![]() That sort of public support is a huge signal that even cities dominated by suburban sprawl are moving toward a smarter, more accessible future. Phoenix voters approved the the 35-year transportation development plan back in August of 2015 it promises several new rail lines, street improvements, and an overhauled bus program. It's one of the only cities on this list with a halfway decent light rail system, and it looks like the city is planning on investing heavily in public infrastructure thanks to the ambitious T2050 plan. Phoenix hasn’t shied away from spending on transportation projects in the past. Combine that with the blob-like sprawl the city has embraced over the past few decades - recall the Onion headline “ New Study Finds Most of Earth’s Landmass will be Phoenix Suburb by 2050” - and you have an urban area that almost requires you to have a car in order to live. That people thought it was a good idea to move/retire to the Sonoran desert might have something to do with the city’s reputation as a transit and pedestrian wasteland: Half the time, it’s just too damn hot to be outside. Walking across Phoenix is like a slog through a desert, plus the occasional McDonalds. Phoenix, Arizona | John Wollwerth/Shutterstock (Just like last time, we’re using two different exhaustive studies on walkability: Smart Growth America’s “ Foot Traffic Ahead” and Redfin’s annual Walk Score rankings.) These might be the least-walkable cities in the country right now, but check in a few years from now. But they also have one thing in common: They’re all trying to change for the better. They’re all painfully horizontal cities, built to satisfy cars more than pedestrians, and are only lately discovering the benefits of dedicated public transportation infrastructure. These cities here, though, are the least-walkable in America, and offer a grab-bag of urban tragedy. Most of the very walkable American cities grew up before cars made “planned communities” a thing. Trying to counteract that only yields stilted, synthetic urban messes. It’s the way we’ve adjusted to living on top of each other. That’s why the best neighborhoods in the best cities - the West Village in New York, Bairro Alto in Lisbon, Shibuya in Tokyo - are more scattered and organic. She’d tell you that planning in the classical sense is swimming against the natural order of human lives in close quarters. Jane Jacobs, patron saint of human-oriented planning, always talked about the city having its own DNA. As we’ve seen from megalomaniacal master planners like Le Corbusier and Robert Moses, it often yields something constricting and unnatural, like those weird square watermelons they have in Japan. (That’s a SimCity joke folks, I’ll be here all week.) Kidding aside, I don’t have a lot of interest in crafting my own metropolis. My go-to answer: type “imacheat” into the dialog box and hope aliens don’t descend from the heavens and vaporize any skyscrapers. ![]() When I tell folks I’m in city planning, I’m invariably asked how I would design a city from scratch. ![]()
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