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American Press
25-05-2025
- General
- American Press
Walking the line: A safer, more walkable Lake Charles starts here
Walkability expert Jeff Speck stopped by Lake Charles last month to tour the city and bestow his walkability wisdom. (Special to the American Press) To begin making Lake Charles more walkable, the Community Foundation of Southwest Louisiana called in the big guns. Walkability expert Jeff Speck stopped by Lake Charles last month to tour the city and bestow his walkability wisdom upon city officials, city planners and curious citizens alike. Speck is an American urban designer known internationally for his books 'Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time' (the century's best-selling book on walkability) and 'Walkable City Rules: 101 Steps to Making Better Places.' With 30 years of experience, he has become a global advocate for new urbanist walkability principles. He consults cities looking to take actionable steps, some simple and some complicated, to improve walkability. After assessing the city's current layout, he determines strengths and weaknesses in walkability and assists in drafting a more walkable design. 'If you've got a lot of good things going for you, I can be most helpful by making suggestions about things you can change. I really see it as my responsibility to share with cities the stuff I notice,' he said. He was brought to Lake Charles after the Community Foundation of SWLA Board Chair Jim Rock attended the Congress for New Urbanism annual conference last year. Speck spoke there, and Rock became enraptured with his philosophy on urban development and walkability. After a chance meeting, the two connected and coordinated Speck's trip. While not a full consultation, he toured the city and presented his findings at the Lake Charles Event Center. The Philosophy Walkability is a 'window into good planning.' Most of the benefits of greater walkability are clear. Walking benefits public health by encouraging pedestrians to exercise and getting them outside. But Speck is more interested in the bigger picture. 'Walkable City,' which came out in 2012, lays out these benefits to discuss why cities need to be more walkable and how to do it. 'While people think of me in the framework of walking for health and all the different aspects of the walkable lifestyle … I'm not so interested in that as I am in what makes cities great,' he explained.'I just happened to learn through the years that if you design around walkability, you do make cities great.' Enhanced walkability helps the environment by limiting motorist emissions, boosts the economy by supporting neighborhood businesses, and supports a strong, tight-knit community, to name just a few. He believes it is not only a good framework for design, but it is also a concept that is digestible for the general public. 'Walkability' is just the 'best practices in urban design,' but walkability is an accessible idea that allows pedestrians to advocate for themselves, he said. The 'general theory of walkability' poses the question, 'How do cities encourage people to walk in a society where driving is heavily subsidized?' 'Once you own a car, the smart thing to do is to use it all the time. Every mile you drive costs less than the mile before,' he said. 'The smart thing to do is drive. The car is there in the driveway between you and everything, and it's just natural to fall into the car.' The solution is simple at first glance. To get people to walk, the walk has to be better than the drive. Speck's walkability foundation is built on four components of a great walk: useful, safe, comfortable and interesting. The concept of a 'useful walk' has become less common. Speck said there are two ways to design a town: the traditional neighborhood or the suburban sprawl. The traditional neighborhood is compact, diverse and walkable, with most of an individual's need within five minutes from their home. City planners strayed away from traditional neighborhoods in the 19th century with the invention of Euclidean zoning, or single-use zoning, which was created to keep residential areas away from industrial activity. Now, it's the most prevalent type of city planning in the United States. But by dividing large plots of land into areas that just have one use, Euclidean zoning limits a walk's ability to be useful. The traditional neighborhood places essential services like housing, grocery, gym, park, dining, entertainment (and coffee) all within a five-minute walk. These neighborhoods also mitigate traffic congestion by not only keeping cars off the road, but by allowing traffic to easily flow through several connecting streets. By contrast, the suburban sprawl hinders a resident's ability to easily walk to resources and burdens multi-lane roads with more traffic. The suburban sprawl is also less safe. The United States has a 'traffic violence epidemic,' he said. In the last 15 years, there has been a 78 percent increase in the likelihood of being killed as a pedestrian. Pedestrians are 290 percent more likely to be killed by a car in a suburban sprawl, he said. 'So the idea that everyone wants their kid to grow up on a cul-de-sac, but once you leave the cul-de-sac, you're exposed to this extremely dangerous environment.' Pedestrian deaths are more likely in cities with little to no pedestrian accommodations and roads with multiple wide lanes, which directly correlates to the speed of traffic. Street designs with wider lanes, fewer intersections, one-way travel, big shoulders, and no trees create more freedom for drivers to speed. By eliminating 'elbow room' and 'forgiveness' for motorists, they are forced to slow down. As an example, Speck said studies show that motorists tend to drive seven miles per hour slower when the center line is removed from a street. 'It's contrary to common sense, but if you think about it, it makes sense,' Speck explained. 'That double yellow stripe makes you feel safe as a driver and makes you go seven miles an hour faster. That's the psychology we need to understand when we're designing downtown streets.' Most two-lane streets without turnlanes can handle average traffic, he added. Safety is the easiest tenet for cities to address because they own the streets. The best way to curb speeding is to design roads with narrower lanes. This is a change that doesn't have to be expensive. 