Focus 580; Walkable Communities

Good morning this is focused 580 of our morning telephone talk show money is Jack Brighton sitting in for David Inge. Glad you could listen. Our producers are here you are Harriet Williamson and Travis Stanzel and Jason Croft is our technical director. If you've ever set foot on an airport tarmac out there where the airplanes go you know that it is not a place for human beings. Things are whizzing by big metal boxes trucks in of course airplanes. It's a very uncomfortable feeling probably not to many of us have actually done that. But if you've ever broken down on an interstate highway and had to leave your car and walk somewhere to get to help you also know that sort of helpless feeling that this is not a place designed for human beings it's very uncomfortable just having your own body out there. Well a lot of our cities kind of feel like those places unfortunately and a lot of people are you know kind of concerned about what we do about that. Our places are not really walkable. And so the topic of the show today is walkable communities what it

takes to design them what it would take to return to a more human scale sort of urban landscape. Our guest is someone who has been dealing with these issues for a long time. Dan Burton is founder and executive director of walkable communities incorporated. He's the former state bicycle and pedestrian coordinator for the state of Florida which sounds like a great job. He's also a nationally recognized expert on bicycle and pedestrian facilitation programs. He has 25 years experience in developing promoting and evaluating transportation facilities traffic calming practices and sustainable community development. He is in Champaign Urbana to give a couple of workshops that we will mention during this hour because they are free and open to the public. In fact he will be speaking tonight at the Champaign Illinois terminal building 45 East University Avenue in Champaign. Speaking about walkable communities and that'll be a sort of an overview public presentation. If you'd like to attend You are welcome to do so. We'll also be giving more extended workshops

on the 20 that be it tomorrow and Saturday and those require registration so it's kind of an all day thing if you'd like to attend you need to call the MTD at 3 8 4 8 1 8 8. I'll give that information out again later so don't worry if you didn't write that down. And he's here to talk with us about walkable communities. If you'd like to join our conversation all you have to do is call us the number around Champaign-Urbana 3 3 3 9 4 5 5. We also have a toll free line. Anywhere you hear us around the Midwest or if you're listening on the web anywhere in the U.S. 800 to 2 2 9 4 5 5. And our guest joins us here in the studio. Thanks for being here. Great to be here Jack. Let me ask you to start out how did you get into this business of you know sort of looking at what it would take to design walkable communities. Well a number of things back when I was totally into bicycling in a very big way. Professionally I decided. Take a trip to Australia I actually was invited there and so as I was walking down the many

beautiful streets and each of their towns I realized that that was what my whole youth had been about. I own the towns I grew up in the Midwest central Ohio and that they had taken a different path that they they kept their cities in and designed for their people and they and they allowed the car to have a space but they didn't dominate the space. So I came back and just changed my title from state bicycle coordinator to state bicycle and pedestrian coordinator. Nobody complained and started a new following that was way back in 1981. And now actually when I started that was about 86. But by 91 they made it a federal law that all states had to have both a bicycle and a pedestrian coordinator. And. I want to say that my walk began in earnest around 1986. I've now been walking through about fourteen hundred communities in America just

go from town to town and it's all based on people realizing that we forgot ourselves in our towns and it's time to reclaim the territory in this space and to make our towns alive and whole and and livable. Now you said there's a federal law that every state has a bicycle a pedestrian Illinois has a bicycle coordinator. They do. Now sometimes states take it very seriously and they hire the best person they can get and they and they give them full license to change. Others say we're not going to change a darn thing. And they make sure they put a person in that as a pose that doesn't do a really effective job. There are only about six or eight states that take it real seriously. OK. I didn't know about that. That's that's news to me. So you go through. You just walk through the community and that's that's how you get a sense of what it's like. Right and people teach me in each community. I have many great mentors whether they be architects landscape architects engineers planners economists. So every town I go to I'm getting

basically. Free education and being paid for it by the greatest people. Recently my wife and I took a walk in Vancouver B.C. one of the best cities in North America was just there. Oh yeah in August Yeah now and the fellow who's designing the whole new Waterfront Village for the Olympics showed us his design before even showed it to the client and spent the morning walking us around showing us how this new city would evolve. That's tremendous. You know there's an incredible park there for some reason the name is escaping me but Stanley Stanley Park is a course that has you know great walking trails and bicycling trails and they've got you know you know there's a horse drawn carriage and stuff and all that stuff and it's just it's amazing and so you see you go how could you know what this exists in a city. Yeah. And I think that's the important thing Vancouver B.C. chose not to build any freeways. Well they tried and they failed they did such a bad brutal job of trying to carve up.

