MR. KOJO NNAMDIFrom WAMU 88.5 at American University in Washington, welcome to "The Kojo Nnamdi Show," connecting your neighborhood with the world. Hitting the open road with the windows down and radio turned up can be a freeing experience. But idling in traffic bumper to bumper with kids screaming in the backseat and groceries slowly thawing is, well, a little more stressful. That hassle is leading many to take to the sidewalks, bike lanes and public transit routes in cities that are becoming increasingly walkable.

MR. KOJO NNAMDIHere to explore the barriers to and benefits of urban centers with fewer cars is Jeff Speck. He's a city planner and architectural designer based here in Washington. His latest book is "Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America One Step at a Time." Jeff Speck joins me in studio. Thank you so much for being here.

MR. JEFF SPECKKojo, it's a delight to be here and after a dozen years coming back to your show.

NNAMDIIt doesn't seem that long. I mean, it seems like just yesterday that you were here last. If you would like to join Jeff Speck in this conversation about walkable cities, call us at 800-433-8850 or send email to kojo@wamu.org. What cities have you found to be very welcoming or inhospitable for pedestrians, 800-433-8850. Jeff, a lot of us might think of city planners as municipal employees who work in one place for a long time. But it turns out that there are a lot of city planners like you who work in a variety of cities across the country and the world. How has your career thus far brought you to focus on the issue of walkability?

SPECKIt's funny, Kojo, because I started out as an architectural designer and than an urban designer and started doing planning. And, you know, found it all of mostly a design discussion. And as I went from city to city and worked with mayor after mayor and more and more citizens, they kept turning me to the subject of walkability. I didn't mean to become the walkability guy and I've never -- I love walking, and most of us do, but I just found the conversation just kept going back to that. And I found that if I was able to redirect the discussion around that topic I was able to solve a lot of problems that I was having trouble addressing otherwise.

NNAMDIHow long has this been going on, because there is a -- I guess the prevailing orthodoxy is that this discussion has really picked up during the course of the last five or six years or so.

SPECKYeah, this has been going on for a long time. I mean, I say in the book, you know, Jane Jacobs who wrote in 1960 won over the planners by 1980. But the planners have yet to win over the city. Certain bigger cities -- and I would count Washington among them, you know, two handfuls of cities in this country, have really prioritized walking and are reorienting their design around making walking and transit and biking better.

SPECKBut the typical city in which I work isn't necessarily even having that discussion. And it's interesting, you talk about two different types of city planners, you know, I don't -- I've never worked in Washington. I don't work in New York. I don't work in Portland, Oregon. Those cities that are on that list, they have staffers who know how to do it right. the typical city in which I work is like in Oklahoma City or a Grand Rapids or a Cedar Rapids, Iowa where they just don't have the staff or they're just not up on the best practices and they need to bring in outside help to get the work done.

NNAMDIWe might think of some cities as havens for pedestrians, others as being very bike-friendly, still others as dominated by cars or transit hubs. But for you there are basically two kinds of cities.

SPECKYeah, it's interesting. I once heard about this study that it was done in Boston and it compared transit ridership with walking to see, you know, who was walking, who was riding transit, and what was better for you. And I just thought that was the most preposterous study I'd ever seen because in fact every -- you know, almost every transit ride begins and ends as a walk. And transit and walking are so mutually supportive.

SPECKInterestingly, and we can talk about this, biking and walking are also mutually supportive. But cities tend to either support driving or the motion and parking of vehicles at the expense of walking and transit. Or when they make efforts to reduce the, you know, hegemony of the automobile, they make it better for all those other things.

NNAMDIYou might be hard pressed to find two cities more different than Italy's capital Rome and lower Massachusetts in Old Mill Town. How do the two differ and how do the two overlap in their design to highlight your general theory of walkability?

SPECKWell, you're referring to Lowell, Mass. where I did a downtown master plan, which maybe not all of your listeners have heard of, and Rome, which most probably have. And what's interesting is -- I mean, they're more similar than they are different if you look at the broadest range of types of cities that we have in the world, and particularly in America. Lowell being a pre-automotive city when it was designed still has what we call good bones. It has blocks that are small. It has narrow streets. It has, you know, more buildings than parking lots that are next to you as you walk down the street.

SPECKAnd what it shares with Rome is that basic understanding of a city built of streets, blocks, squares and buildings that pull up to the street. The alternate kind of city that you all know quite well is a place like Tyson's Corner that we're working very hard to reform but that essentially is conceived of as highways first. The buildings respond to the speedy vehicles by pulling back from the streets. That space is full of parking lots.

SPECKAnd of course, that's the only kind of city -- with rare exception, that's the only kind of city we've built in America in the past 50 years. What makes Rome and Lowell different, and what I highlight in the book, is that if you looked technically at what cities have done in terms of providing sidewalks, handicap ramps and all the other things that people normally look to when they're judging a city in its walkability, Lowell has probably done more than Rome has. I mean, Rome has, you know, streets with 3' sidewalks, streets with no sidewalks. It has...