'Don't rebuild. Restripe. You can restripe downtown for the price of rebuilding just a few streets, and we like to see that money go as far as possible.' The standard width for lanes is 10 feet, with an accompanying seven- to eight-foot parking lane. Parallel parking is paramount because it is an 'essential barrier of steel that protects the curb from moving vehicles.' Pedestrian safety can also be boosted by street medians with trees, wider sidewalks, and bike lanes that run between the sidewalk and lane parking. A comfortable walk can be achieved by aligning with design principles walkers feel secure. This can be done by creating a sense of enclosure with buildings and planting that line the sidewalks. And a walk becomes interesting with trees, vibrant architecture and street art that makes a walk unique. Walkability in Lake Charles In its current state, the region 'urban design adjacent,' Speck said. Downtown Lake Charles is well-situated to become more walkable, but the city's current infrastructure raises safety concerns for pedestrians. But he believes the new urbanist ways of thinking about pedestrian safety could greatly benefit Lake Charles because the city's street design process is 'broken.' 'I've heard that kids are walking to school on the four-foot sidewalk with the rollover curbs adjacent to 13 lanes on Nelson Road, and that shouldn't be happening. 'I'm sure the engineers working in your city want it to be safe. But this idea that safety comes not from forgiveness, but from actual constraint, is one that hasn't taken hold here yet,' he said later while acknowledging recently-striped 15-foot lanes. Pedestrian safety in Lake Charles can be improved by restriping roads, especially the downtown streets, to shrink lanes and add street parking. Kirby and Ryan streets could be reduced down to two lanes, he noted. To make walking more comfortable downtown, the street edges need to be developed. He highlighted the Lake Charles Event Center parking lot that faces Lake Shore Drive. The areas closest to the road could be developed into a safe sidewalk with street parking and trees. Speck also suggested a focus on foliage. 'Trees are vastly undervalued, and all I can say is, it's worth every dollar you spend on them. Palm trees, however, are not really trees,' he joked. 'You should stop using palm trees.'
American Press
27-04-2025
- American Press
A move to make Lake Charles more ‘walkable'
The standard for urban design is shifting, and the expert wisdom of internationally recognized city planner and architectural designer Jeff Speck will be passed down to Lake Charles next week. Speck is known for advocating for walkable cities. As the author of the books 'Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time' and 'Walkable City Rules: 101 Steps to Making Better Places,' he is known for inspiring cities to take actionable steps to improve urban walkability. At 5 p.m. on Wednesday, April 30, in the Lake Charles Event Center Contraband Room, he will give a lecture on walkability in Lake Charles at a community session presented by Just Imagine SWLA and the Community Foundation of Southwest Louisiana. Community Foundation of SWLA Board Chair Jim Rock attended the Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU) in Cincinnati last year, where he attended an hour-long Speck lecture. He was fascinated by Speck's philosophy on urban development and walkability.' 'And you might think an hour-long talk about walking is boring as all get out. But this guy, his presentation style, he was entertaining, he was educational, he was inspirational,' Rock said. In a serendipitous chain of events, he was able to meet Speck at CNU. After a year of email communication, the two were able to organize Speck's two-day visit. On Wednesday, he is going to spend three or four hours with Rock and others from the Community Foundation walking around downtown. He will make recommendations about walkability and connectivity, especially with the lakefront and Drew, Lock and Millennium parks, at the session on Wednesday. Claire Pumpelly read one of Speck's books in her book club, and she's eager to hear him speak. In her early adulthood, she took a 'short' trip to Paris that ended up lasting seven years. Moving back to Lake Charles to help run her father's business was an adjustment, she said. In Paris, she had access to the Louvre and the Arc de Triomphe. But what she misses the most is the ability to walk down the street and run mundane errands on foot. While she lives in 'one of the most walkable areas' of the city, Margaret Place Historic District, she is only able to reach a few restaurants on foot and is otherwise car-dependent. She believes Lake Charles deserves more. 'I really miss that way of life. You could work all day and then after just walk out with your headphones on and stroll and not feel unsafe. 'We're never going to be able to scale in the way these other big cities, like New York, Chicago. I just think there are small changes and implementations that we could make here to just bump up our walkable score,' she added. These changes could be as simple as repainting the streets, adjusting speed limits or adding shade along sidewalks. Rock said Speck's walkable city designs are supported by four pillars – purpose, safety, comfort and interest – that will be discussed during the lecture. A focus on these pillars could be the 'icing on the cake' for Lake Charles, a city that has made 'positive strides' during nearly five years of disaster recovery, he said. About 100 people have already RSVP'd for the community session. He called this a call to action for local community leaders, business owners and municipalities to improve walkability in SW La. The Community Foundation hopes to be able to replicate the plan Speck provides Lake Charles in other communities in the region, like Westlake and Sulphur, Rock said. The lecture will begin at 5:30 p.m. and last about an hour and a half. Speck will be available to sign books at 7 p.m.