Chinese cultural community that they just got stopped cold in their tracks. The net result is not having built a freeway system is they made major investments in their transit in WA gain by cycling their waterfronts the compact dense urban farm and it truly is one of the greatest cities in all of North America if not in the world because they didn't build their freeway system. Very interesting. So you've seen a lot of different communities and you know what are the cons you know in the Midwest Midwestern communities. I don't know if you're a typical Midwestern community what are the kinds of things you see. Well first of all I love the midwest I grew up in central Ohio. To me the Midwest is going to be one of the slowest on the uptake of what it's going to take to revitalize itself and build walkable communities. And one reason is going to hard is a lot of the Midwest is already good. And so when you get the kinds of.

Damage of shopping plazas and strip development. It's like well there's still some good solid course in each community so people aren't noticing that they're out there destroying the things that would matter. So I think it's going to take a little longer I consider Chicago and now Columbus Ohio as the two lead cities in the Midwest. And many of the others are going to take a little longer to figure out what they're losing and to start the recovery process. It's interesting you use the phrase not noticing what they're destroying every community is concerned about economic development partially because even the schools are based on you know the tax base and you know the school funding issue is a big one for everybody so we're all we're all interested in generating more revenue to fund the basic services like education and everything else. So we're looking for the big box stores you know in the strip malls and all that stuff. And in that rush maybe we forget a few things. Well actually we end up forgetting a lot of things.

And one of the secrets of the good city of the future is we've got to stop building the biggest of things a big school just destroys all kinds of community a big recreation center a big store a big fire station anything. We've got to get back down to the main neighborhood scale we've got to be building many villages. Every town say have a population of 30000 or so would have at least a dozen villages just the way we used to do trolley car stops where everything within a five minute walk is pretty compact you've got all of your needs being met in that place. Some medical or retail civic open space but lots of great housing in toward that center. And then as you get further out you lighten the density a little bit and a place like Urbana-Champaign would have dozens of those villages over time. And guess what. Some of the places that have been destroyed the shopping plazas will convert beautifully to these new villages.

Do we see that happening in places. Yes I say there are two cities to watch in America right now because they're doing so many things very good. One is Sacramento California where the circus is going on. And the other is is Charlotte North Carolina. And I like both examples not because they're already there because they're working very hard. Their school boards are talking to their politicians there. Planning boards are being trained their engineers are being trained their architects get it their developers get it and they're working together they're building light rail and building villages at each light rail station things like that. And these are the things are going to matter in the end is having everybody work together not you know it all it takes is like the school board being totally independent going off and doing their thing for for their needs and and further destroying the big community because as you recognize you build one big school

somewhere and everybody wants to live near that good school. All of a sudden you've induced another type of sprawl that we can't afford. Very interesting. Well you mentioned the idea of getting everybody working together. It seems that that's one of the key things that has to happen. It absolutely has to. And I think in a sense that's why the Canadians or the Australians or New Zealanders are so far ahead of us is they've learned how to work together. We've we know with all of our freedoms in our country we failed to accept our responsibilities and therefore we've allowed ourselves to degrade much much much more rapidly and along with that America is considered if not the top country for for. Consumerism and and you know not just personal freedom but the amount of money we have. We have lost our quality of life we're now ranked about thirty eighth in the world for quality of life.

