Urban designer David Goodman, 40, heads Arlington County’s bicycle and pedestrian programs. The Brookings Institution ranked the Washington region first among the country’s major cities in the number of “walkable places,” two years after the American Podiatric Medical Association named Arlington one of the best U.S. walking cities.
What makes Arlington so walkable?
One big reason, we have the Orange Line between Rosslyn and Ballston, all the underground stations close together. You increase the density without expanding the roads. It attracts retail and other uses that make people want to walk.
What makes people want to walk?
People like to walk where other people are walking. It’s human nature. If you give people a choice of walking through a trail away from everybody and walking on a sidewalk between interesting shops with stuff to see, people will take the sidewalk. And people will walk longer distances. At Wal-Mart, people will fight over parking spaces, but in an urban environment, people will easily walk a quarter-mile to get to where they’re going. Can you imagine a Wal-Mart where you have to park a quarter-mile away?
You were the urban designer for Palm Beach County. How are things different?
The big difference is the starting point. In Arlington we’re starting with a well-connected prewar street network. Residents are very knowledgeable about what makes for good civic environments and have a good sense of what’s important. Palm Beach County is the land of gated communities where nobody wanted to see or hear their neighbors. Engineers were only interested in moving more cars faster. What I was doing down there was damage control. Here we don’t have to sell ideas of good pedestrian design. We can work on refining it.