NNAMDIYou say Rome is inhospitable to pedestrians, but it's a great walkable city?

SPECKWell, it's theoretically inhospitable to pedestrians, but, in fact, it's a -- you know, it's named as one of the walkers paradises in the world and--by Lonely Planet Guides and for good reason. It just shows that -- for me it taught an important lesson that the criteria that people were using to determine whether cities were walkable or not were not actually the criteria that individuals were using to decide whether to walk or not.

NNAMDIWe're talking with Jeff Speck. He is a city planner and architectural designer based here in Washington. His latest book is called "Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America One Step at a Time." We're inviting your calls at 800-433-8580. How important is it for you to live in a community where walking is a viable option for getting around, 800-433-8850? You can send email to kojo@wamu.org or send us a Tweet at kojoshow.

NNAMDIJeff, for some people, the car is their refuge. It's where they gear up for or unwind from the workday. It's a traveling workspace, it's a closet, it's a living room all rolled into one. So what are the drivers, if you will, that have proven effective at getting people out of their cars?

SPECKI mean, the car's also a child containment device and we lived -- my wife and I lived happily in the District with no car for seven years. And then we had our second child and within a week of having our second child we had a car. And I have to say, it's made our life a lot better here in Washington largely in getting us to things that we -- places we can walk. So we take it to the Arboretum. You know, we take it to downtown Baltimore. We take it to, you know, Rock Creek Park and then we can walk. So in some ways it's a tool to help us get on our feet.

SPECKBut, you know, there will always be a certain segment of the population, and it depends, you know, who you ask determines how large the segment is, who want that lifestyle. But there's a much larger segment of the population, if you are to listen to the current studies, who want that lifestyle and can't find it or can't afford it in -- who want the pedestrian lifestyle but can't find it or can't afford it within their communities. And that's the group that I'm working to (unintelligible) .

NNAMDIIn the book "Walkable City," you will find his ten steps to walkability provided by Jeff Step -- or ten steps -- Jeff Speck -- ten steps of walkability you'll find in the book. The book is called "Walkability (sic) : How Downtown Can Save American One Step at a Time." Do you want to talk about a couple of those steps?

SPECKWell, you know, the first step -- and this pertains to your very first statement about enjoying the thrill of the open road -- I mean, the first step is just to put cars in their place and to understand that actually cars moving slowly -- moving slowly being essential -- are the lifeblood of the American city. I’m not one of these people, who for ideological reasons -- and there are good reasons -- want to see cars banished from our downtown cores. In fact, we've tried that. Over 200 cities in America pedestrianized their main streets in the '60s and '70s. A hundred-and-fifty of them failed immediately. The other 50 took some more time to fail.

SPECKThere's about a handful now that still exists that proves that you can do it, but that it's very, very hard. So the first steps to understand, the car plays an important role in the city but it's a servant that's become a master. It takes much more than you give it. There are fundamental economic reasons that I'd love to get into why you cannot satisfy the automobile. If you try to it just asked for more. And that is more those cities that have tried to accommodate it have only found themselves overrun. And you have to decide what kind of city you want to be and then the car will toe the line.

NNAMDIOnto the telephones. Put your headphones on, Jeff, so we can talk with Maureen in Southwest Washington. Maureen, you're on the air. Go ahead, please.

MAUREENHow you doing, Kojo? This is a native Washingtonian speaking here. Thank you. It's the best place in the world to live. We have people from all over the world all the time. My point though is that with the green Washington thing that we're supposed to have had, you know, the -- our image of Washington, how is that people can have the walkability when you've got to get into Washington. And every major city, whatever big city, whatever place you live, you've got to get from your home into the major places.

MAUREENSo we've got to have the commuting ways, the ways -- the roads, cars get into the city. And then for -- you know, we have to fund metro rail more. It gets really crowded in the streets going home.

NNAMDISo you're thinking that -- I'm not sure I understand, Maureen.

MAUREENNo, no, no. It's just that walkable cities -- I walk home every day. It's a 20-minute walk, but a lot of people aren't content -- I have a one-bedroom condo -- they have to have a home. They have to have a yard. They have kids and they have to get into the city. I mean, there's got to be more money put into metro and ways for those people to get into the cities.

NNAMDIHere's Jeff Speck.

SPECKNo, I mean, what you're saying is true. The question is, how are they getting into the cities. And the ways that cities have chosen to accommodate those people has determined the form of those cities. Washington, D.C. was looking at, in the '60s, a plan that was endorsed by -- if Kojo had been around then he would have endorsed. The Washington Post endorsed it. Everyone -- it was the -- I don't mean to put words in your mouth, Kojo, but it was the...

NNAMDII'm familiar with it. Go ahead.