And it's because we haven't paid attention to the responsibilities of building good stuff and working together to build that good stuff. We've just lost it and we've got to start regaining it turns out that something as simple as walkability becomes the finite test as to whether or not a place is liveable or not. It's very interesting. Well as we talked about you you mentioned some of the sort of village centers that are some of the key components. What are some of the things that determine whether a community is walkable. Well a lot of good connectivity. If we have the original grid pattern of a town where the streets were laid out nicely and you have lots of connections that is absolutely essential. If you go to an area that got built later built for the car where we don't have many connections it's hard to walk you know even if we had sidewalks and trees and crossings. You just have to go vast distances just to get here. Friend's house one block over because you have to go way down and then way back up present like that. So repairing the broken

pieces by putting those connections in that never were made before. That's important and or next time we planted a village to have the right pattern so that we get that good fine grain mash that's so that's one. Another one is it truly is all about mixing the uses. We have to put things back together again. Having one type of land use like housings totally isolated from work places from churches from schools from parks. It just doesn't make any sense. We have to get in a car to do everything we do and then of course to build the buildings to the street to build that beautiful urban farm where you actually have joy in walking along a straight not looking at somebody is gray asphalt parking lot and and wondering why you're even on the walk you know. And there are dozens more by the way anyone who'd like to they can go to our website and upload a good list. It's I think it's referred to as the 12 steps toward walkable

communities. Just walkable dot org. Very simple. How big a role does green space play. Green face is absolutely essential and having the right amount of green in places is important. And again if we build a single park or several parks way to beg we end up driving to them. It's important to have open space within one eighth mile of every house. And that's that's one of the measures of quality of life. Interesting. You know people will take ownership of anything within eight or nine hundred feet of their own home with a watch over it they'll care for it and they'll go there. But if you put it say 2000 feet from their house they probably won't walk there. They don't think it's theirs and it doesn't really get cared for the way it needs to so not only having the green space but how we orchestrate it and what size it is matters a lot. It's interesting that people will have a sort of instinctive reaction to space. If it's uncomfortable they just won't go there.

And you know it's so interesting and part of my presentation is the heart tells us what to build the heart tells us what not to build. And so if we take a walk through anybody's community and fall in love with anything. We take a mental picture of that when we come back we see if that's possible in our own neighborhood or in our own downtown or something like that. Things like public art. The style the rhythm the pattern of buildings of the streets. You know that there's a great book by by Christopher Alexander called the timeless way of building. And another one he wrote pattern language which anyone who's interested in anything about a town should should read both those books. And it's absolutely true throughout the whole of the history of mankind the things that really matter have ended up in that book as a pattern or a way of building that applies to everything we ever build. Very interesting public art and Seattle has a program in you know public art

the sort of you know people are invited to actually paint the bus stops and that kind of thing. Great stuff. Yeah I don't know if Seattle is a great example of a walkable communities parts of it are. Yeah. Well actually Seattle is one of the top vote getters for a Livable community. I think if you look consistently they are the top livable community on most votes and for a lot of good reasons. First of all have great neighborhood planning. I think it's something like 43 neighborhoods every neighborhood puts together its own vision its own plan. So any time the city has some money to spend they can go right down the list and start building what the neighbors want. Seattle is so well built that today whenever they do new housing starts none of them are occurring in the neighborhoods they're already built out and anything that gets built now has to be mixed use and like right now in downtown Seattle they have 20000 permits pulled for building new residential units and out of the rest of all the neighborhoods. Only two per month.

How about that. So that's an issue of planning and zoning. The city intentionally made it that way. Exactly. And what I'd like to say is the towns that are making it start with a vision until there's a there's a vision. There is no hope that you'll ever end up doing the right thing. You have to have some concrete language that everybody is focused on that they see. Want once you identify what that vision of the neighborhood is everybody now. No matter what the issue is a parking lot or something this isn't fit our vision or twist it this way and then it's going to match our vision of this neighborhood. We have a calling to include a conversation with do that and let me just mention again. We're talking with Dan Burton he's founder and executive director of walkable communities Inc. He's in Champaign Urbana to give a couple of workshops on walkable communities and that's what we're talking about. If you'd like to join us the number around Champaign-Urbana 3 3 3 9 4 5 5. Toll free elsewhere. 800 to 2 2 9 4 5 5. Let's go to a

