This website helps you measure walkability on your block, neighborhood, or even region

The coronavirus pandemic has caused many people to avoid public transit, leading to increased demand for other forms of transportation. If that demand is satisfied by just automobiles, then air pollution and traffic deaths will keep getting worse. But there is an alternative: cities and regions, including Greater Washington, can plan for walking as a mode of transportation.

And now there is a website, Pedestrians First, to help you measure walkability from an area as a small as a block to an entire region, and beyond.

Why is walkability so important

Walkability is fundamental to urban life, but it’s a complex topic. Walkability is more than just sidewalks: it’s a function of urban design and planning at every level from the details of the streetscape to the layout of the region. Walkability brings a long list of benefits. Study after study has found that walkability makes cities more equitable, more resilient, more sustainable, physically and mentally healthier, more economically efficient, and more socially integrated.

Despite walkability’s benefits, cities around the world are still being planned with cars, not pedestrians, in mind. But we can change that. First, we can understand how car-oriented planning has destroyed walkability in our cities. Then we can change our streets, neighborhoods, and cities to make them more walkable.

Over the last year, I’ve worked with my colleagues at the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy to create a new website that cities around the world can use to plan for walkability. Pedestrians First is a set of four tools to help you measure walkability at all scales, from a single street up to an entire urban region.

Walkability is complex, but Pedestrians First breaks it down and explains it step-by-step. The website includes the first-ever global database of walkability statistics, measuring five key indicators in almost 1,000 urban regions worldwide. One of these regions is Greater Washington.

Pedestrians First also includes policy and design recommendations, so that once planners understand walkability, they can act to improve it.

Four tools to measure walkability

Pedestrians First includes four tools to help you measure, understand, and improve walkability.

• View City Measurements. This tool is pre-populated with data measuring five indicators of walkability in nearly 1,000 cities around the world. It tackles the big questions in walkability at the scale of the urban region. Which neighborhoods are dense enough to be walkable? How many people live within walking distance of services, transit, and pedestrian places? How well are places connected by walkable paths?

• Measure Inclusive Transit. Walkable neighborhoods depend on transit to connect them to each other. This self-survey tool measures how well a city’s transit system serves the most marginalized, especially the very young.

• Examine a Neighborhood. This set of questions, adapted from ITDP’s Transit-Oriented Development Standard, helps you measure key issues of walkability at the level of the neighborhood. It’s especially useful to evaluate a proposed development or plan.

• Visit a Street. This checklist is meant to be used while you visit a particular street and look around. It focuses on the smallest details of walkability, but those details add up and become critically important to people walking. Although View City Measurements can tell you whether people can practically walk to a destination, this tool tells you whether the journey will be comfortable, safe, and enjoyable.

What does walkability in Greater Washington look like?

The View City Measurements tool includes data on five indicators of walkability in our region. Of those, I think that two are especially interesting: People Near Services and Weighted Population Density.

The COVID-19 pandemic has bluntly shown us the importance of people being able to access healthcare without having to share space with other passengers in public transit. Pedestrians First measures People Near Services: the percentage of people in a city who live within walkable distance of both healthcare and education, another fundamental social service.

Only 31% of people in Greater Washington live within a 1-kilometer (0.6-mile) walk of both healthcare (including pharmacies and doctors’ offices) and schools. That’s less than Boston, Philadelphia, New York City, or Baltimore. It’s much less than other international capital cities like Berlin, Tehran, Brasilia, and Bogota. Although the District itself is fairly well-covered by social services, walkable access drops in much of Maryland and Virginia, where most of the population of the region lives — and there are certainly places even within DC where people can’t walk to healthcare.

Population density is fundamental for walkability. Of course, density isn’t the same as overcrowding. Overcrowding means that people are crammed together because there aren’t enough homes in a place where people want to live, and overcrowding is bad for everyone. But density means that homes are built close together so that there are enough homes for everyone. Density is particularly good for walkability because it means that people have places they can walk to.

Suppose it takes 5,000 customers to maintain demand for a bakery. If those customers are spread thinly, most of them will have to drive to get their bread. But if they live in a dense neighborhood, most of them will be able to live within a few minutes’ walk of the shop. The same is true for all kinds of goods and services. It’s especially true for public transit, which relies on dense, walkable neighborhoods to be effective.

Pedestrians First measures Weighted Population Density, an estimation of the population density experienced by the average resident of a region, rather than a measurement of the region’s overall density. Greater Washington has a Weighted Population Density of 4,700 people per square kilometer. That’s pretty low by global standards, but it’s one of the highest in the USA. Surprisingly, though, it’s also comparable to many of the northern European cities that we think of as exemplars of sustainable mobility — Greater Washington actually has a higher weighted population density than Berlin (4,500) or Amsterdam (3,700).

So why isn’t Greater Washington as walkable as those places? Two reasons. The population density in the region is uneven, and there’s not as much design for walking. Fortunately, both of them can be changed, and maybe it won’t be as hard as we think to make our city as walkable as Amsterdam.

First, Amsterdam is an evenly-distributed layer of relatively high density, while Greater Washington has a few peaks: Northwest DC, the Orange Line corridor in Arlington, Silver Spring, Bailey’s Crossroads, and Mark Center to name a few. These peaks are separated by wide expanses of very low-density areas that prevent walking. This isn’t just a transportation issue, it’s also a housing justice and affordability issue, because denser, more affordable housing is actually illegal in most of these areas. This is part of why Greater Greater Washington’s advocacy agenda for housing in our region focuses on increasing density in affluent areas.

The other reason is just as important. Many of Greater Washington’s high-density areas have very pedestrian-unfriendly design, but my colleagues and I weren’t able to measure pedestrian infrastructure using global data. This is where we can use the other tools in Pedestrians First. The website also includes two other self-survey tools (Visit a Street and Examine a Neighborhood) to help you measure and understand walkability at the local scale in your own community.

So: take some time and look around pedestriansfirst.itdp.org. What can you find? What’s interesting to you? If you measure your own neighborhood or street, what are your results? Let us know in the comments!

Taylor is both the primary author of Pedestrians First at ITDP and a volunteer contributor to GGWash. This blog post was composed entirely in the latter capacity, and in this post Taylor is not writing on behalf of ITDP.