Frontage Engagement

The geometry of a building frontage can have great effect on how people interact with each other in public. These women are having a conversation because the woman on the porch felt comfortable enough to sit there as people walked by on the sidewalk. Had she felt uncomfortable, the conversation never would have happened.

Neighborhoods which get these geometries right tend to be those where people know their neighbors for blocks around. In those where these things are wrong, people might only know the neighbor to either side and one across the street. And someone you don't know isn't really a neighbor; they're more of a subdivision co-habitator.

Tactical Beginnings

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Block Scale

How long does it take you to walk around a block at an easy pace in a recovering neighborhood? If it's five minutes or less, look for a place to live. If it's four minutes or less, open your shop there. If it's three minutes or less, quick... open a sidewalk cafe! The time it takes to walk around a block is a simple indicator of a complex condition: smaller block sizes are harbingers of strong future Walk Appeal for one simple reason: the more often you reach another intersection, the more frequently you have a choice of which way to go, which makes your walk far more interesting than having to walk a long distance for a choice.
The key point here is that identifying strong Walk Appeal is great, but

Indianapolis, but not the 500. Coulda been a great street, but chose to be a fast street. Every community has this choice.

Danger

No matter how beautiful the path where people walk, no matter how complete and cooling the canopy of street trees, and no matter how handsome the street furnishing and civic art, perceived danger trumps them all. Automobile traffic speed is the universal danger. In the seven Walk Appeal conditions just below, an increase of just 20% in vehicular speed drops the Walk Appeal of the thoroughfare to the next lower condition. A Great Street should have traffic at no more than 15 miles per hour, where the risk of serious injury or death from being hit by a car is close to zero. But if traffic speed increases just 20% to 18 miles per hour, the Walk Appeal of a Great Street drops to that of a W-5 Main Street. Following this all the way to the bottom, a thoroughfare indistinguishable from a Great Street in any physical characteristic that allowed vehicular speeds of 45 miles per hour or more would have the worst Walk Appeal rating of W-0, which is Unwalkable. No matter the beauty, people don't want to be right beside sudden death.
There's one important caveat: the speed that matters is in the travel lane closest to the walking path. A Parisian boulevard moved cars at lethal speeds in the middle travel lanes the last time I was there in 2016, but cars on the slip roads at the edge with parking on both sides moved not much faster than walking speed, so sidewalk cafes flourished with high-speed traffic only four lanes and one median away.
Substantial physical barriers between automobile travel lanes and sidewalks create comfort commensurate with the mass of the barrier. Mature street trees are great at this, but there's a catch: transportation engineers consider trees to be "fixed hazardous objects," so they do everything they can to ensure that any street tree planted will not grow large enough to imperil the driver. No matter the impact on anyone else. We experienced this firsthand in the Flamingo Park Neighborhood's struggle against the Florida DOT. The DOT conceded to a median, but allowed only one street tree per median right in the middle of the block and mandated highly-packed soil around the tree so it would never grow much thicker than your thumb. For this and many other auto-domination decisions in the Alton Road rebuild, carnage has ensued.
Fortunately, street trees are not the only effective barriers. On-street parking is now a highly unpopular option in places that have moved beyond auto domination, but in the great majority of the US which still suffers from auto domination, on-street parking is far better than surface parking lots for several reasons. Protected bike lanes are another effective barrier if they're truly protected by something that would deflect a car away from the cyclists.
Vehicle size has always been an issue, because there's no appeal to walking alongside a truck route. But heavy trucks are a small percentage of total motor vehicles on the road, so it's fairly easy to restrict them to certain routes, keeping them off Main Streets and residential streets. Recently, however, pickup trucks and SUVs have become larger than Sherman Tanks. And to compound the size problem, most new trucks and SUVs have a new front end design that's close to vertical. For decades, most vehicles had a wedge-shaped front end for aerodynamics and the accompanying fuel economy. If those vehicles hit a person, they would usually bounce up and over, therefore having a chance of surviving. But occasionally a deer would come through the windshield, injuring those inside. This new design changes the trajectory, mowing down any creature hit and crushing it under the wheels. If these vehicles drive in the country and the creatures hit are mostly deer and mountain lions, that's one thing. But if driven in the city, the victims are much more likely to be children and old folks whose heads aren't even visible above the hoods of the vehicles, hence the terms "killer grilles" and "kidmowers." Places with a preponderence of supersized vertical-front vehicles degrade Walk Appeal as much or more than speed, in large part because they can go everywhere, not limited to truck routes. Or should they be?
The last danger issue is crime. Places known to be crime-ridden reduce Walk Appeal to nearly zero for anyone except its residents, who are only marginally more likely to venture out on foot or pedal. Several of the tools for building Securable Places will help, but none of this is an ironclad solution to lawless places. For now, those walking should choose different routes.

