Walkability in Redding with Dan Burden.wav
Katie
I'm Katie.
Steve
And I'm Steve, and this is the City of Redding podcast. Today we talk with Dan Burton, a Blue Zones fellow and international walkability expert. Dan has built a career by helping cities reshape downtown districts and neighborhoods to make them more walkable and bikeable. His efforts are more than just a passion for accessible spaces. These changes increase economic vitality. In fact, 79% of those looking to buy a home say they want to buy in a walkable area. However, only 11% of cities meet that target.
Katie
For many decades, the US has focused on car centered travel, which has dramatically shaped the way we live. Shifting focus to walkable spaces has been shown to increase the local economy, overall sense of well-being and happiness, and perhaps most notably, the area's safety.
Steve
So can Redding become a more walkable city? Dan thinks so and will host a walking audit in August to show Redding residents how small changes can make a big impact. If Alaska and Yuma, Arizona can have walkable spaces, Redding can too.
Dan Burden
I'm Dan Burden and I am a fellow with Blue Zones, a for profit corporation that's focused on health building cities that are designed more around people and place and also have my own firm, Dan Burton Consultant. So I work through both portals to really help communities in any way I can to make them more walkable, improve active transportation.
Katie
So Dan, thank you so much for being with us here today. You have a very impressive resume when it comes to walkability and accessible spaces for cities. Maybe you can just tell us a little bit about your history. Like how did you get into the walkability movement, how did you get to where you are today, and why are you so passionate about this?
Dan Burden
First, I, I got in through a back door. I had no training whatsoever in either planning, engineering nor landscape architecture. I just wanted to start of my career to get more people to to feel comfortable and safe riding bicycles. And early on I was with the Florida Department of Transportation as a state bicycle coordinator, and I was invited over to Australia to share with them what we were doing in the States for bicycling. And when I got there, I came to realize, it's not about bicycling, it's about walking. And so I came back and changed my job title at the Florida Dot became the nation's first bicycle and pedestrian coordinator. And then, as the science of walkability evolved, I tended to be at the very top of the group of people doing that. And the very best architects, engineers, planners, every field wanted to mentor me. And so I had no schooling whatsoever in any of those fields. So I only learned the good things because it was only the very best in each field that taught me. And so somewhere around 1996, I wanted to have a bigger canvas than just Florida. So I retired and then went out and now worked in all 50 states, six provinces in Canada, about seven other countries, all in walkability and all kind of each step along the way. We keep raising the bar to where we're trying to figure out how do we go from this level now to this level? And I'll just give an example. We just led a 11 day mobile study workshop for 21 of the very highest level elected leaders in Hawaii to go over and, say, Norway, Denmark and Sweden on how to design roads safely for every way of traveling, but especially the way they've been able to do it for walking and bicycling. So I keep trying to stay at the very upper end of the profession and keep advancing it in that way.
Steve
And Dan, on the topic of walkability. How does walkability impact the quality of life for residents in a community?
Dan Burden
Well, in many dramatic ways, a walkability is the cornerstone of whether people own their neighborhood, own their street, or even their block. If, say, traffic speeds and volumes are too high. The number of friends you have. Based on the original research by Donald Appleyard, the number of friends you have drops from 3.1. If the volumes in the speeds are low. Friends on your block to now .09. If the volumes and speed get higher, so has everything to do with livability. In time, people will abandon the fronts of their homes because of the noise and the other fear factors that come with incorrect use of their streets. It's so important that people are able to choose places to live where they own their own block, they own their street, and people don't misbehave on their block or their street. So I would say where we can measure that with walkability, with all the measures that go into that. It truly is. The tight link is walkability and livability are partners with one another. You can't have one without the other. Yeah.
Katie
I guess it's interesting that you say that that walkability applies to neighborhoods, because I guess in my head, I was thinking that it would just apply to like downtown cores or cause of the city where people might want to walk to eat and shop and get around that way, but I. It even applies to your neighborhood as well.