SPECK...it was the dominant plan that everyone believed in because we were an automotive country, to build 450 miles of highways through and around the city, including highways on both sides of the mall, highways in a ring around the White House. It was...

NNAMDIHighways through people's homes.

SPECKYes. And it was a 22-year battle. People laid down in front of bulldozers. Only a limited portion of that was built and instead we got 106 miles of metro. And what did that get us? Well, you know, I don't know the statistics but a large, large segment of the people who live in Arlington now, they get into D.C. by metro. And a tremendous amount of the economic development and a shocking percentage of the tax revenue that's collected in Virginia comes from right along that metro line. So it was actually a very positive choice that generated some walkable districts outside of the city.

NNAMDIWhen I came to Washington in the '60s I attended meetings in which people were protesting the fact that -- and that's why I use their term -- that quote unquote "they're trying to build a speedway through my home." Okay. That was the plan.

SPECKSo you were here for that.

NNAMDIYes, or a part of it anyway. Maureen, thank you very much for your call. Here is Stacey in Woodley Park. Stacey, you're on the air. Go ahead, please.

STACEYYeah, my comment is about families with children. A lot of the Chinese conversations about kind of a new urban way of looking at walkability, you know, it's considered this sort of yuppie young thing. But then we grow up and we're supposed to leave the cities for the kids. But I think it's exactly the opposite.

STACEYI think in my perspective -- and my neighborhood's very walkable and also has the metro and it's walkable to other neighborhoods, it's such a gift to a kid that they can -- whether in their stroller or they're old enough to walk, you know, when they go places it's not just like through the garage door, into the garage and maybe see a sibling in the back of mom's head. It's -- you see trees, you see other people. You run into your little friends on the street. You get a taste of everything. And it's a playground, it's a learning ground, it's a school, it's a community.

STACEYAnd kids should get that chance, you know. They have -- they get parts of their life back that they don't spend in a car, just like the rest of us. And I would say it's an absolute gift if you can give a child a city, walkable neighborhoods, you've really done something wonderful.

SPECKStacey, do you want to come on my book tour with me?

NNAMDIBecause that's the point.

SPECKThe -- you know, this is a choice that my wife and I have also made along with many of our neighbors and people moving into our U Street neighborhood every day. The biggest challenge, as you all know, to the sustainability of that choice is the school's circumstance, which my wife is very active.

NNAMDIHappens to be the neighborhood in which I raised my children.

SPECKThere you go. So the -- you know, this again is not something that every family wants. What's interesting though is that a lot of families theoretically move out of the city into the suburbs because of these perceptions of increased safety. And there have been some wonderful studies done in which three cities, Portland, Seattle and Vancouver were all studied. And the professor who did it compared two things. He compared death by vehicle and death by stranger, in other words murder.

SPECKAnd if you add the vehicular deaths and the murder deaths together you are 15 percent safer in the grittiest inner circle of the city than you are in the outer suburbs. So actually you may be giving your child even more of a gift by bringing them up in the safer city.

NNAMDIStacey, thank you very much for your call. We're going to take a short break. But if you have called stay on the line. We will get to your calls. The number's 800-433-8850. What hurdles or incentives do you face when it comes to getting around your neighborhood without relying on a car, 800-433-8850? I'm Kojo Nnamdi.

NNAMDIWe're talking about walkable cities. Our guest Jeff Speck is the author of a book by that name, "Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save American One Step at a Time." He's a city planner and architectural designer based here in Washington. And Jeff Speck, you have used the phrase can't satisfy the car. What do you mean by we can't satisfy the car?

SPECKYou know, Kojo, every month somewhere in America I give a talk at a bookstore or a chamber of commerce or on the radio or whatever and I always try to talk about induced demand. Because induced demand is the great black hole in all of traffic planning, in all of community planning because it is kind of counterintuitive. People think that if you build more lanes you will make the traffic go away.

SPECKBut the studies have been done now for 20 years and Robert Moses first noticed it when he was building roads out of New York into Long Island, is that you build new roads or you expand new roads and they are immediately or very soon thereafter taken up by new cars. These studies generally said that for every 10 percent of capacity that you add, within a year 4 percent of it's taken. And within a few years 10 percent of it's taken. In other words, all of the new capacity is eaten up.

SPECKThere are many, many reasons for this and it's a long discussion I won't get into, but the main reason is that we don't pay the true cost of driving. You know, the only way we really pay the variable cost of driving every day is when we're stuck in congestion. And the only constraint then to driving is congestion. The only constraint to congestion is congestion. So, you know, if you -- for example, if you -- the typical car, if you own it and drive it 10,000 miles a year, four-fifths of your costs are sunk fixed costs. And one one-fifth are variable costs.

SPECKSo that means the proper decision, one you own that car, is to drive it everywhere all the time. I think those of us who have switched from being on transit to owning cars see how that works. But because of that, when you build new roads like the, you know, proposed outer beltway in Virginia, or the inter county connector, which many people are still lobbying for, saying that those roads will reduce traffic, they ultimately never do. And I'm amazed the degree to which all the engineers agree about this, it's the fundamental law of traffic congestion. And yet the developers still try to sell us on the opposite.