listener in Urbana on line number one. Good morning good morning. I thought it was really interesting that Mr. Burton said 900 feet because that's exactly how far we are from the pack of measure that's OK. And that's exactly why I feel like we own it and we're proud of that. A couple of comments about cars and bikes. By the way we're really lucky to live in this in the same Peter Pan. I think it's really very very walkable and I feel like we're really lucky really and there's still too many cars and they're always bringing more cars in all the time and it seems like hard to subsidize you know people actually had to pay at the pump for building highways probably five or eight dollars a gallon right away and I'm on the radio I'm a full time father. That's part of why I really appreciate a walkable community and the other thing that can

say about you know I'm on the radio everybody in the whole walkable community can hear you. The other thing is about. You seem to have to move on with bikes and policy for banks and stuff and you get these pamphlets that will talk about you know the right way to get your home and stay on the left side or the right side of the road into to use the hand signals and so on. But they never really didn't they don't seem really very real world. And one of the best ways I think to think of that is to imagine a left turn for a bicycle in almost any community in America. Yeah. How can you know though so I think that the left turn gets avoided in the sampling. And if every community should think about the real Safeway for a bike to make a lean left turn that it's not going to get everybody mad you know. Hard thing to think when you know you're going to be a right turn because we're on a different set of open. In America it will be left turn for a bank it's a very very difficult thing and I criticize going up and

let's talk about the way in Stanley Park. The thing is there is they have huge trees so maybe that's part where you talk about community. Yeah yeah I know. Thanks for the call. Now you know I think the big thing about bicycling and the way motorists are behaving around bicyclists is that the the more active we create a bicycling culture and community the more motorist. I have a friend a child a parent that rides a bike the more courteous they become. We have found that it's really truly about numbers once you reach a certain threshold in the number of people who ride bikes all of a sudden everybody starts to pay attention to and watch over them. Davis California for example a fairly large community about 100 hundred twenty thousand population. Has only had one fatality in 21 years and it's largely because everybody ride bikes and Davis. So even though the roads are fast and this and that they're

really on guard they're watching out and looking out for the needs of the bicyclist. And I think the same is exactly true of walking. The more people walk the safer it becomes for everybody. The thing about bicycling that has really struck me is you know I ride a bicycle and I drive a car when I'm riding a bicycle. Sometimes cars go whizzing past me on the left rather close and I feel like what's the matter with this driver don't think I understand that. You know they're basically endangering my life with their you know the way that they're passing me. And when I'm in a car and I'm passing a bicyclist I sometimes find myself thinking What's the matter with this bicyclist don't they understand that I can't just swerve around them. Yeah this is one of the you know it's almost inevitable if the streets are not or the bike. There's no bike paths there's no actual bike route there's no way for us to co-exist without that kind of conflict.

Right. The challenge of building a system for bias cycling is is that once we've started to have built out a community there's only one. One choice for where to be we just simply unlike Europe we don't we don't have the ability to fit in a Pathway system we can't on a campus we can in certain parts of a town and that needs to be part of the way we look at it. But we really have to design on road facilities and except for a number of Western states. The Midwest in the east has not built good bike lanes anywhere. We just we just have neglected it. And yet they fit in beautifully. In fact one of the approaches we take to making a neighborhood civil again is to take like collector roads and sometimes the principal roads and narrow them down to 10 foot lanes. We get about a 7 mile an hour speed reduction on most streets when we take the lanes down from being oversized or fat and trim off that excess and then put that space into bike lanes and everybody

behaves better. In fact there are 22 benefits of bike lanes only two are for the bicyclists. Most of our benefits to the motorist about that. Well our lines are all full. I've got more questions but I'll defer to the callers. We'll go next to someone in the Chicago area. Line number four. Good morning you're on focus 580. Oh yes. Very interesting program I had. Catching the name of the book that you just had a lot of the basic information. Could you repeat. Sure. Two books there both by Christopher Alexander. The first one is called Timeless way of building and the second was a way of building a building and the second is Pattern Language have a language language and don't let the size of them frighten you there. They're fun reads each ones over a thousand pages. But they're they're just absolutely a joy to read I actually took pattern language to Europe with me and each day my daughter and I would read a chapter and only

