However, the Brookings report itself has some major flaws. I know I’m going to sound like a major hater here, but somehow out of 30 metropolitan regions nationwide, the Miami-Ft Lauderdale-West Palm Beach metro ranked 8th place – above metros like New York and Philadelphia! For anyone who knows anything about cities and metropolitan regions, this should immediately raise a red flag.
So how is such a ranking possible, you ask? It comes down to Brookings’ flawed methodology for calculating walkable areas in each metro. Instead of calculating the percentage of area that is walkable in each metropolitan region, the Institution instead chose to go by arbitrary districts or neighborhoods, which vary considerably in size and functionality. For example, both Center City, Philadelphia and Coconut Grove, Miami were chosen as walkable locales within their respective metros. However, despite Center City being much, much larger than Coconut Grove, the two areas count the same.
In New York, which had the highest number of walkable locales at 21, it’s even more arbitrary. Districts that roughly correlate with popular Manhattan neighborhoods were chosen, leaving most of the rest of the city out of the report. This, in effect, is saying that Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx, home to dozens and dozens of the most walkable neighborhoods in North America, are less worthy than Dadeland or Sugarland Town Center in suburban Houston (that’s redundant, by the way). I’m sorry, but that is at best arbitrary and at worst completely inaccurate.
This is disappointing coming from Brookings, one of the most respected (and one of my favorite) think tanks that regularly deals with urban policy and smart growth principles. A much more accurate depiction of an area’s walkability would be to calculate the percentage of both the city and the metropolitan area that is walkable. This allows for a fair, one-to-one comparison between all cities and metropolitan regions regardless of size or population. If this had been used instead as apart of the report’s methodology, I’m sure that only a very small fraction of the Miami-Ft. Lauderdale-West Palm Beach metro would be considered walkable.
Alas, it is very encouraging to see walkability becoming more mainstream again. It’s amazing what happens when A) people become disenchanted with the soullessness of sprawl and B) quality urbanism is built instead. Believe it or not, this is what Miami 21 is all about – making the City of Miami more walkable and pedestrian-oriented. This is why it is critical that we support it, because even though it is not a perfect code, it is far, far better than anything in place right now. Furthermore, it gives us the only fighting chance at actually making Miami into a high quality, pedestrian-oriented city.
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