If so, you probably live in a walkable community. Living in a walkable community helps you stay healthy, is friendly to our environment and helps you connect more with your neighbourhood and the people in it.

This article tells you:

• What a walkable community is
• Why we should walk in our communities
• How we can make our communities more walkable

What is a Walkable Community?
Walkable communities are neighbourhoods with features that make it easy for you to incorporate walking and other active transportation into your daily routine. Features of walkable communities include:

• Destinations within walking or biking distance
• Sidewalks, speed controls, well-linked trails and street crossings that make walking safe and accessible for everyone
• A mix of businesses and homes (mixed-use neighbourhoods)
• Attractive, interesting places to walk

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“Walkability is more than just the infrastructure, the concrete and the street signs,” says Dean Cooper, a physical engineer for Stantec. Stantec was contracted by the City of Edmonton to produce the bicycle strategy, sidewalk strategy and walkability strategy for Edmonton’s transportation plan.

“(Walkability) is about the quality of the journey,” says Cooper. “And a walkable community is a vital, healthy community.”

Why Should We Walk in Our Communities?
Walking a lot used to be common practice for many people—that’s what they did to get around.

Now people seem to drive everywhere, and this decline in daily physical activity has affected our health for the worse. Today two out of three adult Canadians are overweight or obese, according to Statistics Canada.

Walking every day has a direct positive effect on your health:

• It reduces the risk of coronary disease and stroke.
• It lowers blood pressure.
• It reduces cholesterol.
• It increases bone density, which helps prevent osteoporosis.
• It helps back pain.

If your community is designed for walkability, there’s a good chance that you walk often and are therefore healthier and enjoying a better quality of life. A community designed for walking also cuts down on car accidents. Studies suggest that one-third of car accident fatalities are caused by poorly planned roads and intersections.

Here’s a summary of walkable community benefits:

• A safer environment for walking and bicycling
• More opportunities to exercise for everyone, no matter their age, income, gender or ability level
• Better access to destinations you need in day-to-day life: grocery stores, workplaces, coffee shops, dry cleaners, schools, gyms

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Increasing the amount of daily walking you do might seem like a big change, but it doesn’t have to be huge shift, says Cooper. “Each person can look at their lives and see where they can make small, incremental changes,” he says. “Look at your schedule and think: why not walk for 10 minutes to the store or walk to do your errands on a Saturday?”

How Do We Make Communities Walkable?
Ian Hosler is the co-ordinator for Walkable Edmonton, a City of Edmonton program that encourages and promotes walkability in the city.

Hosler says each neighbourhood has its own challenges. An older neighbourhood might have decaying roads or sidewalks that need upgrading. Other neighbourhoods might need businesses to revitalize the area and give residents places to walk to.

A community should identify the challenges for each of its neighbourhoods and then decide what to do to overcome them.

Communities should also encourage mixed-use neighbourhoods. Hosler cites the example of the recently built Sobeys grocery store on Edmonton’s Jasper Avenue. The store is right in the middle of downtown, providing residents with a place to walk to and shop at in their community. The store also has a place for people to meet and have a bite to eat.

“We look at what we can do as a city to encourage developers to do more of these types of projects,” says Hosler. “Common destinations don’t spring up overnight, but if we look at the root causes of why areas are not mixed-use, we can affect change.”

Hosler says mixed-use developments have been perceived as risky by developers. However, some of the newer communities in North America do have walkability features such as trails.

The big challenges for Alberta are climate and latitude. The winter is long and cold, and it gets dark early, all factors that discourage people from venturing out for walks.

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“We want to make people’s activities outside a safe and pleasant experience,” says Hosler. “We look at solutions from countries similar to ours, such as Norway,” he adds. More lighting in certain areas for the whole winter is one solution that country has looked at.

In general, communities should limit sprawl and traffic congestion and encourage their citizens to walk more. The more walkable that communities are, the more vital they and their residents will be.

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Learn More

Walkable Edmonton
This City of Edmonton program encourages and promotes walkability in Edmonton’s neighbourhoods.

Walking – Still Man’s Best Medicine
This webpage from the Canadian Centre for Occupational Health and Safety answers FAQs about the benefits of walking and how to get out and walk safely.

Walkable Communities
This organization helps large and small cities improve their transportation efficiency.

How Can I Find and Help Build a Walkable Community?
Dan Burden, executive director of Walkable Communities, discusses how to find a walkable place to live.

12 Steps Toward Walkable Communities
Florida’s Department of Transportation gives 12 steps to create an effective pedestrian and bicycle program.

Walk Score
Walk Score ranks 2,508 neighbourhoods to help you find a walkable place to live. All you have to do is type in your address. American and some Canadian communities are covered.

Project for Public Spaces (PPS)
Project for Public Spaces is an American non-profit organization committed to helping people create and sustain public places that build communities.