photograph what was in that chapter. It's a wonderful wonderful way to learn. Now you have a website but you don't have a book at this point. No I have chapters I'm writing but I don't have a book. Forward to that. Thank you thank you. OK thanks for the call. The website by the way again is walkable dot org to simply go to w w w that's hard to say Dot walkable dot org. We're at our midpoint Here let me mention again that Dan Burton will be speaking tonight in Champaign Urbana at the Illinois terminal building which is 45 East university that's the headquarters of the A.D. here. That's a public presentation from 7:00 to 8:00 o'clock tonight on walkable communities and that's free and open to the public if you'd like to attend he's also giving a more extended workshop Friday and Saturday that does require some registration and you can contact the MTD this is a workshop I understand it's not just for professionals it's for anyone who's really interested in doing something about this. Well you know in fact that's part of my message is we've got to stop having specialists learn all the

skills and just going off and doing what they do. We need many many generalists people who see the broad picture. I am not a specialist. I have no specific training in engineering planning architecture landscape architecture. What I do is I listen to all of the professions and by not having the sets of blinders on that they've gotten from their college training. I see a broader picture. And so I might break a classic rule in engineering but we end up with something better. And I think what we're finding is some of the best decisions ever made in the direction of our country have been made by people who are generalists people like Jane Jacobs. She broke all the rules and planning by not having been a planner for interesting. Well our lines are pretty full here so let's go on and talk with some more listeners. Next up someone in Urbana number one. Good morning. Yes yes. Very interesting program. I think you mentioned two books. There are two

cities that were involved in planning these communities would you tell us what that is. Those are again Sacramento California which I absolutely love the big city that has a lot of challenges and they're working together. The second is Charlotte Charlotte North Carolina. Again a very large city that is just making incredible to say Asians for example now they're building a new light rail the first of four lines they're going to build and they're building seven villages out of urban sprawl where each of those light rail stations will be ok seven villages out of the urban school in Charlotte North Carolina along the rail line rail line to light rail light rail. The long run a light rail they're installing light rail light rail. Oh OK. And. Where is your workshop going to be on the streets and it's also the only terminal building which is.

Yeah if you know where that is it's headed in the new empty terminal and what time is it going to be this weekend. I think we'll see registration begins tomorrow at 7:30. Starts at 8 and it goes basically all day and then on Saturday from 8 to noon. I think is that I've got the schedule here it's actually advertised in the champagne band news because that is how I found out about it. Yeah and you can come and go you don't need to be there the whole day. OK yeah and if you'd like I'll give you the phone number two for the MTV 3 8 4 8 1 8 8 3 1 1. Yeah and you can call there for reservations. Hey Ross thank you very much. Thanks very much for the call. Before we get on to the next caller you mentioned you mentioned light rail a couple of times and that's something that has been raised here in this community as something that you know I think with studying light rail has as a way to sort of transform public transportation

and other things about this community. And then the price tag was mentioned everybody went What do you not see somewhere above 40 million a mile it's off the charts. Expensive. There are many other systems many other ways to go. Honolulu for example isn't investing in what's called BRT bus rapid transit. They still use vehicles that look like buses although they're better than buses and they used stations. And the good news is because the rubber tired they can move the stations if they if they need to make some adjustments but they're very efficient very powerful. And just a fraction of the cost and there's some other systems that are very in keeping with college communities that. Can get down to as little as a million a mile and still be rail oriented. The Japanese have been developing this move got some developers in Florida have been looking into these. We call them green green ways. They share bike routes with with a very

small rail and the kind of cars you just literally slide onto there. There's no hour anything so they make them very efficient they run with Briggs and Stratton engines and that generates the electric power for these. They're very quiet and they match beautifully with the trail. You mentioned the installation of stations for these buses. How key is that. Well I think I think it's important to have real focal points for collection and have the great efficiencies you know so you have a new station every half mile that's the perfect spacing that's only trolley cars have a half mile half mile. And that gives you a quarter mile village. The boundary and then the next quarter mile village. And by doing that we keep very high efficiencies with with moving the vehicular loads and then of course for people to walk into and then we can put a little bit of money into the stations and make them civic spaces and have great retail sprout out from that in fact one of the neat things about Portland with their light rail

