Sumin Lee
ENG 2150
Professor Ian Singleton
March 18, 2018
Environmental Designs in Affecting Walkability
Since the dawn of time, walking has been an essential and integral part of everyday living for humans. Without the ability to walk, you lacked the skills to survive independently. Nowadays, the ability to walk isn’t used as frequently with the evolution of technology and the introduction of mass transit and vehicles. The start of focusing on structuring more modern societies and technological advances have separated our distance between walking and surviving. We, as humans have evolved from living in villages and hunting for food to living in cities and working in offices. It is evident that the evolution of our societal structure and the implementations of environmental design have affected our walkability. We now rely less on walking because there are faster and more accessible means of transportation. The environment you surround yourself in definitely affects walkability and how you interact.
The creation of mass transportation such as trains or buses have played a huge role in affecting walkability in the last couple of centuries. The idea that going from one location to another would take couple of hours to get to can be shortened by more than half the time is astonishing. Obviously, this will affect how people live their lives. For example, in New York City, mass transportation has become a daily part of living. People depend on the public transportation to get to places. Without public transit, many people would not be able to go to their job, school, or a friend’s home. Public transit has made it so much easier for people to get to places. It connects the boroughs together. If I wanted to walk to school from my home, it would take me approximately 2 hours and 30 minutes; if I take the subway it will take me roughly 40 minutes, if there are no delays. This does come at a price however, and not talking about the MTA fee but you miss out on looking at things. Meaning you’re stuck inside a subway train with nothing to look at besides the advertisements on the walls or the lights when you look out the window that you pass by every couple of seconds; it is very repetitive and you don’t get to see sights compared to walking. This is different however for above ground trains and buses, but a majority of people who want to travel from borough to borough usually take the underground subway, including me. It’s a very dull and repetitive experience after you’ve taken the same subway route for four years.
Mass transportation also affects the way people interact. As a person who resides in New York City, mass transportation, like the subway is viewed to get to a place quickly, from point A to point B. There is no need to talk to strangers and interact with them. You don’t need to make any eye contact and have an awkward moment where both of you are looking at each other. Usually to prevent this, people listen to music or sleep on their trip to their destination. Something I see very often in my subway rides are people who go to subway to subway asking for money or donations to help them or their family. Most people don’t even bat an eye and completely ignore the person. However this doesn’t only happening the subway. I always found this odd because it made me feel so distant from everyone in the train. There is no connection between people who are literally close to each other, in a physical sense. I sometimes see the same people daily on my way to school in the same station or subway train but never feel the need to have any interactions with them. Compared to a different place that doesn’t rely on public transportation like rural areas; it is more common for people who see each other almost every day to have some form of interaction even if it’s a brief discussion about the weather or a simple hello.
Another means of transportation besides walking are cars. Within New York City, there is a very large culture that involves taxis. If you google search “New York City” it is almost guaranteed that you will see pictures of a sea of yellow taxi cabs. For those in the city who don’t want to take the public transportations such as the bus or the subway, they take the taxi. Within these couple of years, services like Uber and Lyft have also become very popular in cities because they tend to be cheaper than the standard taxis. For people who don’t have subway/bus stations near their area of residence, or own a vehicle to drive, can order an Uber or Lyft through their phone and get to their destination. This concept also affects walkability because taxis and Uber can help people such as tourists or friends navigate around the city without worrying about learning the subway/bus routes.
Other means of transportation isn’t the only factor that affects walkability. According to J. Michael Oakes, who is a professor at the University of Minnesota and conducted a study on the effects of neighborhood density and street connectivity on walking behavior, key environment factors that affect walking are: density, street pattern or connectivity, mixed land uses or the presence of destinations, and pedestrian infrastructure and design related to issues of comfort, safety, and interest. Out of those factors, Oakes believes the two most important contributions to walkability are density and street pattern. Density is important because higher densities affects the way people walk and how safe they feel – more people to walk, to see others walking, to feel safer. Additionally, the higher the density, the more traffic congestion, meaning it is sometimes more convenient to walk to certain places. Street pattern is significant to walkability also because it affects the directness of travel, making travel more or less efficient.
Cities that have developed over the years can also affect the walkability. For instance, Manhattan is a grid, where the streets ascend/descend vertically and avenues increase/decrease horizontally. It is very straightforward to walk through and not get lost in the city, because you can simply look at street signs and know the general direction you need to walk towards. Additionally, the streets of Manhattan are almost always populated, living up to the name of the city that never sleeps, which adds to the cycle of more people walking. These two examples provide evidence to Oakes’ claim on the vital factors of walkability. In “The Death and Life of Great American Cities” by Jane Jacobs, she writes “To keep the city safe is a fundamental task of a city’s streets and its sidewalks.” Jacobs is trying to convey: to keep the city feeling safe for its residents, the streets have a higher density. The pedestrians don’t need to be doing anything actively to protect others, they just need to be present and work like “eyes” to be mindful to keep the streets safe. This is relatable with Manhattan and Oakes’ claim because like mentioned above, Manhattan’s streets are usually never left alone, especially in Lower Manhattan. People who have work, live there, or just simply walk around will always be present in all times of the day. And according the Jane Jacobs, that will prompt the city to be safer. From my weekly walks, whenever I walked around in Manhattan, the most obvious observations were the buildings and the amount of people walking in the streets. A large number of those people were on their way to work and were just mere afterimages. You see them for a couple of seconds and you forget their faces after a couple of minutes. During my time in Manhattan, for high school and college, I didn’t not ever feel safe or protected; there were always people around me and I was never alone. In Lower Manhattan, like Times Square, there are police almost on every block, but according the Jacobs that isn’t the main contribution to the safer streets, it’s the pedestrians and tourists that prevent others from commiting crime.
As a society, we have stopped relying on our primal instincts and have grown into more intellectual beings. We have gone from hunters and gatherers to living in cities and taking the subway to work or school. Walkability is defined as the environment and how it affects the presence of residents, visitors, and possible activities in an area. Evidently, transportation, such as the subway, bus, taxis, and services like Uber or Lyft, does play a significant role in walkability because instead of walking to your destination you can take these alternatives to shorten your time to get to a place. Population density and street pattern according to J. Michael Oakes and Jane Jacobs also affect walkability because the more dense a street or city, the more safer the environment becomes and street patterns can make it easier for pedestrians to walk in, or drive through, streets. Advances in society has added positive contributions and has simplified the way of living compared to how it was centuries ago.
Works Cited
Jacobs, Jane. The Death and Life of Great American Cities. New York, Random House, 1961.
Oakes, Michael J. “The effects of neighborhood density and street connectivity on walking behavior: the Twin Cities walking study.” Epidemiologic Perspectives & Innovations, vol. 4, no. 1, 2007, https://epi-perspectives-biomedcentral-com.remote.baruch.cuny.edu/articles/10.1186/1742-5573-4-16. Accessed 18 March 2018.