New national guide: Steps to a Walkable Community

Our newest national partner, America Walks, has just released an excellent guide for citizens, planners, and engineers:  Steps to a Walkable Community.  This timely tool can assist Lee County's complete streets efforts--from advocacy and citizen involvement, to engineering design, land use considerations, safety and enforcement. Below are excerpts from America Walks' press release.

 Sept. 11, 2012:
A new book and workshop series puts innovative, multidisciplinary pro-walking tactics in the hands of citizens, planners, and engineers.
Sam Schwartz Engineering, the transportation engineering consulting firm, and America Walks, the national pedestrian advocacy organization, are proud to announce the launch of Steps to a Walkable Community: A Guide for Citizens, Planners, and Engineers. This book and downloadable PDF is a collection of innovative tactics that have successfully improved and encouraged walking in communities around the country. This resource serves as the basis for a series of webinars, phone discussion groups, trainings, and walking campaign walkshops™ also launching this month.

Creating a pedestrian-friendly community often means tackling the problem from several different angles at the same time. To address that reality, Steps to a Walkable Community features tactics that tackle those challenges from multiple approaches, such as advocacy, land use, policy, design and engineering, encouragement, and enforcement.

The guide is designed to be practical: Benefits of walking are distilled into two-page fact sheets that readers can use as talking points. Tactics are grouped by their fields of discipline and described in a standardized, easy-to-read format under the following headings: definition, benefits, considerations, appropriate contexts, guidance, professional consensus, examples, and case study (where needed).

“I now see the future of cities lies in their previously dominant transport mode—walking,” says Sam Schwartz, president and CEO of Sam Schwartz Engineering. “Steps to a Walkable Community will help engineers, planners, and citizens support this grand movement.”

“This guide, Steps to a Walkable Community, provides readers with both time-tested and innovative pro-walking tactics that are realistic and achievable,” says Scott Bricker, executive director of America Walks. “We aim for this resource to be the first stop in shopping for exciting walking projects and campaigns. Dive in and learn about these exciting initiatives.”

Steps to a Walkable Community is available for wide distribution in multiple formats:

• Download a free PDF from americawalks.org/walksteps
• Order a $40 hardcopy by emailing info@walksteps.org
• Visit WalkSteps.org, launching in October, a website where the tactics within Steps to a Walkable Community will be integrated with other emerging ideas

BikeWalkLee becomes AmericaWalks partner

BikeWalkLee joins hundreds of other organizations who have partnered with America Walks, a national resource which fosters walkable communities by engaging, educating, and connecting walking advocates.

 The mission of America Walks is to make America a great place for walking by working collaboratively to share knowledge, advance policies and implement effective campaigns to promote safe, convenient and accessible walking conditions for all.  Their mission is consistent with BikeWalkLee's vision for Lee County--to become a complete streets model community whose integrated and safe cycling and walking network inspires people of all ages, income groups and fitness levels to cycle and walk for transportation and recreation, and where public transportation is available and accessible to citizens and visitors alike. 

Partners of America Walks support changes in the built environment to encourage walking as a means of achieving healthy, efficient, equitable, socially inclusive and sustainable communities. Click here to see the list of hundreds of America Walks partners.

America Walks Vision Statement for a Walkable America:

By 2020, walking in everyday life is embraced across America. Streets and neighborhoods are safe and attractive public places that encourage people of all ages, abilities, ethnicities, and incomes to walk for exercise, recreation, and transportation. Walkable community policies promote health, economic vitality, environmental sustainability, and social equity.

Principles for a Walkable America

Walkability is defined by the following key principles:

1. People of all abilities can safely walk and move along and across all streets in their communities.
2. Communities of all sizes are designed so that most people can walk comfortably to places where they work, study, shop, play, and pray.
3. States, counties, and cities revise existing transportation and development policies, standards, and programs to encourage walking, bicycling, and transit use.
4. Transportation and development design decisions explicitly consider public health outcomes.

Check out their website for the many resources available to partners.