system. You cannot pay for light rail at the fare box. It just can't happen. But what they're finding is everywhere they put in a light rail station they make mega mega millions of dollars off of the development. So it's a form of community development that pays huge dividends to the tax base to the building of communities and so on. By investing around transit stations. Very good we have a couple callers waiting will get next to a listener in Belgium. Why number two. Good morning. Yes I totally agree with your ideas. The unfortunate thing is you know yes it's going to be slow in the Midwest. We're somewhat isolated in our communities dotted around because of the rail system that first brought a lot of people here and now. But there's it's their small town Spencer. True annoying simple in the end it's difficult the sort of relationship between these two.

In any kind of. In my school walking type of endeavor. Oh yes yes. Well you're right and you know once we killed off the trains in our country we basically were given a death blow to all these wonderful little towns and making them totally car dependent. I agree and I think eventually we're going to figure it out we're going to figure out how to get some rail back and it won't be the same rail that we had before but I think truly the way that we can move people by something other than the private auto car is what's really going to revitalize all of our wonderful little towns. And I'm not going to give up on the Midwest. I think it's going to make it. But at the same time until people realize that they have a choice and can switch to other modes of transportation and work together so that they can can build it in their own community. Each of those towns is going to

continue to decay a little bit and destroy itself in ways that will regret. And I'd like to also just that I think you need to start with this concept. Grade school teaches children to walk more to get out. Sure that aspect of the activity that they want these kind of spaces. Oh absolutely in fact I was speaking with someone yesterday and talking about the importance of teaching people how to live without a car. And you know everything we have focused on is by the time you're 16 you've been a slave to your parents and any anyway and so it's like finally you get the right passage. And what I was thinking is you know we need to be able to offer a course to those who want to take it on how to live without a car I never had a car until I was 35. I didn't want one didn't need one and lived many places very successfully. But there's a skill in living without a car and a lot of people don't know what that skill is that's interesting.

I don't. Thank you very much. Thanks the call. Well there's a couple things to follow up on there. You know I'm thinking about the University of Illinois campus which is a great place is a great place to walk around in there. I think they're doing some great things to make it even better. But the thing is you know there are no grocery stores on campus at all there are none. I mean there's no way to actually go shopping for food on campus. The great the great towns in America that are becoming walkable are learning that you cannot have a grocery store larger than 20000 square feet. Maybe 25000 by building the 60 and 80 thousand square foot grocery store is what we're saying is we're only going to have one everything six miles every two miles. And that's totally on walkable. So until we learn how to build small very well-stocked twenty or twenty five thousand square foot groceries we really can't have walkability. It's going to require some new industries some new ways of looking at conventional stores stores that are the right size the right place

carry the right products so that people can live independent and have affordable prices without having to go to the megastars. I do think the caller mentioned was you know the issue of a you know small town sort of isolated there was a time in the early part of the 20th century when there was a light rail system. You may already know this that existed in Champaign-Urbana that connected I believe far as far west as Clinton which is about 30 miles west of here. And as far east as Homer and maybe even beyond that. And people would take that light rail system to go to various parks and you know to go from community to community it was very convenient and very effective. Of course the automobile came along and basically I feel that now you know I think if Henry Ford were alive today or any of the early Giants and starting the auto industry if they had realized what we would have done with their inventions. They would not have gone for further forward. One of Henry Ford's quests was to allow people to go out and picnic

in the countryside. He didn't want to destroy the countryside. Obviously if we did that by the light rail or trolley stations you know it worked and it worked well we develop some really great parks out these distances we got to the beach by trolley and things like that. I'm convinced that if through some quirk in history we had waited 30 more years for the car America would be the rightest greatest nation for livability. But it was that 30 year jump with technology and and mass production of the car and then of course post World War Two building the interstate systems and building the factory housing and. Literally making it impossible for returning to invest in a home in the center city. You could only get a loan to buy the factory houses further out of town and that was by design by design. Yeah and to this day the mortgage rules basically still favor sprawl and so do the realtors that's all they've been trained to sell those

