Home // Walkable

What Is a Walkable Neighborhood?

It’s a common question at planning conferences: How many of you walked to school as a kid? Nearly all hands go up. Then comes the follow-up: How many of your kids walk to school? Almost no hands are raised.

The reason is quite simple; we’ve designed walking out of our communities—not only for children, for everyone. But now it’s clearer that forcing ourselves to drive everywhere for every trip has had big consequences.

What a Walkable Neighborhood Is NOT

• Single use buildings, big box retailers or strip malls with large parking lots out front
• Car dependence
• High-speed streets
• Unrelated and separate trails, streets and transit

Benefits of Walkable Neighborhoods

• Encourages exercise in daily routines
• Aids health and prevents obesity
• Enhances neighborliness and a sense of community
• Helps small business
• Adds vitality to sidewalks, thus reducing opportunities for crime
• Reduces the carbon footprint
• Saves money and resources
• Enhances the beauty of streets and sidewalks

Examples

• The Loring Park, East Hennepin and North Loop districts of Minneapolis
• Lowertown and St. Anthony Park in St. Paul
• The downtown areas of Stillwater, Hopkins, Wayzata and Northfield

Challenges to Creating Walkable Neighborhoods

• Current laws, transportation funding formulas, zoning regulations, building codes, parking requirements and roadway standards discourage sidewalks in many areas, or leave pedestrians vulnerable to fast-moving auto traffic
• In most suburban communities there’s simply no place to walk to. At a mall in Woodbury, one prominent Twin Cities writer found it nearly impossible to walk from one big box retailer to the next. A security guard stopped to ask if he was in some kind of distress
• The harsh winter climate also provides an excuse for builders to eliminate walkways or to minimize them if they are built
• Skyways pose a vexing problem for downtown Minneapolis and St. Paul; they clearly encourage walking. But, as private space, they are open only when stores and offices are open, and they tend to leave the street-level barren and lifeless. Indeed, skyways, while prized for protecting office workers and shoppers from bad weather, create a class hierarchy: wealthier people and wealthier businesses upstairs and poor people and no business down below