NNAMDIOne factor you point to that may help cities decide whether or not to invest in boosting rail and bus lines and services like bike share is that money spent on cars does not stay local. But the money you save by not having a car often does. Why is that?

SPECKYeah, I don't have the statistics in front of me but it's a dramatic -- I think 80 percent of money spent on cars leaves the economy and the -- you know, when we didn't have a car certainly -- you know, we make an effort to do the right thing anyway but certainly when we didn't have a car, you know, Home Depot was not really a choice. It was just Logan Circle Hardware, right? I mean, that was the choice. And you make all these daily decisions, what doctor to go to for us, you know. Of course where to shop, where to eat.

SPECKYou make all those daily decisions based on the calculus of walking or taking transit and it makes things -- it makes your spending much more local. Studies show that people who don't spend their money on vehicles are principally spending that money on better housing. That was the experience in Portland, Oregon, which is the only medium-sized city or larger in America that's reduced its driving dramatically since the mid '90s by doing some very smart things.

SPECKAnd you see in Portland an increased consumption of recreation of every sort. Huge amount of restaurant use. They're reputed to have the most roof racks, independent bookstores and strip clubs per capita in the country. These are all exaggerations but they reflect the fact that people are doing other things with their money that are more fun than driving.

NNAMDIOn to Steve in Rockville, Md. Steve, you're on the air. Go ahead, please.

STEVEYes. I wanted to ask, I live about 15 minutes walking distance from the metro. And how -- I pay a premium for that. You know, how can we help the community and, you know, get rid of that premium so more people can afford to live in walking distance from things?

NNAMDIJeff Speck.

SPECKMost of the authors I work with are celebrating that premium and they're saying -- Chris Lineberger who's based in D.C. at Brookings Institute, his book "The Option of Urbanism" is talking about how people are willing to pay a considerable premium for the opportunity to live in walkable communities. In a typical city like Denver, that premium's about 50 percent. In a city like New York it's 200 percent. People are paying three times as much to live within walking distance.

SPECKThe sad fact of most people buying homes in America these days is that if you're a working class, you're paying a little bit more even for transportation than you're paying for housing. So, you know, what we like to look at is the combined cost of housing and transportation and bring that down collectively. But, you know, it's very hard to reduce the rate of something that people want very much unless the government is willing to step in, as we often advocate, to support more affordability.

SPECKThat's a discussion that deals mostly with what's called inclusionary zoning. Something that's been in place and perhaps you and your friends could benefit from in Montgomery County has one of the longest running inclusionary zoning programs in the country. Incredibly effective. When developers build a large project, a certain percent of it has to be made affordable.

SPECKI go around from city to city and, you know, suburb to suburb and I berate governments that it's their moral obligation to insist on inclusionary zoning in every community. There are very few that are willing to do it.

NNAMDISteve, thank you for your call. And you mentioned going from suburb to suburb. Kevin in Washington D.C. has a question about suburbs. Kevin, you're on the air. Go ahead, please.

KEVINThanks for taking my call, Kojo. Yeah, I live in Montgomery County and an area that probably did not have a lot of sidewalks when it was first constructed near Chevy Chase. And I guess the county is now going back and putting these in. I'm just wondering how that is decided. There's a project -- I drive -- actually drive by Connecticut Avenue where they're gouging out the property, they're cutting down trees, they're building these giant retaining walls. And it's for a sidewalk that I don't think a lot of people are going to use. So I'm just wondering how that's being decided in suburbs.

SPECKThat sounds really unfortunate and entirely unsurprising. The suburban discussion is not one that I'm as familiar with currently. I used to work almost exclusively in suburbs but before this was happening. What I do find in a lot of American cities where I work is that pedestrian funds are being spent indiscriminately. And you have a situation where a mayor or a city planner feels an obligation to the entire city, which makes sense, right. So -- but as a result of that they tend to sprinkle the pedestrian -- you know, the walkability funds everywhere like fairy dust thinking that that's the fair thing to do.

SPECKBut the majority, certainly geographically the largest part of almost every American city is not walkable, was never walkable, will not be walkable. Particularly if it was arranged as cul-de-sac sprawl where there's nothing to walk to. And so I'm always making the point to cities that they need to figure out first those places where actually walking is a possibility, where the streetscape is enticing. Where there's a reason to walk. You know, where the buildings have open doors and windows and not blank walls.

SPECKAnd once you figure out what that -- what I call the primary network of walkability is, you spend you funds there first in a concentrated way to generate a pedestrian culture in a limited area that can then spread outwards.

NNAMDIAnd , Kevin, you should know that Jeff's last book was called "Suburban Nation" and that's what we talked about here back in 2000, was it not?

SPECKAnd still available.