Dan Burden
It does. And and indeed, most people need to walk every day. That's the only way you can stay healthy. And yes, you can get in your car and go downtown, and then you want it to be walkable or your waterfront or whatever. But why force people to get into a car, to go somewhere else, to walk right into, to stay active? And so we the way we've been able to build the whole science around walking is we start with downtowns, we rescue them first. They are the place where businesses occur. It's where the greatest exchange is, where the social life of the town is identified. And then you start to work out to adjacent neighborhoods and go out, say, a quarter mile and then a half mile and and over time, even a mile. And the good news is, most towns like Redding really were laid out originally. It was only later that we stopped doing the right patterns of development. We created longer blocks. We created everything that would speed up traffic and serve traffic. And as we did that, those areas are going to be harder to rescue. And so when we do a project, we typically are asked to come in and start with the downtown and then work our way outward. And it pays off handsomely to do that. As an example, using Portland, Oregon as an example, one of the first great cities that rescued itself over many years. They now will not tolerate any movement in their downtown being more than 20 miles an hour. And that's truly the ideal speed the motorists will yield to pedestrians. They want to honor people walking and bicycling if the speeds are low, but once you get up to 30, that is pretty marginal. And if you get up to 35, it just drops off, uh, completely. And the crash rates and the crash severities go way up based on speed. So we have to rescue the arterial roads and other roads, but we have to start with creating that oasis of good places first. So people start to ask for more.
Steve
Well, it's so true too, Dan. When I look back at places I've lived, I think the most rewarding and impactful places I live absolutely have been provided ample walking and biking avenues to get around versus being car dependent. So it's so true. I'm wondering, you touched on Portland. What what is one of the most inspiring examples of walkable cities or neighborhoods that you've encountered during your your research and your efforts?
Dan Burden
Portland would be among them. The Pacific Northwest is very high in my ratings. Seattle, Portland, of course, Vancouver, British Columbia and Victoria, British Columbia. All four are very good models. In fact, I'll go over to Victoria, British Columbia, 2 or 3 times a year to study what they're doing. And I can stand in places in Victoria, not in the downtown, but in neighborhoods where I rarely see a car moving. I see people walking and bicycling. That's an area that's been rescued. But it was it was not an easy win. They had to use all the right approaches to come up with what they've got. But I love to take people to the places that have made the transitions so that they can see the value, the benefit, and understand what goes on. We have many great cities that have rescued themselves. Washington DC is one one of the real, most walkable, transit bicycle friendly places in the nation. Cambridge, Massachusetts. Extraordinarily high. Charlotte, North Carolina they're just many dozens. But only only only the small towns can do it fast. And Redding is in that category where if you start to take the right measures, you can really bring the kinds of transitions that are going to really pay huge dividends and livability, quality of life, affordability, all the things that matter and start to bring back not only the health of the people, but the health of the cities.
Katie
And I 100% agree with you. One of the things that we hear for Redding specifically, is that the weather is just pretty intense here. We have very rainy winters. Typically, I would say we had one last year and our summers are very hot. So how do you balance that? That's that's definitely a factor when people are considering do I walk or bike? Is it just too warm outside? How do you take those into consideration when you're designing spaces for walkability and bikeability?
Dan Burden
What's very interesting about climate, that climate is hardly any factor at all. Uh, so, for example, the highest walking rates in the nation are Alaska. And, uh, when we were up in Norway and Denmark and Sweden, which are typically very cold places and they don't have long seasons of daylight even. And it's interesting. I was sitting in a restaurant and it started to rain, and I watched the street and the street before the rain started. It was just packed with people walking and biking by, and there was maybe a five minute interlude. And then all of a sudden the same number of people were walking and biking, bicycling in the rain. People can prepare themselves for whatever climate they're in. There are extremes. There are times in, say, Yuma, Arizona, where you just have to adjust the time. You walk to middle to late evening. But but there's no climate in North America that you cannot adapt walking and bicycling and make these healthy activities for certain hours of the day, or even all day. If you wear the right clothing or carry the right rain protection.
Steve
And Dan what role does technology and data play when enhancing walkability in cities?
Dan Burden
I think technology is a big part of it. When I got into this field, I knew I was not the technician, I was the person who could get people to work together to, to overcome the needs and then have the best technicians come in and follow and provide the solutions. But we need to have the right street designs. And most engineers in our country are plagued with the old age, thinking that their job was to keep cars moving, keep them moving fast, not worry about safety, even though they kept saying that was their number one. It wasn't. And so America became the most dangerous place in the developing world or developed world for driving, walking or bicycling. And now, because speeds are so high and automobiles are so demanding of space, then the pedestrian and bicyclist is just off the charts in very dangerous territory. So we're rolling that back. But it's happening one city after another. And that's why I love to use the models. We start with model communities that are already there or getting there, and then we spread out from there. Yeah, but the technology is important. There's just so many tools we have now in the last ten years that didn't exist before. So people are starting to wake up and we're developing and refining the type of tools we use to enhance walking and to enhance bicycling. But here's the funny thing is, we're using the tools that were developed in the 1950s by the most brilliant thought leaders of the time, people like Jane Jacobs, Kevin Lynch. They laid down the foundation of what would work and where many planners and engineers haven't even heard those terms or those people. They're picking up old ideas and carrying them forward and making them work. Things like in your downtown, your street, your sidewalk needs to have complexity. It needs to have enclosure it. Now. The buildings need to have transparency. All these things we have known, they were well defined for us. We just didn't pick them up while we were making this sidebar, rush to further serve the car and sadly increase our dependency on the car. Yeah.
