What is walkability and why should it be a priority?

At its core, walkability is the measure of how accessible an area is for walking (or using a mobility aid), and the idea of creating ‘walkable’ urban spaces means making them comfortable, safe and well-connected for pedestrians. Essentially, walkable urban spaces aren’t just traversable for pedestrians but are welcoming and easy to do so.

What makes places 'walkable'?

Today, more and more city planning is centred on making walking the best choice of transportation, and the way it’s achieved must be considered and executed well. Factors like tree cover, benches, gradient and even clever placemaking initiatives like sculptures and wall art add a level of comfort and attractiveness that can make an area or route more inviting to pedestrians.  

Safety methods such as adequate lighting and pedestrian crossings, traffic calming measures like speed bumps and well-maintained and signed pathways play a particularly important role in creating walkable environments that cater to everyone in the community.

However, while comfort and safety are both crucial components of walkable environments, it’s important to remember the role that accessibility plays in making places truly ‘walkable’. Convenience is incredibly influential when it comes to mode choice, and for a place to attract pedestrians, it must be convenient to navigate on foot. This means that, even if a location is safe to walk through and comfortable to do so, it doesn’t mean as much if it’s not well connected. This high level of accessibility and convenience is a crucial advantage of modern mixed-use developments, which place a range of land use types near one another in a bid to create convenient and vibrant places.

Why should walkability be a priority?

Now we’ve discussed what walkability is and what contributes to its success, let’s investigate the benefits of planning with walkability in mind.  

Firstly (and perhaps most obviously), walkable environments promote physical activity, which is crucial for maintaining good health. It might sound rote or predictable, but there’s no less truth in the facts that regular walking can reduce the risk of chronic diseases such as heart disease, diabetes, and obesity. Additionally, walking has mental health benefits, including reducing stress, anxiety, and depression; so, by creating walkable spaces, it’s possible to encourage healthier lifestyles and improve overall well-being within ‘walkable’ communities.

Another benefit and focused goal of making more places walkable is reducing a societal reliance on cars, leading to lower carbon emissions and improved air quality. It’s a simple fact that walkable cities positively contribute to environmental sustainability by promoting greener modes of transport (and simultaneously reducing the negative impacts of urbanisation on the environment), making ‘walkability’ a highly desirable outcome for places of today and tomorrow.

In addition to its health and environmental benefits, walkable neighbourhoods attract more foot traffic, which itself can be a strong predictor of economic activity (and is the reason why foot traffic analysis is such a powerful tool for site selection, benchmarking, network planning and more key business decisions). The flip side of this is that walkable areas often see higher property values and attract more investment, contributing to the overall economic vitality of the community.

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Finally, walkable environments help build a sense of place and community identity. The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted our basic human need to interact in the public realm, largely due to the absence of it during lockdowns and periods of social distancing measures. Without people, public places can feel empty, vacuous and uninviting. Walkable places, meanwhile, effectively attract people into public spaces to interact with their surroundings and each other, creating lasting connections and an innate sense of belonging.

The benefits of walkable places are numerous and multifaceted: improved public health, sustainability, community identity, accessibility and more. Each of these outcomes are high priorities in how planners shape places for the future, and the fact that they naturally overlap within walkable places is both logical and noteworthy - giving added credence to their value and the growing role that walkability plays in creating better urban environments.‍

How do you plan walkable places?

Planning walkable spaces, communities and cities requires a deep understanding of what truly influences walking trips, as these factors are what planners must leverage to grow pedestrian activity. This understanding then needs to be combined with knowledge of where and when people walk, which is essential for analysing performance; this evidence can then be used to guide where resources and investment need to go.

The final step in planning more walkable places is understanding which intervention(s) - whether it’s a change in the network, place factors or in land use – will have the most positive impact given the resources available. Using the right data and modelling approach, which in the past has been a unique challenge for active transport planners it’s possible to robustly test and predict the impact of these changes on people’s travel patterns. Armed with these insights, the task of planning walkable places becomes more attainable and impactful (whether it’s at a street or city-wide level).

The Planwisely team is creating a solution to these pervasive challenges with a tool called PATH, which allows planners to analyse current walk and cycle networks and test the impact of potential network or land use changes on these movements.

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