NNAMDIThank you very much for your call, Kevin. It used to be that turning 16 in America meant a trip to the DMV. But many millenials are foregoing that rite of passage and lots of baby boomers who maybe struggled to convince their parents to stop driving want to retire to walkable communities. What are the implications of trends we're seeing from these two different generations?

SPECKIt's really fascinating. In the '70s, only one in twelve 19-year-olds opted out of having a driver's license. Now it's one in four. That's particularly astounding when you think about the environment that those kids grew up in versus the environment that these kids grew up in. You know, when I was a kid we weren't chauffeured everywhere. We could walk around. Fifty percent of us walked to school. Now 15 percent of kids walk to school. So somehow kids that grew up walking less are now choosing to drive less.

SPECKA recent article I saw called the millenials the cheapest generation which I think is one part of it. They're just not into spending money on things, which is really nice to see. But there's definitely a discussion about -- well first of all, 64 percent of millenials decide first where they want to live and then they look for a job. That's totally different from my generation. Seventy-seven percent of them say they're going to live in America's urban cores so it's what they want. And what they want is to be able to bike and use transit and not have the obligation of car ownership or home ownership. They much prefer to rent.

SPECKNow then you have the other side of the coin which are an even bigger demographic, which is their parents, the leading edge boomers who don't care about schools anymore. They don't want to take care of a yard anymore. They don't want to have to heat and cool an expensive house. The only challenge they really face is getting out of that mortgage because it's kind of hard to sell these big clunky houses these days. But for many of them the city has what they want which is the ability to retire in place.

SPECKMy parents just moved from leafy Belmont, Massachusetts to slightly less leafy but totally walkable Lexington Center, Massachusetts where they have, you know, on-foot access -- you know, they're around their 80's -- they have on-foot access to a ton of restaurants and hairdressers and other shops. And it's actually what sociologists call a N.O.R.K., a naturally occurring retirement community. It's just a better way to live if you can get out of that house.

SPECKSo these two generations coming of age, if you will, looking for new households are what Chris Lineberger at Brookings points to when he says that the next great economic boom in this country is going to be providing urban housing for these people.

NNAMDIWell, speaking of generations, is this just a generational trend? Might we see a shift back in the next generation and when Gen X starts to retire?

SPECKI have no idea, but this trend that Chris Lineberger discusses is going to be lasting until -- is going to be the dominant trend until 2030. So we have some time to think about it and watch.

NNAMDIOn to Ruthie in Hyattsville, Md. Ruthie, your turn.

RUTHIEHi, Kojo. Thank you for taking my call. I work at Community Forklift. We're a thrift store for building materials out in the Hyattsville area and Edmonson . And we're not very close to a metro station. We're a couple miles from a metro station. And we're really the biggest thrift store for building materials in the region, so people want to come to us from all over, Northern Virginia, D.C., Maryland.

RUTHIEBut I get a lot of people who are like, oh are you near a metro? Never mind. And we've also -- of course because the nature of things people are buying, they're buying refrigerators, they're buying kitchen cabinets that, you know, it's stuff that's huge. So they don't think about the fact that they might be able to bike or walk to shop at our store. But because we're kind of -- you know, we lean toward people who are green and eco minded anyhow, from the very beginning the bikers and walkers have been really vocal about like, well how can I get my stuff home? How do you make it easier for me?

RUTHIEAnd so for us it's made sense as a business to try and accommodate them. So we changed our policy. It's just a little thing but to be able to offer storage that folks could buy something and then, you know, return later with a neighbor's pickup truck. So we're right in the middle of the bike trails people -- we get Saturday morning tons of men in spandex coming in, like people from the bike trails come in all the time into the shop. And then we make it easy for them to, like, get a vehicle later and come back if they find something. And if they only find something little, great, then they came on their bike or they, you know, walked or ran on the trail to us.

RUTHIESo I think there's something to be said for the business community just to sometimes shifting their thinking. And, yeah, it's for maybe the big boxes, Home Depot or whatever won't, you know, shift their thinking. But if you're going to (word?) Hardware store or something, you know, and you're buying a couple of big heavy paint cans or something, you know, maybe it doesn't hurt to ask. Some of the smaller mom and pop businesses will probably be more likely to shift their policies or (unintelligible) ...

NNAMDILet me see what Jeff Speck has to say about that.

SPECKNo, it's wonderful to think that people who are buying refrigerators are showing up on bicycles. What you're pointing to is a circumstance that zip car has had a tremendous influence on. And any downtown D.C.er who spent any time here knows what I'm about to say, which is that the presence of zip cars and...

NNAMDI..and car to go.

SPECK...yeah, and car to go, which is even a more amazing version of that, but when I came here from Florida in, you know, 2003, it soon became very clear, I didn't need my car any more. And the needle -- what's the expression? The camel's back was broken by the fact that zip car was right in front of my building. Knowing that it's there for occasional country trips or for the trip to the store made a huge difference. And the data suggests that every zip car takes 25 cars off the road, which really reinforces the discussion about -- that so many of the costs of driving are fixed that when you make driving a variable cost exercise, people choose not to do it.