Katie
I guess on that note, like how do you pull that back? I'd say a community like Redding is so firmly attached to their vehicles. One, because we are quite spread out for a city, we have a lot of miles to travel if you're going from one side to the other, which people have just gotten used to growing up here to being in a car, how do you peel that back from people and show them what walkability looks like if they haven't experienced it themselves?
Dan Burden
We increase the number of people who feel comfortable walking and bicycling and not feeling they have to get in their car as much. By building, first of all, 15 minute neighborhoods. And that starts with the downtown and a 15 minute neighborhood, which the the folks in France are developing very well, really mean that if you take where you live and you go out 15 minutes or a neighborhood that you can walk 15 minutes and get most of the things you need. Uh, you have access to parks, to schools, to libraries, to retail, and in many cases, even shops. So we do that by making land use the big partner. The engineers just don't have the resources or the wherewithal. And and I'll use myself as an example. When I worked in Florida, I was there for 16 years trying to figure out how to make bicycling and then walking safer. And where I did, fewer and fewer people were finding it comfortable walk because the land use was totally out of control. The decisions were made to do communities that were further out that were only one type of use, like just residential. And that was it. Rarely was there good systems of parks or trails or links or connectivity. We're now learning that the value of land use, that any project we do has got to have the associated land use strategies, working with transportation to stop growing the dependency on driving.
Dan Burden
And once we do that, we'll start to to have a more balanced budget and economy to where we can now afford to do the things that we've said. We don't have the money to do it. We've been spending our money funding and paying for the things that are doing the most harm. And so the cities are figuring this out, and I use as an example Vancouver, British Columbia In British Columbia, but especially Vancouver, when they look at their annual budget as a city, they say number one is walking. Number two is bicycling. Number three is transit. And then if there's any money left over, we will fuel more motor vehicle use. But they figured that one out. And they've been following that strategy to huge success. But it took building the land use elements so that people could have a place to live, where they didn't have to depend on being in their car for every trip and every movement they took. So it's it's that partnership. And so when we look at a project, we're looking well beyond just pure transport.
Katie
And maybe you can break down what success you said that to huge success. Like what does that success look like? Because I'd say a lot of people in our community probably don't see the benefit to walking or biking. They're just fine in their car. What's the matter with being in a car? Why would we divert resources to walking and biking versus just keeping the status quo?
Dan Burden
Number one reason is the economics of a community. And I use as an example, between 1980 and 1990, Portland, Oregon, focused on bringing the the growth back into the city. And as a result, during that ten year period, they were able to drop their taxes. I believe it turned out to be 30%. And obviously livability went up, places became quieter, more wholesome, everything at the same ten year period. Atlanta used the outward growth scenario. They had to raise their taxes 20%. They had no choice because the cost of just doing business was that much more. And they. The cool thing is we now have all that data, we have those statistics and we can apply those to any community we work in. I use another example, a fire department. The last time I checked to build a new station was like $2 million, or at least to manage it and run it with that much per year. And so if you have good street connectivity, the old traditional pattern that downtown Redding is made up of, you can handle a vast amount of territory and cover the six minute window that you need for your merchant's response. But if you go out to the broken style street system, you can only cover, I think it's one fifth of the territory, so you have to five times as many fire stations in order to cover the same territory because of broken land use and inappropriate patterns.
