Recent Streetsblog USA posts about Walking

What Should the Surgeon General Say to Get More People Walking?

By Tanya Snyder | Apr 2, 2013 | 15 Comments

What if cars came with a Surgeon General’s warning like the ones that come on cigarette packs: “Sitting in this seat could lead to obesity, diabetes, heart disease, depression, and divorce.” Surgeon General Regina Benjamin is getting ready to go halfway there. She announced in December that she’d be issuing a call to action on […]

How Much Driving Is Avoided When Someone Rides a Bike?

By Tanya Snyder | Mar 29, 2013 | 34 Comments

If Jane Doe rides her bike a mile to the post office and then back home, is it fair to assume she just avoided two miles of driving? And can we then assume that she prevented 2.2 pounds of carbon dioxide from being emitted? That’s more or less the way most agencies calculate averted vehicle-miles traveled. One […]

Walkonomics Sets Out to Create a New Way to Measure Walkability

By Angie Schmitt | Feb 19, 2013 | 7 Comments

Looks like Walk Score has some competition in the business of rating walkability. The U.K.-based startup Walkonomics recently unveiled an app that aims to measure the walkability of streets based on physical characteristics. The new Walkonomics app — currently available only for Manhattan, San Francisco and the United Kingdom — uses open source data to rank […]

Oklahoma City Mayor Mick Cornett: We Have to Build This City For People

By Tanya Snyder | Jan 24, 2013 | 6 Comments

On the last day of 2007, Mick Cornett, the Republican mayor of Oklahoma City — ranked as one of the fattest cities in the country — stood in front of the elephants at the zoo and announced he was going on a diet, and taking the rest of the city with him. Oklahoma City lost a million pounds, 37 of […]

Today in Foreign Policy: American Interests Demand Walkable Communities

By Tanya Snyder | Jan 15, 2013 | 2 Comments

If you’ve had your head stuck inside street design manuals or engineering guides – if you’ve been thinking at the level of the bulb-out or the bollard – I’ve got a present for you. I wouldn’t have expected to find it in Foreign Policy magazine, but last week, Patrick Doherty of the New America Foundation […]

Author Jeff Speck on Walkability and the One Mistake That Can Wreck a City

By Angie Schmitt | Dec 19, 2012 | 10 Comments

What makes a city great? According to Jeff Speck, the secret sauce is, quite simply, walking. If your city is a good place to walk — that is, walking is safe, comfortable, interesting, and useful — everything else will fall into place. In Walkable City, his talked-about manifesto about healthy urban places, Speck lays out a […]

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