Jeff Speck teaching The Walkable City at Harvard Graduate School of Design Executive Education
Matthew Jennings
Jeff Speck and I first met in 2004. I had just been elected mayor of Oklahoma City, and I was invited to Charleston for an event hosted by the Mayors’ Institute on City Design. Jeff was one of the design professionals lending expertise to mayors facing complex planning issues.
Years later, our city chose Jeff to help us redesign our entire downtown grid. We had too much capacity, and it drastically affected the walkability of downtown. We changed our one-way streets to two-way. We added on-street parking. We added hundreds of trees. It was a game-changer for Oklahoma City.
Recently, Jeff and I were invited to Atlanta to speak on walkability to students and faculty at Georgia Tech. The event gave us a chance to share notes and catch up. Here are some of his thoughts on walkability and trends in the industry.
Mick Cornett: You’ve been in this space for some time now. How has the conversation about walkability evolved through the years?
Jeff Speck: It’s funny. I sure didn’t invent the term walkability, but when we started using it, it was new. Spell check would catch it, and folks would make curious faces when I brought it up. Now it seems to be what everybody wants. Even in places that are entirely car dominated—which is most of America—people want to be able to drive to places where they can live the walkable lifestyle, even just for an afternoon. I can tell you how my conversations have evolved, which is that I used to be asked to give talks on why walkability is so important, and now I’m mostly asked to talk about how to achieve it. “We’re already sold,” people say. I actually have TED talks on both subjects, and the ‘How’ talk is the more popular one.
Cornett: One of the primary barriers in a community committing to more walkable streets is the cost. How do you respond to cities and towns that say, “We just can’t afford it.”
Speck: Mayor, you presided over one of the most expensive street projects I’ve ever worked on, funded by a new giant tower being built in your downtown. At the time, we joked about whether the name—Project 180—was referring to the 180-acre [73 ha] study area or the cost in millions. It was a good example of how a city can leverage private investment to end up fiscally stronger after a major rebuild. When it turned its main street into a gorgeous, drivable plaza in 2010, Lancaster, California, spent $11.5 million to create an economic impact of roughly $280 million. A lot of that money found its way back into city coffers.
That said, we are always advocating that cities not rebuild but restripe instead. You can restripe a whole downtown for the cost of rebuilding a few streets. At the same time that downtown Oklahoma City was being rebuilt, Cedar Rapids restriped most of its downtown, in conjunction with scheduled maintenance, for an additional cost of about zero. That’s the approach we take most often.
Cornett: When I think about walkable streets, my thoughts go immediately to downtowns. Is there momentum to apply some of these strategies to suburban communities?
Speck: Absolutely, but you have to be realistic about outcomes. There are two main opportunities in suburbs. The first is to redesign the old main street, if there is one. Many of these are state highways, so you have to play hardball—or do a lot of begging—with the DOT to change them. But DOTs are getting smarter, so success is possible. But some newer suburbs have bad bones, through and through: huge blocks, fat streets, and no prewar main street to resuscitate. There, the best opportunity is to find a large parcel, like a dead office park or mall, to turn into a new mixed-use town center. Dozens of these [places] have been built in recent years, like Belmar in Lakewood, Colorado, or Sugar Land [Town Square in Texas] and they’re not perfect, but they at least offer people a chance to live, work, shop, and play in a walkable place.
Cornett: Where are you working these days?
Speck: Speck Dempsey is an integrated city planning and urban design firm, so we are always working both on new neighborhood plans for developers—currently in Massachusetts, Florida, New York, New Jersey, Utah, Ecuador, and Guatemala—and on downtown plans, regional plans, and street plans for municipalities—currently in Massachusetts, Florida, Maine, Tennessee, Kentucky, Louisiana, Indiana, Colorado, Texas, and Hawaii.
We’re on the team rebuilding Lahaina, Maui, after its devastating 2023 wildfire. We’re redesigning the downtown street networks in Chattanooga and Louisville. Over the next year, our restriping plans for downtown Scranton and Mobile [in Pennsylvania and Alabama, respectively] will be fully implemented. Between those two plans, we’re restoring two-way travel to a dozen dangerous one-way streets and replacing three dozen traffic signals with much safer all-way stop signs. We’re completing a micromobility plan for the University of Alabama. Roll tide! I also just got to design a train station in Hammond, Indiana, but that’s another story.
Cornett: And you’re doing work internationally? Are these conversations taking place on other continents?
Speck: Absolutely, but some places need help more than others. Our specialty is the U.S., but there is a lot of work to do elsewhere, especially in places that have uncritically copied American development patterns to their detriment. There are some large U.S. design firms that have been exporting car-dependent sprawl to the developing world for half a century, and we try to be the antidote. I can say, “No repitas nuestros errores” [“Don’t repeat our mistakes”] in at least three languages.
Cornett: Sometimes, city staffers can’t agree on the best course for street design. If urban planners are getting pushback from the public works department, what should the discussion points be?
Speck: As you yourself point out in your public talks, the best touchpoint is probably public safety. We can argue for walkability in terms of economics, health, climate, community, and equity—as I do in my books Walkable City and Walkable City Rules—but not everyone in city government, or the public, cares about most of those things. [Nobody] is against saving lives, [though], and there are a lot of statistics that make the case for our proposals. As Mayor [Mike] Bloomberg said, “In God we trust. Everyone else bring data.” We can document how restoring two-way travel to multilane one-way streets has reduced car crashes by 48 percent, and how replacing traffic signals with all-way stop signs has reduced severe injury crashes by 63 percent. We share those numbers, and others, not just with city staff but [also] with general audiences who, as it turns out, have a lot to say about the future of their cities. Ultimately, it’s those folks who give city leaders the courage to move past business as usual.
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