W-6 Great Street

A Great Street is thronged with people, but not too many. People should be closest at the sidewalk cafes to either side, and while cars may be entirely crowded out, there should still be room for people biking gently.

W-5 Main Street

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W-4 Neighborhood Street

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W-3 Sub-Urban Street

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W-2 Subdivision Street

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W-1 Parking Lot

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The most poisonous condition to a #MainStreet is a parking lot just behind the sidewalk. People hate walking there, and businesses all along the street suffer from this blockage to free flow of people walking. It’s #WalkAppeal poison.

W-0 Unwalkable

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The Popsicle Test

The original Walk Appeal Test was the Popsicle Test (not my idea) which was 1: can a kid walk or ride to a local market and buy a popsicle & 2: get home before the popsicle melts or is eaten? This is a test both for safety and proximity. Will Mom allow it, and how near?

The People Test

Walk Appeal Test 2 is the most obvious: are there a lot of people there? If not, it's probably not an appealing place. As John Massengale and Victor Dover say "it's not a Complete Street if people aren't there." Other humans are the most appealing thing about a place. See & be seen.

The Speed Test

WalkAppeal Test 3 is simple: how slow are people moving? The slower, the better. If everyone is walking really fast, the place is either really boring or dangerous. Good urbanism where people sit or better yet lie down is neither and appeals to other people.

The Sidewalk Cafe Test

Walk Appeal Test 4: Sidewalk cafes are the canary in the coal mine for good urbanism. If they thrive, the place almost certainly has good Walk Appeal. If not, go to City Hall and demand change. Cities should incentivize them, not tax them because they do so much good.

Sidewalk Cafes

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People sitting outdoors are a great sign of good #urbanism on many counts including: 1. Of all things in town, we find people most interesting. 2. They attract more people so the place thrives. 3. People sit where it feels like an outdoor room. This is another simple indicator of a complex condition: if you find people sitting in a place, that place is probably doing several good things for them that they might not even be able to explain.

Gifts to the Street

There are eight types of gifts to the street; those that shelter us (like arcades, galleries, and awnings), refresh us (like a street fountain or sidewalk cafe), delight us (like a beautiful frontage garden, including this one), direct us (like a goal in the middle distance), entertain us (like an good storefront), inform us (like a clock or sundial), help us remember (like a memorial), and give us a place to rest (like a street bench). A Gift to the Street doesn’t have to be expensive or time-consuming. These gifts probably cost very little and could be done over a weekend. If most buildings gave gifts to the street, think how much more appealing it would be to walk there! Good urbanism thrives on gifts like these.

Some townhouses have frontage garden beds between the stairs & stoops; this one is paved entirely in brick, but with a frontage garden of potted plants which constitute a delightful Gift to the Street.

There are no set formulas for frontage gardens, so start with what you have and do something that lifts your spirits because it'll likely do the same for your neighbors and others walking by.

Sidewalk cafes are great Gifts to the Street and Walk Appeal superfood, and are great indicators of many beneficial things. They may shelter us like this arcade, they definitely refresh us with food and drink, they delight and entertain us with our dinner companions and other diners, and they give us a place to rest.

They are also places to see and be seen, neighbors get acquainted there, people get acclimated to the local environment, their patrons provide organic Eyes on the Street, and they are harbingers of more prosperous times ahead... the list is long.

The Outboard Liner Building is built outside the main building box. It can be single- or multi-story, covering part or all of the main building.

This bakery is only about 15 feet deep & is a Gift to the Street for several reasons: It diverts eyes from the blank walls behind, it entertains those walking by with its sidewalk cafe, and that cafe is bolstered by seating inside as well which is quite open to view. The billboard? A crass commercial move, some say, but it's certainly more interesting than a blank wall.

The boardwalks of Carlton Landing are magical places accessible only on foot or bike as cars are relegated to rear parking courts, which allows surprisingly strong density.

The right-of-way is made up of boardwalks and bio-swales. Distance between building faces are as little as 25' and porches 12'. And it's richer in Gifts to the Street than almost any place I've seen.

So much delight in so little space! French Quarter balconies are rarely much over 3 feet deep, but look at all the gardening the building's occupant is doing on this balcony!

And what a Gift to the Street, and on multiple counts! It's not only a delightful frontage garden, but it's also entertaining because there's no way someone can love a garden as much as this person and not spend time there doing things other than working. And whether working or relaxing they're in a place where it's easy to get in conversations with people walking by.

