communities are asking planners and engineers to build road networks that are safer, more livable, and welcoming to everyone.

Instituting a complete streets policy, according to McCann, ensures that transportation planners and engineers consistently design and operate the entire roadway with all users in mind. NewPublicHealth caught up with McCann in advance of this week’s conference.

NewPublicHealth: What is the scope of Complete Streets?

Barbara McCann: Complete Streets is about getting communities around the country to adopt policies to ensure that streets work for all users, and we have focused quite a lot on policy adoption. We’re seeing success in more half of the states and in about 300 local communities. And now we’re turning our attention towards implementation. What do communities need to do once they have a policy in order to actually make changes on the ground that creates a safer environment for walking and bicycling and taking the bus and other really active transportation?

NPH: How quickly have you seen changes recently?

Barbara McCann: Well, certainly in policy adoption it’s been going great guns. We’ve pretty much doubled the number of policies adopted every year for the past three years, from close to zero where we started this in 2006. So the policies are really, really spreading. Implementation of actually seeing change on the ground is a long haul process in most places because Complete Streets policy must make sure that every future project is done differently, and so that means that you’re not going to see an overnight change in your community, but it does mean that as investments move forward, every transportation investment will start to make a difference.

There are communities that have been doing this for a number of years and we do see improvements in facilities, we see public support or some of the innovations that are happening on the roadways really rising. We see safety improving and we see an increase in biking and walking in some of the places that have taken this approach.

NPH: What community would you hold up as a model for Complete Streets?

Add New York to the growing list of cities with bike-share programs, which let people borrow bicycles from central locations, usually at very low cost per ride. The Big Apple’s bike sharing program should begin next summer and New Yorkers were invited to weigh in on where the bike stations should be located. According to the New York Times, NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg submitted a request for a station near City Hall.

However, bike-share programs do introduce new risks, including biking accidents and exposure to air pollution. A recent British Medical Journal study offered a health impact assessment of the bike-share program in Barcelona, Spain, used by close to 200,000 members, to weigh the benefits of increased physical activity and reduced reliance on cars against potential risks. The study found that the increased use of biking over car travel avoided twelve deaths a year and reduced carbon dioxide emissions. Study authors concluded that the benefits of the bike-share program outweighed the safety risks.

Another study, by researchers from Hunter College of the City University of New York, looked at bike injuries in New York and found that even though the bicycling trend is taking off in New York City, the number of injuries has actually been on the decline. In October, New York City will begin collecting data on bicycle accidents for the first time.

It’s a couch potato’s dream. In New York City, residents are getting exercise without even realizing it. The city’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene recently released a report, “Health Benefits of Active Transportation in New York City,” that finds that most New Yorkers get more physical activity getting from place to place than they do from intentional exercise.

And, according to the report, the benefits abound:

• On average, people who walk or bike to work log more than an hour of active transportation time daily.
• In addition to reducing premature death, brisk walking or biking for a half hour every weekday reduces the risk of heart disease.
• Brisk walking for 20 to 30 minutes per day also can reduce diabetes risk by 30%.

New York City has made changes to its infrastructure to improve pedestrian safety, including widening street lanes, expanding sidewalks and adding countdown clocks at street crossings that let pedestrians know when the light is about to turn red.

But even communities where traveling by foot isn’t a part of everyday life are creating new walking opportunities. In Kansas City, Kansas, residents and volunteers are working with their surroundings to encourage walking as a leisure-time activity.

“Kansas, unlike New York, has very little public transportation infrastructure, causing most residents to use personal vehicles for movement between destinations,” says Caitlin McMurtry, an analyst with the Kansas Health Institute. As a result, says McMurtry, most people have fewer opportunities to exercise, “since walking to the garage is a lot closer than walking to the subway station.”

AmeriCorps VISTA volunteers have partnered with neighborhood development associations to revamp the physical environment and create walking clubs. Using practices recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and funding from the National Network of Public Health Institutes, the Rosedale Development Association and their volunteers are rehabilitating local walking trails by installing park benches, extra lighting, and trail markers.

Other resources for walkability information include:

• Walk Texas
• National Center for Safe Routes to School
• Active Transportation Alliance

Weigh in: Do you live in a walkable community?