By Marc Fisher
Thursday, April 28, 2005
America's great walking towns feature historic neighborhoods (Washington, Boston), corner stores and majestic vistas (San Francisco) and riveting people- watching (New York). So when I heard that the American Podiatric Medical Association was ranking the nation's most walkable cities, I assumed the foot doctors would hoof it to one of those great cities.
The docs chose Arlington. Yes, our Arlington, America's most walkable city.
This called for a long stroll along Wilson Boulevard.
Sure, plenty of folks happily walk around after dinner in Clarendon, a movie in Shirlington or a game of pool in Ballston. But America's most walkable city? Did somebody on the County Board slip something into the foot doctors' slippers?
Not necessary, says the board chairman, Jay Fisette, who led me on a search for evidence of Arlington's supreme walkability.
Fisette lives the model pedestrian life, and I don't mean he's boring. He's a lean, energetic gent who regularly walks Arlington's neighborhoods.
Arlington is a national leader in figuring out how to build densely around transit stations while maintaining neighborhoods of one-family houses just off the main drags. The foot doctors loved that 23 percent of Arlingtonians commute by public transit.
The county pays its workers a bonus of $25 a month if they walk to work. There's even a county office on walking, which this year will hand out thousands of pedometers to encourage exercise on foot.
Fisette showed me how simple, inexpensive design changes can give us a fighting chance against the hegemony of the automobile. In Clarendon, Arlington told developers that new buildings had to be pedestrian-friendly. Look at newer intersections along Wilson and you'll see sidewalks that bulge out into the street at corners, slowing car traffic while easing the fear factor for those on foot.
By building up around Metro, Arlington has boosted the portion of people who arrive at Ballston Station on foot to 70 percent. To encourage biking, the county has added 20 miles of bike lanes and requires bike racks and showers at new office buildings.
This is no Manhattan--it's not even Georgetown or Capitol Hill. But you can walk from many Arlington neighborhoods to shopping, work and entertainment. Incentives promote retail on the ground floor of new apartment buildings, and the county has managed to maintain locally owned shops as a bulwark against encroaching national chain stores.
Still, Arlington? It's not even a city, technically. But Fisette notes that Arlington now has more commercial space than Denver and that more people work in the county than live in it.
Arlington may officially be a suburb, but it thinks of itself as urban. "A lot of people from a suburban mind-set believe they should be able to drive to their restaurant and park right in front," Fisette says. "That's not our concept."
Restaurateur Joe Corey, who owns Faccia Luna and Boulevard Woodgrill in Clarendon, says that at night, about a third of his customers arrive on foot or by Metro. At lunch, almost all do so. Over 13 years, Corey has watched Clarendon change from a sleepy strip of used-car lots to a cool nightspot where people come to walk around.
Arlington is far from perfect; it is home to two glaring examples of stultifying urban design -- Crystal City's failed attempt to put city life underground and Rosslyn's inept effort to relegate pedestrians to overhead skywalks. "From those experiences, we learned that life belongs on the ground," Fisette says.
Both mistakes are being dismantled, to be replaced by developments aimed at repeating the successes of Ballston, Clarendon, Shirlington and Pentagon Row, the residential-over- retail project next to the Pentagon City mall.
I'd still pick Washington, New York or San Francisco to wander, but our pleasant walk proved that big cities can learn from little Arlington. Adams Morgan and Georgetown, for example, cry out for wider sidewalks.
Footnote (groan): The podiatrists picked Brownsville, Tex., as the nation's least walkable place. Maybe they haven't visited Tysons Corner.
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