Dan Burden
So it's a huge it's a huge cost to follow the suburban sprawl pattern that we came up with. It has the broken blocks and forces people into the car to make a trip, because there's nothing within range that you can walk or bike to. So it's anyone who studies economics figures out that what you really should be looking at is yield per acre. So if you look at, say, a downtown block and a particular building and compare that with a with one acre, let's compare acre to acre. So an acre downtown versus an acre in a suburban strip area. You can increase the value of the land 800%. We recently did that in University Place, Washington, uh, a suburb outside of Tacoma. And truly, those numbers crunched precisely at 800%. So you go away from a strip. And what they did is they bought a strip and turned it into a true village. By doing that, the value of their land, the yield per acre that goes back to the city in terms of taxes, gave them that lift 800% increase in valuation, and therefore more money to provide the services that cities require.
Steve
Wow. That's amazing. I'm wondering when you're working to make a city more walkable, how important is community engagement and what does that community engagement look like many times?
Dan Burden
Engagement is the key. When I started doing my work, and that goes back probably to the very late 70s, early 80s, I realized that if I wanted the products, the projects that I wanted built, I didn't need to know the technical side. I knew them, but I realized it was all about public engagement. If you don't have the public with you, you can't build or you have to build something watered down to where it's no longer walkable, where the systems just don't work. And so I went back to college, got my master's training in interpersonal communications, and my built my whole career around how to advance public engagement. I invented a few tools as I did this. People are getting tired of going into a meeting and hearing other people shout and scream. And so if you can develop activities like walking audits, where people can go out and they can see, they can understand, they can one on one speak, then it just unlocks all the the understandings in the world. And it doesn't matter what groups you bring together as they start to realize what they've got in common, that if they want something to work for driving, they want fewer people driving. If you want to have people get across the street and you see what the behavior of the motorist is, you figure that out. In fact, I was leading a walking audit in, uh, Pacific Highway in, uh, Tacoma. And the speeds there in the 50s, 50, 55, 60. It's a typical strip style street, just like the streets we're going to look at in Redding. And with the speeds being that high, they were using what we call rectangular rapid flash beacons for a five lane road.
Dan Burden
And so we went out and I with the group, I stepped out, I got the first motorist to stop. And I knew my risk, my danger would be the next car would not stop because of the speeds. But I insisted I move forward and forward until finally that modus was forced to stop. And that motorist was very angry because even though the the lights were flashing, I was in a crosswalk. All these things I had to prove to the group I was with that you just can't use rectangular rapid flashing beacons at speeds that high. You've got to go to a half signal or a hawk signal. That is a true signal that will bring the traffic to a let people get across the street. The cool thing is, as a result of that project, I want to say it's probably 8 or 9 miles. They're going to put in over 40 half signals for Hawks. They're getting totally away for rectangular rapid flashing beacons. They want to rescue these neighborhoods that have been overlooked for 60, 80 years, and now honor the neighborhoods by the design of the street. And the motors can go through at 30 miles an hour and some areas 35 miles an hour, but they cannot go through it 50 miles an hour. It's how we learn through the walking audits. We see what's working and what's not. We understand why it's not working. And then all of a sudden, people will back tools that are appropriate for their community. And so it's really cool. It's the right time in our careers in in the transportation field to be bringing huge changes where before it was tiny incremental. Now it's big incremental.
Katie
And I guess I was going to ask a different question. But to follow up on that one, what do you think? What do you think is making it possible to make this change now? Are people more receptive to this now? And and why do you think so?
Dan Burden
People are more receptive and more and more people, in fact, uh, another statistic, the, real estate industry, through the National Real Estate Association, has kept very close tabs on the, uh, current and the future homebuyers, who are mostly younger people. And the vast majority of them, about 79%, want to live in a walkable neighborhood. That is a huge number. However, only 11% of a neighborhoods in America are walkable. There's this desire by the people in the professions and the the the people who want to have a home to, to live in places that are now built on people and place. And so I would say the number of people who now get it, if when I started my profession, it might have been one out of 100. I think now easily 30 out of 100 and maybe even a higher percentage than that. The people get it and they'll elect the right leaders, and they'll support the leaders when they make the tough decisions. And they'll go and they'll defend a better street, a better park, a better place focused on on people. So we're entering a much better era, but the one we've come out of still has a very dark influence.
Steve
And Dan, for a city like Redding, where, you know, at the at the current time that the majority of the city maybe is not super walkable like we talked about earlier. Do would you say residents here have reason for optimism? You know, how long could it take or can it take to to make a city like Redding truly be walkable?
