Frontage Engagement

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Look closely at front porches and see how many have signs of life. There are two reasons people don’t sit on porches: they’re too close to the sidewalk to be so low, or too low to be so close. Unsittable porches are just expensive decoration.

Tactical Beginnings

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Block Scale

How long does it take you to walk around a block at an easy pace in a recovering neighborhood? If it's five minutes or less, look for a place to live. If it's four minutes or less, open your shop there. If it's three minutes or less, quick... open a sidewalk cafe! The time it takes to walk around a block is a simple indicator of a complex condition: smaller block sizes are harbingers of strong future Walk Appeal for one simple reason: the more often you reach another intersection, the more frequently you have a choice of which way to go, which makes your walk far more interesting than having to walk a long distance for a choice.
The key point here is that identifying strong Walk Appeal is great, but

Indianapolis, but not the 500. Coulda been a great street, but chose to be a fast street. Every community has this choice.

Danger

No matter how beautiful the path where people walk, no matter how complete and cooling the canopy of street trees, and no matter how handsome the street furnishing and civic art, perceived danger trumps them all. Automobile traffic speed is the universal danger. In the seven Walk Appeal conditions just below, an increase of just 20% in vehicular speed drops the Walk Appeal of the thoroughfare to the next lower condition. A Great Street should have traffic at no more than 15 miles per hour, where the risk of serious injury or death from being hit by a car is close to zero. But if traffic speed increases just 20% to 18 miles per hour, the Walk Appeal of a Great Street drops to that of a W-5 Main Street. Following this all the way to the bottom, a thoroughfare indistinguishable from a Great Street in any physical characteristic that allowed vehicular speeds of 45 miles per hour or more would have the worst Walk Appeal rating of W-0, which is Unwalkable. No matter the beauty, people don't want to be right beside sudden death.
There's one important caveat: the speed that matters is in the travel lane closest to the walking path. A Parisian boulevard moved cars at lethal speeds in the middle travel lanes the last time I was there in 2016, but cars on the slip roads at the edge with parking on both sides moved not much faster than walking speed, so sidewalk cafes flourished with high-speed traffic only four lanes and one median away.
Substantial physical barriers between automobile travel lanes and sidewalks create comfort commensurate with the mass of the barrier. Mature street trees are great at this, but there's a catch: transportation engineers consider trees to be "fixed hazardous objects," so they do everything they can to ensure that any street tree planted will not grow large enough to imperil the driver. No matter the impact on anyone else. We experienced this firsthand in the Flamingo Park Neighborhood's struggle against the Florida DOT. The DOT conceded to a median, but allowed only one street tree per median right in the middle of the block and mandated highly-packed soil around the tree so it would never grow much thicker than your thumb. For this and many other auto-domination decisions in the Alton Road rebuild, carnage has ensued.
Fortunately, street trees are not the only effective barriers. On-street parking is now a highly unpopular option in places that have moved beyond auto domination, but in the great majority of the US which still suffers from auto domination, on-street parking is far better than surface parking lots for several reasons. Protected bike lanes are another effective barrier if they're truly protected by something that would deflect a car away from the cyclists.
Vehicle size has always been an issue, because there's no appeal to walking alongside a truck route. But heavy trucks are a small percentage of total motor vehicles on the road, so it's fairly easy to restrict them to certain routes, keeping them off Main Streets and residential streets. Recently, however, pickup trucks and SUVs have become larger than Sherman Tanks. And to compound the size problem, most new trucks and SUVs have a new front end design that's close to vertical. For decades, most vehicles had a wedge-shaped front end for aerodynamics and the accompanying fuel economy. If those vehicles hit a person, they would usually bounce up and over, therefore having a chance of surviving. But occasionally a deer would come through the windshield, injuring those inside. This new design changes the trajectory, mowing down any creature hit and crushing it under the wheels. If these vehicles drive in the country and the creatures hit are mostly deer and mountain lions, that's one thing. But if driven in the city, the victims are much more likely to be children and old folks whose heads aren't even visible above the hoods of the vehicles, hence the terms "killer grilles" and "kidmowers." Places with a preponderence of supersized vertical-front vehicles degrade Walk Appeal as much or more than speed, in large part because they can go everywhere, not limited to truck routes. Or should they be?
The last danger issue is crime. Places known to be crime-ridden reduce Walk Appeal to nearly zero for anyone except its residents, who are only marginally more likely to venture out on foot or pedal. Several of the tools for building Securable Places will help, but none of this is an ironclad solution to lawless places. For now, those walking should choose different routes.

W-6 Great Street

A Great Street is thronged with people, but not too many. People should be closest at the sidewalk cafes to either side, and while cars may be entirely crowded out, there should still be room for people biking gently.

W-5 Main Street

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W-4 Neighborhood Street

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W-3 Sub-Urban Street

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W-2 Subdivision Street

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W-1 Parking Lot

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The most poisonous condition to a #MainStreet is a parking lot just behind the sidewalk. People hate walking there, and businesses all along the street suffer from this blockage to free flow of people walking. It’s #WalkAppeal poison.

