Walking the Walk

Why Billy Penn's grid design is good for your health.

by Bruce Schimmel

Sean Hamel was losing weight, and he couldn't figure out why. Last summer, living in San Diego, the 6-foot 27-year-old had bulked out at just over 200, the most he's ever weighed. Now, seven months later, living in Center City, Hamel is happy at 177, which is normal for him.

So, Hamel wondered, where did the fat go?

Hamel was eating the same. He hadn't joined a gym, but he felt great and was otherwise very healthy as 23 pounds melted from his frame.

The difference was walking. Living in San Diego, Hamel drove to his job. Living at 20th and Walnut streets, he now walks to Old City and back five days a week to his job as a City Paper classifieds account executive. Each trip takes a half hour, an hour of walking a day, which is twice the half-hour the surgeon general recommends. Hamel says he's in pretty good shape.

"I've never had a gym membership in my life," he says, "and as long as I live within one or two miles of work, I never will."

Instead of a gym, Hamel simply walks, commuting and exercising at the same time. And what he's exercising on, if not living his life inside of, is William Penn's original 1680s street grid design. The ancient design works for walking in part because it is scaled for people and for smaller, slower vehicles.

According to a study in the current issue of Prevention magazine, Philadelphia ranks eighth in walkability for cities with a population greater than 500,000 — all the more remarkable since parts of this city are clearly unfriendly to pedestrians.

Walking to work is rare in America: only 3 percent of the nation's workers do so. But for Philadelphians living in and around Center City, some 37 to 56 percent, depending on which adjacent neighborhoods are included, regularly walk to work.

And, as Hamel discovered, living in a walkable world can be good for your health. Very good, in fact.

According to a recent study in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, people who live in walkable places are almost 2.5 times more likely to get the 30 minutes per day they need. In walkable places, 38 percent will meet the guideline; in less walkable places, only 18 percent do.

For Larry Frank, the study's author, Philadelphia's central district has everything to make a place walkable. The streets are laid out in a compact grid, so it's easy to go directly from place to place. There's a mix of homes, retail shops and workplaces. And while drivers may curse getting clogged in tiny, cobblestone streets, Frank says that traffic jams actually increase Philly's walkability, when walking is faster than driving.

For Penn public policy scholar Mark Alan Hughes, central Philly is a walkers' paradise. In his own unpublished research, Hughes found that the city's central pedestrian core, which in this case included University City, has the largest concentration of pedestrian commuters in the country. In the 10 census blocks he surveyed, about 56 percent of its residents walk to work.

We have walkable neighborhoods, says Hughes, because there is a central business district, a mix of historic and modern housing, and two large universities.

Hughes also credits the 335-year-old grid design for the area's walkability, which he says grew in part out of William Penn's utopian and democratic ideals.

"The legacy we've inherited from William Penn gave us safe streets with clean, right angles,"says Hughes. "The design is very Quaker. It is a design that discourages pre-eminent streets or dominant vistas. The design is democratic, because all the streets begin and end in the same way, they're all equal. And you can't have more intersecting streets than a grid."

And one of the best things about Penn's design, says Hughes, even if unintended, is that narrow streets make life harder for car drivers. Hughes commutes by foot from the Art Museum area to work in University City. For him, cars are the enemy in a battle that pedestrians are losing.

"You have that right-turn-on-red law," he says. "You've got SUV drivers who can't see over their hoods. There are drivers who play chicken with pedestrians, where the acceptable buffer between your kneecap and a car bumper has shrunk to six inches."

To protect pedestrians, Hughes wants to make the streets less friendly to cars. For instance, traffic lights should be reprogrammed to create an interval when only pedestrians may cross.

Even building design and development should discourage cars. "Every time we build a parking garage or a single, massive building the curbs cuts for driveways, you're killing the sidewalk," he says.

Seems like the choice would have been plain to Billy Penn.