Sweet Home Indiana: Living In A Small Town Doesn’t Have To Mean Driving A Big Car

Walkability is important for environmental, commercial and health reasons. But what makes a city truly walkable?

We think of cities as big or medium-sized metro areas to be inherently more walkable than other places, but maybe that’s not so. I live in a small town right now, and it’s plenty walkable—albeit in a different way than, say, downtown Washington, D.C. Many suburbs are even walkable, depending on what aspects of walkability you think matter most; they certainly provide sidewalks, greenery, safety—although unfortunately, they do lack a destination outside of other suburban houses. Clearly, walkability is about more than just atmosphere.

Transportation for America just released its most recent report on pedestrian safety, finding the most dangerous metro regions in America for people to walk are in Florida, California, Nevada, Tennessee, Texas and Arizona. At first it seemed strange to me that all of the top 10 worst cities for walking were in warm-weather states, not cold, northern areas with icy roads. But as Kaid Benfield at The Atlantic points out, most of these are “sprawling, Sun Belt metro regions built completely around the automobile.”

Pedestrian safety is a big one, of course. But what else?

My new neighborhood (in downtown Lafayette, Indiana) is incredibly walkable—for about about a six-block radius. I can still go out to dinner, get drinks, run errands, work out and do a little shopping without getting in a vehicle. Then there are other things—actual grocery stores, for instance; the Purdue campus—that are walkable, in terms of distance (say 1.5-2 miles away), but these walks aren’t as easy or pleasant. The roads widen, and get busier; it’s a place where walking is possible, but not terribly practiced. When I lived in Brooklyn, on the other hand, two miles was a common trek of mine. Two miles felt quicker and easier, in a place where walking was the norm, not the exception. So walkability is about more than just distance—the number of things accessible to you by foot within some reasonable area. The condition (and, yes, even the aesthetics) of a place makes a big difference in how walkable it feels (not every place in Brooklyn felt so walkable, of course; a one-mile stroll through some of Bushwick’s warehouse district could feel like a spooky eternity).

But I think how ‘walkable’ you find a place also depends on what you’re used to. There were many things in Washington, D.C. I considered ‘walking distance’ from one another, but for my roommate, who’d always had a car, it wouldn’t even have occurred to to walk. I drive distances in my hometown suburb that I’d almost certainly walk in other places, just because I’m just so used to using cars there, I guess.

Most recently before moving here, I was living briefly  in Arlington, Virginia—a place that’s very suburban in parts, despite it’s proximity to Washington, D.C., and yet is recognized for its walkability. Parts of it have expanded recently with big, chain-retailers and restaurants—but because of smart planning, this has made the neighborhoods more walkable, not less. Unlike in many places, where big retailers are clustered around suburbs in parking-lot heavy patches, the stores and restaurants form a walkable, mini-urban center linking area suburbs, which are slightly less walkable. So smart growth is important for walkability. But public transportation is also important. In Arlington, public transportation also connects this area to other mini-city-centers and the depths of the suburbs. I was able to take a bus out to the Super Target on 26, a long, wide state route leading out of town, where either side is flanked with parking lots, each belonging to a some big store or restaurant. But the bus stop dropped me off literally on the side of the road, and I had to wait on this shoulder of this busy road with bags of groceries for an hour for the bus to pick me up. Traffic whizzed by, a lot of people stared; one man stopped to offer me a ride (I declined). Public transport isn’t a cure-all, either.