Do the locomotion

Improving ‘walkability’ should be higher on Tulsa’s to-do list

Did you walk anywhere this week? Please don’t count strolls to and from parking lots. If the empirical data on most Americans is true for you, you didn’t get much shoe action. Tulsa’s average Walk Score, a composite rating that incorporates a variety of metrics, is a lackluster 36 out of a possible 100. To give some perspective, New York City leads all cities with a Walk Score of 88.

Frequent walking is a powerful road to better health, but it’s also a potential boon to local economies. Creating hyper-connected American communities with sidewalks, bike paths and combo trails is the core of a quiet revolution in urban planning, exercise dynamics, landscape architecture and park design. The “walk-talk” has altered the way streets are conceived and created by builders, planners, architects and local officials. It has birthed strange new notions such as “road dieting”—partially re-claiming streets and highway segments, reducing car lanes and creating pedestrian paths and bike trails with the liberated territory; or “complete streets,” an exciting re-imagining of road segments as budding multi-lane corridors with spaces for cars, pedestrians, buses and bike riders. Some of these notions have been partially incorporated at Tulsa City Hall by the planning and public works departments after policy actions by positive City Council and the planning commission.

Equity and fairness 

Surprisingly, getting around is mediated by a host of powerful and deeply-engaged policy and city budgeting contingencies—things that don’t constrict most Tulsans but do circumscribe the lives of many thousands in Green Country. Consider the exploding cadre of seniors who can no longer drive; people who lack the resources to buy, maintain and insure a vehicle; and folks who simply think cars are hassles. All are profoundly disadvantaged in Tulsa. But the carless pay federal, state and local taxes to maintain our extensive street and highway system and the signalization and policing outlays required to run these elaborate networks. People with limited access to cars get very little for those contributions. 

Although improvements are afoot, Tulsa still has an anemic bus system and a limited para-transit system for people with physical challenges. It also has a distinctly inferior sidewalk system—which might help explain Tulsa’s feeble Walk Score. While we have an excellent dedicated trail and bike/pedestrian system in Tulsa, only about half of our major streetways and arterials are equipped with even rudimentary sidewalks. 

Ren Barger, chief of our nonprofit bicycle services collective, Tulsa Hub, said it best in a recent article in this very publication:

“Mobility is not just movement through geographic space. It is the intertwined physical, technological, social, economic, political, and experiential dimensions of human movement. It is culturally meaningful. It affects changes in social condition and social status. It is a lens through which privilege and disadvantage, power and powerlessness, are revealed. Streets and transportation systems are the civic inheritance of cultures ... The street is also an expression of domination and power, where hierarchy of size, speed, affluence, and privilege dramatizes the relationship between the Quick and the Dead.”

Sidewalk sidestep

Mayor Dewey Bartlett sparked controversy recently when he decided to forgo a proposed sidewalk segment on Riverside Drive from 21st Street to the new Gathering Place park. The park is a fantastic, variegated design and is one of the most important large-scale new park developments in the U.S., and arguably on the planet. 

Most progressive planners and urban designers argue that sidewalks are an unambiguous public good—they allow for exercise, they give those without access to vehicles an avenue from A to B, and they provide safety and security for pedestrians in the midst of high-speed traffic corridors. The fate of new sidewalk links shouldn’t be determined by well-connected folks with objections to “outsiders,” who we can safely argue overwhelmingly use sidewalks for honorable purposes. And there will be an eastside path leading up Riverside to the new park no matter what official action is taken. If typical human behavior is any indication, soon after the park is completed an informal footpath will emerge spontaneously from tens of thousands of treks made by people coming to the park. Pedestrians will create this soft path—voting with their feet, if you will—but it won’t be paved and it won’t be as safe as it might be if it were optimally aligned, designed and surfaced. 

Walkanomics

Some of the folks who oppose the sidewalk claim it will whack their property values. Yet, a bevy of stout statistical analysis shows that well-designed sidewalk networks typically raise property values. Consider economist Joe Cortwright’s 2010 piece for the group CEOs for Cities, in which he gathered data for 90,000 distinct home sales in places like Chicago, Dallas and Jacksonville. “After controlling for all other factors that are known to impact house prices, he found a clear positive correlation [between housing values and walkability scores] in all but two of these markets. In a typical example—Charlotte, North Carolina—Cortright found an increase in walk score from the metropolitan average of 54 (somewhat walkable) to 71 (very walkable) correlated with an increase in average house price from 280,000, to $314,000.”

Cortright and others have highlighted an array of new developments in America that have fetched higher valuations as a direct consequence of quality sidewalk complements and carefully crafted connectivity amenities, like nature trails and bike paths—assets that are typically open to all comers. 

Reversing course

Tulsa isn’t the worst city in terms of sidewalk access and walkability, but we’re still leagues behind the vanguard and will have to make vast improvements even to reach the level of mediocre.

Walkability, it turns out, is a surprisingly quantifiable aspect of a city’s character, aesthetic and economic dynamic. And there is an active, aggressive effort to advance the cause of sidewalk access and walkability in Tulsa led by the folks who populate the city’s Bicycle and Pedestrian Advisory Committee, senior staff from City Hall and INCOG, our regional planning agency, and a host of volunteer activists. A $4.2 million “GO” allocation in the latest round of voter-approved capital improvements earmarked for a pedestrian/bicycling plan that will rigorously identify areas of town lacking sufficient sidewalks and analyze the cost of upgrades.

Taking steps

An October summit at the University of Oklahoma-Tulsa, “Walk to the Future,” tackled many of these issues. It was conceived by Dr. Gerald Clancy, who until recently was president of the OU-Tulsa and a major advocate of exercise, walking and radically improved diets. Clancy gave a detailed presentation on the state of play for a whole range of health indicators for Tulsa and illuminated the connection between sidewalks, fitness and walkability for addressing them.

Consider this passage from an article at SmartGrowthAmerica.org: “When streets are designed only for cars, they deny people the opportunity to choose more active ways to get around, such as walking and biking. Even when sidewalks do exist, large intersections and speeding traffic may make walking unpleasant or even unsafe—discouraging any non-motorized traffic. … The latest data show that 32 percent of adults are obese, the number of overweight or obese children nearly tripled between 1980 and 2004. Health experts agree that a big factor is in activity—55 percent of the U.S. adult population falls short of recommended activity guidelines, and approximately 25 percent report being completely inactive.”

Clancy was followed up by Ian Carlton, director of OU’s Institute for Quality Communities, who talked about the direct health and wellness benefits associated with more walkable communities and the assets and investments needed to create them. Later, the dual topics of direct development—using accessibility and sidewalks to produce jobs and better retail connectivity—was covered by Chuck Marohn, president of the nonprofit Strong Towns, a consulting and advocacy group devoted to improving walkability in American cities. Jeff Stava of the Tulsa Community Foundation and the prime executive associated with the new Gathering Place, concluded the session with a talk on children and families and the new park, spiking accessibility to the park and how we can create connections from the park to other parts of the city.

Next

The folks at City Hall would do well to emulate a new voter-approved capital project in Oklahoma City designed to make the city more walkable, improve safety among school kids and encourage adults and kids to “move”—something that a bevy of current research suggests has made spectacular progress toward quashing the obesity epidemic that continues to grip Oklahoma.

Folks, it’s really all about imagining real empowerment, moving beyond autopilot nostrums and focusing on improving connectivity in the largest sense. 

We need to get beyond the same-old same-old, and soon. Perhaps we can walk there.