Dan Burden
It won't happen overnight. It can't. It's got to be project by project. But and we're seeing more and more people willing to become engaged, become informed. In fact, so many people going into the health field, into planning, into architecture, into engineering that are doing it out of a passion, out of a love. They're tired of not having an easy time finding a place to live that is going to support their needs, their family, the things they want. I think I think we're entering a really good era, but it's going to be step by step. It's going to be incremental. And just to use University Place as an example, where they converted a strip into a village because they were early pioneers in this. It took them 30 years to get the final village built. It was that long. But they had the right leadership or the right elected leaders who stayed with them, that believed in the opportunity to build a truly walkable community, that they stuck through it. I've seen other communities go through maybe a ten year transition, but once the transition is underway, 2 or 3 years in, people start to really get it. And it's just fun to watch that process. But definitely this is for the long haul. It's not going to be done in Redding or anywhere in 2 or 3 years, or 2 or 3 projects.
Steve
From your perspective, the wealth of knowledge that you have and the number of places you've seen and visited and helped shape this change. What do you see for Redding? What's the possibility in Redding? If you could just dream it a little bit?
Dan Burden
Oh my gosh. First of all, to use some of the best new tools, right? And again start with the downtown. That's where people are going to see the biggest bang for the buck, the biggest return of business and business life and profit margins. And it's got to be about that and good places to go to bump into other people and so on. So you start with the downtown. I think the cool thing is I've studied the downtown. Your changes are going to be at first. Some of them are very simple. Uh, we're doing a new type of treatment in our country, and people seem to love it. It's called tactical urbanism or quick fixes, but they can also be attractive. And you could, with a very moderate amount of money, make significant changes. And maybe you start with one street, maybe you only start with one block, but you do that and you could do it within easily. Within six months you could have something underway and then you can grow out from there. And I've seen that done so many times, so well that I'm a believer in start with the quick fixes, the low cost treatments and prove that things work and but definitely always back it with good public engagement because you've got to have people to back your elected leaders and point out what, uh, as neighbors or as business leaders, why this is an important decision and not leave it on the backs of your elected leaders to defend it on their own.
Katie
Cars aren't going away anywhere. There's the push to electric and there's that might change or adjust how people use cars or their relationship to cars. But what's a good modern balance for walkable and bikeable places but that still accommodate motor vehicles because they aren't going anywhere?
Dan Burden
Yeah, really a key question. The car will not go somewhere else. We are very heavily invested in that. The culture's invested in it. Everything. But people are getting tired of only having one choice. And so there's been a huge movement in our country for multimodal transportation where anyone has a choice they can elect. I'm going to drive this morning, this afternoon, but they're going to take my kids to school by bike or walk or whatever, so that by giving people choice, we start to take pressure off of the streets and, and then when land use starts to join the same, uh, growth opportunity and we start building the right things, then more and more people are going to say, I want to live somewhere where I maybe I still own a car, but I may only drive it on weekends or whatever. Right now, people don't have a choice. And so I think that's what we're going to see in the future, is more and more people are going to demand it, and more and more communities are going to have places you can elect to live where where you only use your car when you really need to. And there are many cities that are already there. I'll just use an example. When I started college in 1970. It was in Missoula, Montana. My wife and I didn't need and didn't own a car for maybe 15 years there. Then when we finally had kids, we needed a car and but we lived 15 glorious years without a car. And we we borrow one on a weekend if we're going to do big shopping or whatever. So yeah, I think I say this to all the many clients I have.
Dan Burden
This is the best time to be advancing transportation in many decades. There's never been a time like this. There are so many people that now get it. Caltrans gets it. They want to see successful projects. And I'll just use a 15 years ago and then recently example Bridgeport, California. They asked me the for communities up there asked me to come in. I want to say now it's probably been 20 years ago. And when I came there and studied their opportunities, there was so little traffic that I could literally lie down in the middle of the street for ten minutes and never have to move because it just wasn't any traffic. Yeah, there's some in the summer, but at any rate, Caltrans not only rejected the idea, they basically they're saying to the community, you don't have the right to make a decision for your community. This is our road. And and so truly they rejected all the ideas for the community. 15 years roll by. Caltrans then funded a return visit. And we we worked with the community. And then they first of all took out lanes and they tried out new tools like back end, angled parking, a roundabout or two, uh, totally different time. And that's the good news is Caltrans sees a different world. They know they're running into the wall. You can't just keep building more highways. You can't keep widening intersections. It just doesn't work. Caltrans is now a willing partner. So the whole world has changed. And so I feel very good about what Redding and, and the Regional Planning Council are now preparing to do. It's just fabulous.
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