The Footprint
where will your feet take you?

Can You Walk?

by Christine Schultze

walk

Transportation is important to each of us. Can it be improved, what kind of $$$$ investments are prudent and where should we invest? Did you think first of rising gas costs? commuter rail? road congestion? potholes and bridge repair? vehicular injuries and deaths? emissions, pollution, global warming? something else?

Logically, efficiency, cost, predictability and safety matter, so let’s start with a few questions:

  1. What is the simplest form of transportation?
  2. What is the cheapest form of transportation?
  3. What is the cornerstone of and key to efficient ground transportation for a town?

Walking is the answer to each question.

The construction of a walkable community provides the most affordable transportation system any community can plan, design, construct and maintain. Additionally, walking is the most sustainable form of exercise, for, minimally, all trips begin and end with walking (1). Beyond the affordability of walking and the encouragement of sustainable, moderate-intensity exercise, walkable communities decrease vehicle miles traveled (VMT’s), vehicle emissions, paved surfaces and run-off. And walkable communities, even with their higher average physical activity levels (2), have lower numbers of pedestrian injuries and deaths due to automobile accidents(3).

Now, Rochester, with the Mayo Clinic, is a city intent on promoting and modeling good health, so, let’s connect the dots:

How we get around, our health and our safety can all be improved by making Rochester more walkable.

While Rochester has supported sidewalks and a broad network of inviting trails for recreational walking and biking, we have not focused investment on making in-town walking and biking more useful, more inviting and a good choice for all ages. Walking fits well with people’s daily life, if errands, ways to work, school and play, and explorations can all happen on foot.

Walking which is integral to daily life, is the cornerstone of ground transportation and compact, diverse, walkable growth. Can Rochester be more walkable, improving how we get around, our health and our safety? Definitely.

First, we need to know how to guide growth and changes in ways that will increase walkability. Whether we realize it or not, Rochester is about to change, and more than any other Minnesota city. Rochester will soon become the fastest-growing metropolitan area in the entire state (4), and the state is growing fast! State forecasts predict the Rochester metropolitan area will grow by nearly 40 percent in the coming 25 years – more than any other Minnesota city – from 125,000 in 2000 to 170,000 in the year 2030(5). The question is not will we grow, but how and where will we grow?

Dan Burden and the Florida-based, non-profit, Walkable Communities, Inc., say the key way to know a walkable city is that it has many villages – small, well designed, compact, intact neighborhoods, each with a village center and a character and personality of its own.(6); Rochester has a few neighborhoods matching that description, so we have a start.

How can we build a more walkable Rochester? This is an important question to answer, and looking for guidance and good models is a start. Portland ME, Burlington VT, Boston MA, West Hartford CT, East Lansing MI, Chicago IL, Madison WI, Ft. Collins and Boulder CO, Eugene OR and Juneau AK are some identified walkable, livable cities, good models for increasing Rochester’s walkability. And, given Rochester’s growth scenario, we should be aware that when towns get up to100,000+ population, added services, like efficient transit, are a must to remain walkable and fun.(7)

Dan Burden was included in Time Magazine’s 2001 prediction of the most innovative people of the 21st Century. According to Time, while he can’t unpave paradise, Burden helps plant the trees, lay the grass and narrow the highways, to slow traffic and give sidewalks back to the neighborhood. Time observed that even in midsize cities, traffic volume on roads can be so extreme that “a walk to the market is impossible, biking downtown a flirtation with death and that Burden has figured out what to do - he’s the guy people call to get their space back.”(8)

This innovative man spends his days walking our streets and advising politicians and civic leaders on how to make communities more pedestrian and cyclist friendly. His recommendations go beyond adding sidewalks and providing space to walk safely to what he calls straightforward principles to becoming more ‘walkable.’ “It’s not just about sidewalks or being able to get across the street. It’s really about putting things in the right place—to make sure you get your civic buildings, your plazas and your greatest retail, residential and commercial buildings all within walking scale.”(9)

A few of the successful strategies Dan Burden uses to make communities more walkable are:

  1. Put bloated thoroughfares on what he calls a “road diet.” In cities as large as Toronto and Seattle and towns as small as Sammamish WA, Burden has trimmed lanes and filled the space with bike routes or grassy buffers to ease walkers’ stress. Burden says slimmer roads are “leaner, safer and more efficient,” and take some of the stress off drivers too. “We tend not to like open, scary places, and we try to get through them quicker. Somehow the canopy effect of tree-lined streets slows traffic.”(10)
  2. “Everything has got to slow down. Nobody should be driving through a town center faster than 25 mph. So you work on making something so attractive and intriguing that no one wants to drive fast.” West Hartford CT’s central town area is a sterling example, and Burden compliments everything from sidewalk surfaces to on-street parking, window displays, outdoor cafes, streetlights and trees.(11)
  3. A parallel Burden observation is that wealth doesn’t ensure walkability. “We can take a lesson from almost any city in Canada. We have more money, they have more common sense.” (12)
  4. Finally, Burden points out that there’s a huge, if not obvious, economic incentive to develop compact village centers. Places like Santa Barbara and Burlington, Vermont are making money “because the things they are now doing are compact,” and, while shoppers spend more money when they can walk through an entire downtown area, the city in question spends less on maintaining infrastructure.(13)

So . . . let’s choose our future – a walkable one – by making sure that how and where we grow supports walkability:

  1. Leave the car at home and take the bus, ride a bicycle, or walk to your destination – cut down on air pollution and learn more about our community.
  2. Make our community more pedestrian and cyclist friendly, and – simultaneously – more fiscally responsible and economically vibrant. With neighbors, local businesses, schools, elected officials, and city and country departments, support local transit, walkability and the densities and diversity that make both work.
  3. Identify leaders who will develop and support policies and investments that help build a more walkable Rochester.

How? We’ve identified a few good model towns and cities, straightforward principles and successful strategies for walkability. What of guidelines for walkable growth? We can start with LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design)’s Neighborhood Development (14), a pilot neighborhood rating system, published February 2007. This system integrates LEED’s green building standards with green urbanism, melding good location, linkage, pattern, design, construction and technology. LEED’s Neighborhood Development is the first national standard for neighborhood/village design.

And, let’s not forget the common sense.

Christine Schultze, Livable Rochester Member


  1. http://www.walkable.org
  2. http://www.smartgrowthamerica.org/report/HealthSprawl8.03.pdf
  3. http://www.planning.org/newsreleases/2005/ftp071805.htm?project=Print
  4. http://www.demography.state.mn.us/DownloadFiles/00Proj/PopulationProjections02.pdf page 14
  5. Ibid.
  6. http://www.walkable.org
  7. Ibid.
  8. Time, “He Takes Back the Streets for Walking,” by Josh Tyrangiel, reported by Amy Bonesteel, http://www.time.com/time/innovators_v2/civic_leaders/profile_burden.html
  9. Failure, “Walk this Way: How one Man’s Epiphany is Changing how America Walks,” Jason Zasky http://www.failuremag.com/dan_burden.html
  10. Op Cit, Time.
  11. Op Cit, Failure.
  12. Ibid.
  13. Ibid.
  14. http://www.usgbc.org/leed/nd