Walkability is the ability to safely walk between homes and businesses, transit stations, and other amenities in a reasonably short amount of time. Promoting walkable neighborhoods and cities reduces the need for personal vehicles and carbon emissions, gives citizens more freedom to access services and businesses, and encourages high-density infill development that makes use of existing resources and infrastructure. Planners can promote walkable design by incentivizing infill, eliminating parking requirements, and investing in robust public transit and mixed-use development that puts businesses closer to where their customers live and work.
All Walkability Courses
Walkable City 1: Why Walkability?
Instructor: Jeff Speck
Jeff Speck explains his five principal reasons for building more walkable places — Economics, the Environment, Public Health, Equity, and Social Cohesiveness — arming practitioners with a full range of arguments in favor of pro-walkability planning.
Donald Shoup Explains Parking Reform
Instructor: Donald Shoup
Donald Shoup, distinguished research professor in the Department of Urban Planning at UCLA, is shown in this video making a typically funny and engaging presentation at CNU 27 Louisville in 2019. In the presentation, Shoup lays out the key aspects of the parking reforms from his seminal book, The High Cost of Free Parking (2005) and the follow up, Parking and the City (2018).