NNAMDIAnd I should mention that if you go to our website kojoshow.org you'll see what our amazing web producer, Monica Arpino put up, and that is metro stations in the region. You'll see a map there that plots those stations and the walk score of each metro station. Metro Center came in first with a score of 100. That's a walker's paradise. Landover held up the rear with the 37 car dependent. The one nearest to me, Tacoma, got a 95 which was almost close to a walker's paradise. But you can find that at kojoshow.org. And Ruthie, thank you very much for your call.

NNAMDIWe move on now to Tony in Bethesda, Md. Tony, your turn.

TONYYeah, hi. I'm calling because I -- one of the earlier callers talked about going into D.C. by metro or car and then, you know, being in a walkable space. So there's two fundamental models it seems to me. One is a model of you live, work, and shop all in the same area so you don't need a car at all, or you are in the suburbs or something like that and you need to go into a walkable space in order to experience that environment.

TONYSo -- and then of course a lot of places people live in areas where it's not very walkable, and so they have to go somewhere else, so maybe we could talk about that a little bit?

NNAMDICare to?

SPECKWell, you point first, Tony, to the discussion I'd love to have which is mobility versus accessibility, and the conversation for so many years was just about auto mobility, and then it expanded to be about mobility in general, and wow, we should look at trains and bikes and other ways of getting around. But only recently has the conversation begun to be about not transportation, but about community planning and saying, hey, why can't we have it all in the neighborhood, and just have fewer trips -- the need for few trips.

SPECKAnd as you know, that's a -- for most of us, that's perceived of as being a better place to live. Beyond that though, I want to say that, you know, the more walkable you make a place, the more people will try to drive to it. And so, you know, it's fascinating that there's the list of the ten most congested cities in America, and there's a separate list by a different group of the ten most walkable cities in America and they overlap, except for three cities.

SPECKSo the -- when you make something great like downtown Washington, it accumulates a whole bunch of sprawl of people who want to be next to it, and then those people all want to come in. So it isn't like we can -- as I've suggested before, it isn't like we can stop congestion, or should even bemoan congestion. And interestingly, the more traffic congestion you have in a major city, the less air pollution you have, because congestion is the only thing that limits driving.

NNAMDITony, thank you very much for your call. We've got to take a short break. When we come back, we'll continue our conversation with Jeff Speck. His latest book is called "Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America One Step at a Time." And you can call us at 800-433-8850. If you love your car and feel like the move toward walkable cities is too extreme, give us a call. 800-433-8850. I'm Kojo Nnamdi.

NNAMDIOur guest is Jeff Speck. He's a city planner and architectural designer based here in Washington. His latest book is called "Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America One Step at a Time." Jeff, we are an increasingly obese nation, and in the course of researching this book, you were surprised that deaths from asthma have climbed in the last two decades. How does improved walkability address these and other health issues?

SPECKWell, you know, the best day to be a city planner in America was July 9, 2004 when this book came out called "Urban Sprawl and Public Health." And here we were as planners. We had been shouting into the wilderness about all the problems of sprawl, how it was ugly and boring and dissolved, you know, cultural ties to be so spread out. But no one was really listening to us. Then this book came out with three epidemiologists basically saying sprawl is killing is and here's how.

SPECKThe biggest category is obesity and obesity -related illnesses like diabetes, which consumes two percent of GNP right now, and as you suggest, it's an epidemic. Forty percent -- 25 percent of young men, and 40 percent of young women can't get into the military because of their weight, and the military would love to have some more volunteers. So that isn't an eye opener. We all know that we're getting fatter as a nation.

SPECKThe eye opener for me was learning that the more recent studies, one after the other, show that diet is much less of a factor in our weight than inactivity, and that it didn't matter what kind of food regime you were put on, what mattered more was not even if you were working out, but if you were building daily simple activity into your lifestyle like walking to work or walking to transit. There's all these great studies that show how transit riders immediately lose five pounds from before.

SPECKLow walkable and high walkable neighborhoods in San Diego, the low walkable neighborhoods were 65 percent overweight, the low -- sorry. The low walkable were 65 percent overweight, and the high walkable were only 35 percent overweight. And study after study, one in England called Gluttony versus Sloth, demonstrated very clearly that the problem is that we've engineered out of daily lives the useful walk.

SPECKNow, in terms of asthma, it hasn't just gone up in the last two decades, we have three times -- we have 14 asthma deaths a day, three times what we had in the 1990s. And those are almost entirely the result of automobile exhaust, and they're happening almost entirely in cities which are more autocentric and not it cities which are more walkable.

NNAMDIBut then there's this. Our producer, Tayla Burney, says that back in the day when she was in school they walked to school in the snow uphill both ways.