W-0 Unwalkable

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The Popsicle Test

The original Walk Appeal Test was the Popsicle Test (not my idea) which was 1: can a kid walk or ride to a local market and buy a popsicle & 2: get home before the popsicle melts or is eaten? This is a test both for safety and proximity. Will Mom allow it, and how near?

The People Test

Walk Appeal Test 2 is the most obvious: are there a lot of people there? If not, it's probably not an appealing place. As John Massengale and Victor Dover say "it's not a Complete Street if people aren't there." Other humans are the most appealing thing about a place. See & be seen.

The Speed Test

WalkAppeal Test 3 is simple: how slow are people moving? The slower, the better. If everyone is walking really fast, the place is either really boring or dangerous. Good urbanism where people sit or better yet lie down is neither and appeals to other people.

The Sidewalk Cafe Test

Walk Appeal Test 4: Sidewalk cafes are the canary in the coal mine for good urbanism. If they thrive, the place almost certainly has good Walk Appeal. If not, go to City Hall and demand change. Cities should incentivize them, not tax them because they do so much good.

Open Streets

Countless auto-dominated streets around the world have become Open Streets since the pandemic began. Some have reverted to auto-domination, but many hold firm & people are learning the value of streets filled with people on foot and pedal over streets filled with cars.
Open Streets don't even need to be open all the time. This is Royal Street in the French Quarter of New Orleans. Both Royal and Bourbon, just one street over, are closed to cars so they can be open to people on foot and pedal for substantial parts of the day. Other streets open for months on end as a pilot project until the city and its leaders decide whether to leave it open in perpetuity or return it to auto domination. It's important for the pilot project to be able to open with uncertainty, otherwise the answer is almost always "no."

View Changes

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Window of View

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Shelter

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Goal in the Middle Distance

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Turning the Corner

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Sidewalk Width

The ideal width of a sidewalk depends on its context, but if sidewalks aren't at least five feet wide, your town isn't serious about walkability, much less Walk Appeal. Two people can't walk comfortably side-by-side on a four-foot sidewalk, and two people passing each other have to turn sideways to pass without bumping each other. A five foot sidewalk is the minimum serious sidewalk, and six feet is better. In the post-Pandemic era (has that begun yet?) an eight-foot sidewalk is better still as people can maintain social distancing. In mixed-use areas, a ten foot sidewalk allows people to shop at modest retail displays, while fourteen feet is the minimum width on which to set up a sidewalk cafe, which can extend to twenty feet or more.

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Sidewalk Cafes

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People sitting outdoors are a great sign of good #urbanism on many counts including: 1. Of all things in town, we find people most interesting. 2. They attract more people so the place thrives. 3. People sit where it feels like an outdoor room. This is another simple indicator of a complex condition: if you find people sitting in a place, that place is probably doing several good things for them that they might not even be able to explain.

Gifts to the Street

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Liner Buildings

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On-Street Parking

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Open Streets

Countless auto-dominated streets around the world have become Open Streets since the pandemic began. Some have reverted to auto-domination, but many hold firm & people are learning the value of streets filled with people on foot and pedal over streets filled with cars.
Open Streets don't even need to be open all the time. This is Royal Street in the French Quarter of New Orleans. Both Royal and Bourbon, just one street over, are closed to cars so they can be open to people on foot and pedal for substantial parts of the day. Other streets open for months on end as a pilot project until the city and its leaders decide whether to leave it open in perpetuity or return it to auto domination. It's important for the pilot project to be able to open with uncertainty, otherwise the answer is almost always "no."

View Changes

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Street Enclosure

The best streets in the world tend to have an enclosure proportion of 1:1 or a bit taller. Enclosure is the proportion of building height divided by street width from building face to building face. Too tall, and the street is dark; too low, and it doesn't feel like an outdoor room. US Main Streets struggle to achieve a 1:3 proportion because transportation engineers force streets to be wider than necessary; at less than 1:6 all sense of enclosure is lost.
When enclosure is lost, the main event on the street is the traffic, making it a less appealing place to walk. When enclosure is gained, either by building closer to the street or building taller, the main event is the public outdoor room created by the enclosure, making it feel more like it's a place for the people walking and biking than the cars driving. Better enclosure also tends to slow traffic because there are more visual cues to process than on a wide-open road.

Window of View

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Shelter

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Goal in the Middle Distance

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Turning the Corner

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Sidewalk Width

The ideal width of a sidewalk depends on its context, but if sidewalks aren't at least five feet wide, your town isn't serious about walkability, much less Walk Appeal. Two people can't walk comfortably side-by-side on a four-foot sidewalk, and two people passing each other have to turn sideways to pass without bumping each other. A five foot sidewalk is the minimum serious sidewalk, and six feet is better. In the post-Pandemic era (has that begun yet?) an eight-foot sidewalk is better still as people can maintain social distancing. In mixed-use areas, a ten foot sidewalk allows people to shop at modest retail displays, while fourteen feet is the minimum width on which to set up a sidewalk cafe, which can extend to twenty feet or more.

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