Ron Eck, Senior advisor, West Virginia Local Technical Assistance Program (2013)
Interview transcript
Most walkability studies you find on the Internet would be good in Chicago or Morgantown, but not in rural West Virginia. So an education professor, Jim Rye, and I made a rural walkability tool.
We made it for a project called The Wise Woman, designed to improve the health of rural West Virginia women. We were tasked with developing an assessment tool that would apply to rural areas, because most of the available tools apply to urban areas. So I put together some things that would be relevant to walking rural areas. I also wanted to also give people the idea that, hey, just because there’s no track near me, I can still walk.
I remember one summer evening, we went up to Brewston Mills, and we walked the town and tweaked and refined the tool. It probably could still use some revision…
I have an “Elements of Walkability” checklist. It’s things to look for. I use it as I walk about a community. No community’s going to have all these things. It’s to give folks ideas for what to look f or…. (He’ll send it to me).. Sample items:
Well designed walkways
Intersections that respect both pedestrians, bikers and
Well-maintained walkways
Inviting gathering place
Efficient connection to transit
Can people do their own walkability study?: As long as they have a good checklist and some folks who understand the relationship between the built environment and walking. For instance, the importance of maintainance of sidewalks. An example would be: In many WV communities a lot of our sidewalks are right up against the curb. And it would be nice if there were a couple of feet as a buffer.
I’m doing a walkability study now for the city of Richwood. If you go in their downtown – and this is common throughout the state – storefronts that were nice in the past, oftentimes what’s done is they brick the windows shut or block them up to a certain height. Or they put a mirror-like film on their windows that blocks out sunlight. All those things kind of destroy the concept of eyes on the street. And it makes it very unfriendly to somebody walking down the street.
And the way windows are make a big difference in how inviting it is for somebody walking down the street. But I’m not sure that the average person understands that.
So that’s one of the things that I bring up. On one street, all of the old store fronts are no longer “eyes on the street” for pedestrians. That’s a concept that relates to security and visibility. The idea is that if people are walking on the sidewalk, if there are windows in the front of the bldgs facing the street, people feel more secure because they have the feeling that people are looking out for them and they feel safer. Plus, it’s more inviting if you have a downtown with interesting window displays, versus walking down a street where all the windows have been boarded up. It’s not stimulating, and it’s depressing.
But then another Richwood street is a model for what you should do with empty buildings. Even though almost every storefront is empty, in most of them, they’ve put visual displays about the history of Richwood. So even though they were empty, I stopped to look at each one.
Can people can do their own walkability study? Well, yes, but there are some places where professional help can do you good: For instance, there’s one street in Richwood where, if you look down that street, the whole area is asphalt. They paved it all. As a walker, there’s so much unrelenting asphalt, I didn’t really know where to walk to cross safely.
It was obvious that the automobile must be the most important thing there, not the pedestrian or person on a bicycle.
Something like that affects storm water runoff and heat in the summer. So if you can reduce the amt of paved area, it benefits everyone.
Are people more interested in walkability? Ron’s gut feeling: There was revived interest in walkability three or four years ago, and that had sort of dropped off, and now it’s coming back again. Friday I got a call from a fellow in Elkins. Their Planning Commission wants me to come over. …