homes and that the developer that wants to build a great mixed use concept and do good quality urban infill is breaking every rule they can't find the bankers that know how to work together. One works in commerce another one works in residential. They don't speak the same language so everything we now need to do has to break all the institutional rules and start from scratch. Just a couple of the callers waiting will go next to a listener in Urbana on line number three. Good morning. Yeah great topic. I just read a news report about a study out of the University of Pittsburgh which is being reported in the American Journal of Health Promotion. The walkability neighborhood determined the activity level of the older woman and they were the least active group. Now the health benefits are really tremendous. So I guess it isn't my question though

I guess that would mean we'd have to spend less money on health care. Have you been. What do you have to say about the economic benefits of making a place walkable for example. And I'm wondering if you could make this if I could tie this into a question about Orlando Florida where I happen to have broad has in the area and I just read that Orlando Florida is one of the worst in the country and has a very high pedestrian fatality and very well you can talk about maybe in talking in terms of Orlando what the economic effects are. I mean hit there's a place where there they deliberately made the place not walkable it seems to be suffering to. Places that are making their place more walkable What are the economic effects right.

A couple of new studies out that show that sprawl is in direct correlation with the levels of quality of people's health. The more sprawl the more we decline our health. And obviously as we don't get the exercise as we put on the extra body fat we end up with much higher levels of heart problems respiratory diabetes every every serious disease you can think of including cancer goes up as we put on the extra weight. The weight is obviously a product of both bad food. Way too fatty weight way too many calories and just not getting the exercise to burn that stuff off. A year ago I weighed 50 pounds more than I do today. I came down with diabetes have it the rest of my life. I'm reasonably trim now and I project I'm going to live longer than most people because I'm now carefully watching over my calorie intake and think spender. But so many people in Florida's a good example Orlando

where everything was built post auto. And where it's going to be very hard to build in walkability. Now we're doing it. We have to and Florida is truly the national leader in new or been ism in building new communities new neighborhoods that are truly walkable. Great trees and great street saying and good mixed use development in many locations. But it's going to be a battle and it is truly a battle for health. And I'd like to say it's also going to be a battle of affordability that our our health care costs are totally related to how much exercise we as Americans are getting for interesting. So you're you but you don't you can't you can't like compare the adults who are Lando and say you know filter out all the other factors and say because. Seattle is walkable. It's more economic anyway. Well what we can say is is that when people fall in love with the

lifestyles they can have in a place like Seattle where they can be very active. That attracts jobs. And even during the hard hit times right now the recessions with the airline industries and Boeing and all the others people still want to move to Seattle. And they're not flocking to the places that are unhealthy that are not livable in fact. So many personal stories and corporate stories of people wanting to take their corporations where their senior managers and middle managers are willing to live. And if a place is not livable It doesn't matter what tax offerings we give. You know you can only induce a person so long to make that expenditure if they're not going to be able to retain their key employees they want livability. And that's one reason places like Portland Seattle San Diego all kinds of places in the West that have focused on liveability are still continuing to attract

good businesses who to call were forgiven for moving on we only have about six or seven minutes left and we have another caller waiting and probably time for another call if you like to join us 3 3 3 9 4 5 5 toll free 800 2 2 2 1 4 5 5. Next up a listener in Chicago on line number four. Good morning. Thanks to the program I just moved up to Chicago for a champagne Urbana and like the neighborhood I live in a lot I don't think Chicago is like this but I can walk right down the street and get my groceries at the hardware store not too far there is a stop in you know buses are all over and his watch is love champagne Urbana. There certainly is like you can get everywhere on bike totally easy but I think walking is a little bit different because there are no neighborhood grocery stores and even at one point in. I think it was like quite a while ago almost 10 years ago but there was a little neighborhood bar sort of where I used to live and you know was in a bad bar they sold candy the