A storefront bench is a Gift to the Street that gives people a place to rest. It's especially useful at shops where not everyone in a group needs... or wants... to go in to shop.

Those who are bench-sitting aren't just taking up space. They are first of all by far the most visible people at that shop. And because they're sitting where people walk by, there's a chance of conversations starting where they become part of the entertainment of the storefront to those walking.

The smallest Gift to the Street is a window box garden. Few building in town have building parts with more delight per square inch than this one!

And they can even be planted with herbs and other edibles, contributing in a tiny but very immediate way to making the neighborhood a nourishable place. This isn't farm-to-table; it's window-to-table.

Patterns transplant easily to places where they make sense. Plants on the parapet are a strong pattern in Mexico; this is Key West on the Caribbean Rim. Mexico is on the Echo Rim of the Gulf Of Mexico so both share several regional conditions, climate, and culture.

As a result, it's no surprise this pattern travels well to the Keys. And of course they contribute in both settings to a delightful frontage garden.

Here's a compound Gift to the Street! It has both a fountain and a frontage garden for delight, and also a bench so someone can sit and rest after hours of exploring Key West. Actually, it's technically a Gift to the Lane because it's on a rear lane, not a street. If you've ever been to Key West and just stayed on the streets, you've missed some of the more interesting parts of the city. Next time you're there, be sure to explore its wealth of inner-block urbanism.

A Gift to the Street can be seasonal; both the festooning for the 4th of July and the flowers in the pots appear or change with the seasons.

This is technically a frontage garden, even though the festooning isn't made of plant material. But it definitely boosts the level of delight.

Liner Buildings

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Open Streets

Countless auto-dominated streets around the world have become Open Streets since the pandemic began. Some have reverted to auto-domination, but many hold firm & people are learning the value of streets filled with people on foot and pedal over streets filled with cars.
Open Streets don't even need to be open all the time. This is Royal Street in the French Quarter of New Orleans. Both Royal and Bourbon, just one street over, are closed to cars so they can be open to people on foot and pedal for substantial parts of the day. Other streets open for months on end as a pilot project until the city and its leaders decide whether to leave it open in perpetuity or return it to auto domination. It's important for the pilot project to be able to open with uncertainty, otherwise the answer is almost always "no."

On-Street Parking

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View Changes

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Street Enclosure

The best streets in the world tend to have an enclosure proportion of 1:1 or a bit taller. Enclosure is the proportion of building height divided by street width from building face to building face. Too tall, and the street is dark; too low, and it doesn't feel like an outdoor room. US Main Streets struggle to achieve a 1:3 proportion because transportation engineers force streets to be wider than necessary; at less than 1:6 all sense of enclosure is lost.
When enclosure is lost, the main event on the street is the traffic, making it a less appealing place to walk. When enclosure is gained, either by building closer to the street or building taller, the main event is the public outdoor room created by the enclosure, making it feel more like it's a place for the people walking and biking than the cars driving. Better enclosure also tends to slow traffic because there are more visual cues to process than on a wide-open road.

Window of View

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Shelter

Awnings, galleries, colonnades, and arcades all shelter a building edge from sun and rain to varying degrees, acting as a Gift to the Street (more on that momentarily). Doing so not only protects those walking by from the elements, but on a Main Street or High Street, they also reduce glare on storefront windows so it's easier to see what's for sale inside. This is a win-win for both shoppers and shops.

Goal in the Middle Distance

A Goal in the Middle Distance, or “terminated vista,” as some planners call it, entices you to keep walking past stretches of street that might not have great Walk Appeal. If there are businesses along the street, this benefits the local economy by bringing customers in from further away.

View Changes

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Sidewalk Width

The ideal width of a sidewalk depends on its context, but if sidewalks aren't at least five feet wide, your town isn't serious about walkability, much less Walk Appeal. Two people can't walk comfortably side-by-side on a four-foot sidewalk, and two people passing each other have to turn sideways to pass without bumping each other. A five foot sidewalk is the minimum serious sidewalk, and six feet is better. In the post-Pandemic era (has that begun yet?) an eight-foot sidewalk is better still as people can maintain social distancing. In mixed-use areas, a ten foot sidewalk allows people to shop at modest retail displays, while fourteen feet is the minimum width on which to set up a sidewalk cafe, which can extend to twenty feet or more.

Turning the Corner

A key to Walk Appeal is turning the corner well. Enticing customers from side streets does wonders for neighborhood businesses. There’s a strong retailing misconception that side walls should be blank, but a place will do much better with storefront all along the side wall.

Shade

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Light

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