SPECKBoth ways.

NNAMDIWith all these concerns about childhood obesity, we also have very real concerns about safety of children and teens walking on busy roads. Are there simple fixes that cities can put in place to help encourage kids to walk to school again?

SPECKI would say there are not simple fixes. The question is, are you building neighborhoods that have walkability built into them from the start, are you encouraging schools to be local, are you not, as any school departments have done, supersizing your schools, putting them on the edge town, you know, building them lead gold and saying that you've created a green school when no one has ever walked to that school and will ever walk to that school.

SPECKThe question of location is -- in this whole green discussion, the question of location is the one that is most easily forgotten. You know, it's all become gizmo green. What kind of stuff can I buy for my house in order to make it sustainable, when the much bigger question is where is my house located.

NNAMDIA whole lot of people would like to join this conversation. I'd like to go onto Stephanie in Rockville, Md. Stephanie, your turn.

STEPHANIEHi there. I'm an urban and environmental planner. I worked here and overseas on sustainability at the local level, overseas referred to as Local Agenda 21, which unfortunately is criticized by some sectors here in America as a UN conspiracy. But one of the aspects of sustainability that I'm particularly interested in is the aging population which you kind of touched on, but with the additional piece on the ground about how when we make communities more elderly friendly, it translates to benefits among all demographic groups.

STEPHANIESo I guess I'm wondering how you perceiving the aging angle as both a frame for spatial planning, as well as a means of engaging multiple stakeholders. I also happen to be reentering the job market in this arena, so I'm wondering if -- in your mind who are the key players at the helm of this movement?

SPECKYou know, I don't know that much about the movement or its players, but I do know that, you know, we've been looking at these N.O.R.C.s as I call them for a few decades now, and it just keeps reminding us what a wonderful the traditional neighborhood is. The traditional way was the way that we built communities, you know, from 10,000 years ago, you know, the first non-nomadic settlements like Jericho until 1950.

SPECKAnd then something changed with World War II and the, you know, the falling in love with the automobile and the sort of land patterns that the automobile generated. And then you have this whole generation of elderly people who are driving dangerously late, much later than they should, and they're afraid to give up the car keys because they know that those car keys are their citizenship. You know, once they can't drive anymore, they are now going to be deprived of all of the benefits of being a citizen, and they'll have to wait for a bus that comes on Tuesday, you know, to take them to the mall.

SPECKIt's really sad, the environment we've created for older people, and there are the wealthier ones who can make the choice to live on the Upper East Side, or to move to a vibrant downtown core. But I'm concerned about the ones who don't have that option.

NNAMDIStephanie, thank you for your call. Onto Bob in Sykesville, Md. Bob, you're on the air. Go ahead, please.

BOBHey, thanks a lot. Jeff, this is a good conversation, appreciate it. I'll have to check out your book. I'll make a few quick comments and then maybe ask my question that I had earlier, but a few things came to mind as I was listening. One, last fall I was in Manhattan for a weekend for a wedding. I don't remember seeing a speed limit sign at all.

BOBIn traveling through the city, I think that there were people that were on foot that were passing me. So that's just interesting. They hit me, my car will be damaged and they'll be fine I suspect. Another point is, in my community there was a plan, and there may still be a plan, I'm not real sure, but to redirect traffic through a residential neighborhood and -- which is cool, except for you figure out why, and the reason was to mitigate the traffic congestion on a, you know, I don't want to say major intersection, but a business-oriented intersection, 26 -- route 26 and 32 up here in Maryland.

NNAMDIOkay.

BOBSo that's just kind of strange to me as far as planning is concerned. So those are just things I wanted to mention. My question really is, is I was thinking, as I thought about before, is relative to city planning, there are many buildings, abandoned buildings, abandon property, there's a significant amount of real estate in major cities that, you know, that the government could exercise control and use their authority to kind of clean this, you know, to clean that outright, and so there's either...

NNAMDII'm not -- I'm not -- I don't understand the relationship between that and walkability that you're trying to get to, Bob.

BOBRight. Right. Yeah. So there's two things. You can plan to enable or create a city framework in order for people to walk. The other aspect is to motivate people to do so. And so, you know, in terms of, you know, routing traffic, creating, you know, paths, locations, this whole network, the foot network -- integrating the foot network and the automobile network, you know, in a way that one, creates the ability for people to walk, and to...

NNAMDIIs -- is that...

BOB...motivate them to be able to do so.

NNAMDIIs it possible to do that, Jeff Speck, to, I guess, manipulate the network of cars and feet?

SPECKAbsolutely. Absolutely. The -- I'll start -- I'll do this in the order that it was brought up, and thank you, Bob. You know, I was in Manhattan last weekend, and you're right. There are no speed limits anywhere in Manhattan that you can see on the street, and the reason probably -- although my taxi driver does not count, most people drive a reasonable speed, which points to the fact that speed limits are -- speed limit signs are actually very ineffective in regulating people's speed.

