CAN CAPE BECOME A 'WALKABLE COMMUNITY?'

For 50 years, cities have been planning streets and neighborhoods with automobiles in mind, but times are changing.

Dan Burden, director of Walkable Communities, says communities across the country are looking at ways to encourage walking and bicycle riding. He spoke at a daylong conference Friday at Cape Girardeau's Osage Center. City planners and engineers from area communities attended.

Friday's program was Burden's fifth this week in Missouri.

"We've been designing cities for cars, and that doesn't work, not even for the cars," he said. "There's too much traffic and no place to park."

Cities are designed requiring people to drive everywhere.

"Schools are in the wrong places. Parks are in the wrong places, or we don't have any parks," Burden said. "But the trend is changing."

Communities need to focus on people instead of automobiles when designing neighborhoods and streets, he said.

Burden recommends that cities build narrower streets, insist on sidewalks and encourage tree plantings along roadways. These factors will cause traffic naturally to travel slower. It's safer to travel these roads, he said, and road designs on a smaller scale are less expensive to build.

Designing a Walkable Community, Burden said, encourages downtown revitalization.

"People are tired of automobiles ruling their lives," Burden said.

Automobiles, speed and noise dominate roads so much that people report they don't know others living on their own blocks.

City planners decades ago, who designed the oldest sections of town, had the right idea, Burden said.

"They had common sense and no money to waste," he said. "As we get back to those ideas we will see the centers of town come to life. We will see urban in-fill, and we will stop sprawling to the suburbs."

Sidewalks, walking trails, bicycle lanes all encourage a mode of transportation outside the automobile, he said.

"I know we will see a lot more of this. It's a quiet trend, but it's coming on fast," he said.