I often hear that mixed-use zoning (i.e. Euro-style walkable urban planning) is illegal in the US. Zoning laws will always prioritize auto-centric and oil-friendly infrastructure. But which laws specifically prohibit human scale development and how can we get them repealed? What laws can we enact in their place?
I call it “the cartwheel test”.
Basically if you can do 50 cartwheels, and haven’t passed anything useful yet, it’s not a walkable city.
Maybe a school. Maybe a CVS/Walgreens. Maybe a laundromat. Maybe a movie theater. Maybe a tax place. Maybe a seniors center. Maybe a daycare.
Just anything that SOMEONE is going to find useful.
So that’s an urban density test, with added cartwheel fun.
When selecting a place to live last time I moved, I set up a balanced scorecard (as one does). One of the highly-weighted criteria was “how many places can I sit down and have a beer within a 20-minute walk of my house?” The answer for the place I moved to was 34. Other places I considered scored even higher than that, but lost out on other criteria. For the previous place I’d lived: 3, though if you expanded to 30 minutes, it was 8. Still not bad if you have a bicycle. English (and many other European) cities are far more concentrated than those in the US. In the US, the closest you’d get are San Francisco, New York, Boston and a few other eastern cities.
The ironic thing is that I quit drinking beer a couple years ago. Luckily, other services like cafes, restaurants and coffee houses follow a similar pattern.
You must do a lot of cartwheels!