SPECKAnd what determines the speed of drivers in any environment is the degree to which they feel safe or dangerous going a certain speed. What makes that important is that that fact is completely unknown by the traffic-planning profession whose approach is to make a street safe by creating broader lanes and clear zones on either sides so that the opportunities for conflict are minimized when in fact that's exactly what makes people go faster.

SPECKSo that's the other great struggle we have with traffic engineers is for them to allow us to make places that tell people to go slower, which they think are dangerous. Secondly, it's interesting, what you describe in your neighborhood is the opposite of what's been happening in many neighborhoods around the country for the last 20 years where residents have convinced local authorities to snip the network, to make their street a cul-de-sac, to stop the through traffic going through it.

SPECKAnd what that does is it pushes the traffic onto fewer roads and then burdens those roads and those become very unsafe, and you actually become trapped in your little safe neighborhood that's framed by those roads. If neighborhood streets are kept as through streets in a porous, delicate grid, and no street has more than a lane or two of traffic in it, then the cars and he pedestrians and the residents can all co-exist very happily without it being a dangerous situation. But it needs to be delicate.

SPECKGenerally I'm advocating against the concentration of traffic on fewer streets, but I do worry about a neighborhood that might be overrun as you suggest or imply.

NNAMDIBob, thank you very much for you call. I'm reliably informed that Manhattan has a citywide speed limit of 30 miles per hour. I guess that's supposed to restrain Usain Bolt. But the Department of Transportation there has a campaign centered around the idea, quoting here, "New Yorkers know it all, except the speed limit."

SPECKYeah. And there is a lot of speeding in New York, particularly on the Avenues which are quite wide.

NNAMDIGot an email from Karen who says, "If there's a prevailing sense that highways being built in some ways increases demand for driving, is the same true of walkability infrastructure? In other words, if you build a bike lane or sidewalk, will the pedestrians and the bikers come?"

SPECKThat's a great question. Two different questions really. I say walking and biking are two entirely different things...

NNAMDIYes.

SPECK...in terms of how people respond to cues. My whole book, "The Ten Steps of Walkability" is about the fact that particularly in areas where walking is a choice, you know, most American cities, people have the opportunity to drive and park cheaply, and that's not going to change, so we create more pedestrians by enticing them to walk. To get that to happen, you have to get ten things right, and each of those ten things has about 20 things beneath it that you have to get right.

SPECKIt is extremely hard to convince people to walk, and just putting sidewalks out there generally is not enough. However, in all my experience as a planner, the build-it-and-they-will-come phenomenon has never been as dramatically proven to count as with bicycle infrastructure. What we've seen in Portland, what we've seen in New York, what we're beginning to see in D.C. is that bikers are just there, you know, talk about induced demand.

SPECKThere are latent bikers there just waiting for that lane, and particularly that protected lane which makes the older person or the -- dare I say it, the female bicyclists statistically, choose to bike when she wouldn't have otherwise. And what we saw in Portland for -- you know, everyone talks about Portland, Oregon, you know, biker's paradise.

SPECKWell, 20 years ago they didn't bike any more than the rest of us, but they spent $300 million, which is half the price of a clover leaf on bicycle infrastructure over 20 years, and now they bike 15 times more than the rest of us, and that's all it really took.

NNAMDIAnd finally, here's Miriam in Cleveland Park on walking and presumably health. Miriam, you only have about 40 seconds. Go ahead, please.

MIRIAMI'll talk fast. When I gave up my car about eight years ago, in large part because I could living near Metro, but also for all the other reasons, and I have not looked back since. I use zip cars and Metro and wish the Metro on weekends was a bit more reliable, but otherwise...

SPECKAgreed.

MIRIAM...you're doing a great job. I think this is a wonderful message to give through to…

NNAMDITalk about your health, Miriam. How has this affected your health?

MIRIAMOh, and my blood pressure's gone way done. I could feel, you know, when I sometimes drive a zip car, I can't wait to put it back because I can feel my shoulders coming up around my ears, you know, in the traffic. So -- and the bus...

SPECKGlad to hear it.

MIRIAM...bus is a good way to meet people. You get to see the neighborhoods and get to know where you live.

SPECKWell, we always say it's one thing to bump into someone as a pedestrian, a very different thing to bump into them as a driver.

NNAMDIMiriam, thank you very much for your call. And finally, there's this from Seth who tweeted, "I love D.C. because I can walk from Adams Morgan to two Metro lines in less than 15 minutes, both red and green lines," and he gets in some walking too. Jeff Speck, good to see you again. Thank you for joining us.

SPECKAlways a pleasure, Kojo. Thanks for having me.

NNAMDIJeff Speck's latest book is called "Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America One Step at a Time." Jeff Speck is a city planner and architectural designer based here in Washington. Thank you all for listening. I'm Kojo Nnamdi.