kids were coming home from school and there was a hair salon right next to it and I think a photo place is well on my Huber's of course. Yeah exactly. They were talking about shutting it down. It didn't happen but if so that was like the only sort of business in that whole area. The only places you go like West to Madison and be entirely strip malls and things like that where you would go shopping or what not and I don't know I just wonder if you have any thoughts on like how champagne Urbana can like reverse that trend and get like small businesses back into neighborhoods where people don't have to walk to them like shit. Or or you know big places like that to get their groceries or what they need. Yeah I think the formula is fairly simple. It's a matter of getting good leadership group together and start on one model area neighborhood that get set up that has some ability to

transform and I by the way every neighborhood has that ability and two to get a declaration of support from all the right players. You know all the elected leaders the Planning Commission the school board members the fire department the police department everybody who has a role to play to take part and to help shape that vision and then to have the political will and commitment to start to put some dollars into reformatting some of the streets proving to the developers that this is the good place to invest in training the good developers to come and work and give them certain partnering opportunities so that you can prove that economically the developers make better money when they start to invest in things like make mixed use retail and and multi-story buildings and things like that where in neighborhoods some neighborhoods are already you might simply put up with houses. Like where would you find the space for things in places like that.

Well it depends on how how well that the homes were built whether they're historic in or not even the best most dense historic neighborhoods have development opportunities or redevelopment opportunities. The main thing is on important intersections are a focal point. Quite often the buildings are not worth near as much as the land and it's possible to rebuild those buildings. Offer to the people who trade out their buildings. In some cases houses. The first opportunity to move into the great new house with the retail down below and all the services that are right there. But again that's why it requires a neighborhood vision people have to work together on this and have to decide where is the right and the best location. But I think you know without having spent more than a few minutes getting to this radio station I can guarantee you there are dozens and dozens of great opportunities right here for people start to make those investments.

Well thank you. All right thanks for the call. It really is a great community I think that you'll have a receptive audience in the workshops. There's one other issue I want to touch on briefly and that is you talked about mixed use is I wonder it's also important to have to create community focal points. You know that have mixed income groups mixed ages mixed races etc.. Is that part of this is Oh it's absolutely essential. We we have devastated ourselves by sending all the grandparents off to one place our older people can live here and and families can live here. And if you're below a certain economic level you get to live over there and things like that. The best neighborhoods throughout the history of the world have always been mixed income and so on and it's the only way that will grow up culturally that will start to lose some of our fear. And so again one of the reasons I love Charlotte is they took one of their four major downtown area

neighborhoods. They had to bulldoze a lot of it. It was bad stuff. And there was a lot of crime a lot of prostitution and drugs and all kinds of stuff. They they kept some of the buildings and rebuilt those and then built brand new street brand new building brand new school brand new park and made it the desirable place to live and invited everybody to stay there if they wanted to some chose not to. And obviously now rich diversity ethnically economically the new homes now being built are coming in somewhere around 300 400 500 thousand dollars. But and yet it's a place that it would have been totally devastated economically. And it's just wonderful and just an example of what can and should and must occur as we build these villages in the same place where you have the three $400000 houses there are also some opportunities for lower income people to live as well. Cottages and many times what we refer to as Granny flats

is our studios above the garage. It's extra income for the people in the big house. And maybe at some point in our lives they'll say hey wait a minute I need the extra income I'm going to live in the granny flat I've designed it so that I'm going to feel comfortable there and I'm going to ride out the big house I'm going to have a pretty good income to do travel with and things like. Well we're going to stop since we're out of time we have scratched the surface of the topic. But if you would like to learn more you are invited to a public presentation tonight at 7 o'clock at the terminal building in Champaign 45 East University. Also more extensive workshop tomorrow and Saturday that is being sponsored by the champagne Urbana mass transit district the City of Urbana and the City of champagne. If you'd like more information you can call the MTD at 3 8 4 8 1 8 8. Our guest has been Dan Burton and Dan thank you so much for being here. Thank you. Programming AWOL as made possible in part by Strawberry Fields on West Springfield Avenue in downtown Urbana Strawberry Fields provides a wide assortment of natural foods vitamins and

supplements as well as a full deli coffee bar. Bulk herbs fresh breads and produce today's broadcast is made possible with soap.