Wages of sin are paid by our broad boulevards: Larry Wilson

Why don't we walk more often?

Because when we head out the door, the car's in the driveway, in between the house and everything else.

At least that's the way new urbanist Jeff Speck knows how it is for middle-class, Southern California us. We can live in a city for decades and never experience it on foot except for the nightly dog-walk around our own block, and the three or four blocks surrounding our offices at lunch.

The sprawl didn't happen all at once. It was incremental -- a crawl. But there were no soccer moms when we were young because kids could walk to the baseball field. Fully half of us walked to school.

"Now 13 percent of kids walk or bike to school -- down from 15 when I first started telling this story," Speck told a morning walkable cities seminar held by the Old Pasadena Management District last week. Top city planners were there. The mayor was there. Since what Speck had to say about the way a downtown neighborhood should work for its residents, its shopkeepers and its visitors was so important and compelling, I hope they were taking notes.

Speck's new book is "Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time." And as he looked out the big front windows toward West Green Street, he said that Old Pas, for an L.A.-area downtown, wasn't bad in the walking department.

True. One reason? Short blocks. Some of them were laid out 120 years ago, before the car was common, and that's a bonus to the hoofer. Not only that -- it's a lifesaver. Speck has statistics that show when you double the length of a downtown city block, you triple the pedestrian fatalities.

That's a mean, lousy ratio. And it's one big reason why we feel more comfortable on Colorado Boulevard, or on Citrus in Covina, or Greenleaf in Whittier, or Myrtle in Monrovia, than we do anywhere else. "It's about whether the pedestrian feels like he has a fighting chance" against the tons of steel flying by at speed just a few yards away. But how the city allows parking is key as well. Sidewalk cafes don't feel safe, whether we realize why or not, unless there's parallel (or angle-in) parking along the curb, the parked cars a barrier. The width of the street and of its lanes is also crucial. Fellow new urbanist Andres Duany "used to say the American road is so wide you can see the curvature of the Earth," Speck said. "A 12-foot lane is a 75-mph lane -- what message are you sending drivers?"

Oh, and one-way streets? They're the worst. They can actually be a boon to the pedestrian jaywalker. You only have to glance one way before you make your dash. But "it just gives drivers the temptation to jockey," Speck said. You'll look down and you're going 50. We've all done it.

The prescription is to put our cities on a road diet. As fellow planner Fred Kent told Playhouse District leaders last year, Pasadena's main drag, Colorado, is way too wide. "I know you have to bring this parade down it once a year," Speck said, "which is the equivalent of taking the space shuttle down it." But the rest of the year, he suggests putting in median parklets, temporary ones like trees in pots, to take up two lanes. And the Playhouse people are already working on placing temporary parklets in parking spaces on Union.

The north-south streets in town don't get high marks at all from Speck. They are built for getting through rather than arriving at.

Can every downtown get with the skinny streets program? Speck says he knows there will be resistance. So he quotes from Matthew: "Broad is the road that leads to destruction, narrow the road that leads to life."

That one goes down particularly well in the South, he says. Whatever it takes to purge the boulevards of sin.
