Colleen O’Brien: Seattle’s new walkability maps

If you’ve ever vacationed in a city where you are within a 15-minute walk of whatever you may need, then you know how awesome it can feel.

Instead of starting up your car, driving through traffic, circling to find a parking spot, and then finally arriving at your destination, you can instead strap on your comfiest walking shoes, fit in some exercise, take in the sights and sounds of your neighborhood, and access businesses with ease.

Capitol Hill resident Nat Henry loves his neighborhood. He loves it so much that he decided to develop an interactive website showing everything around him and how long it would take to get there by walking.

The idea grew beyond Capitol Hill to include other Seattle neighborhoods. When he released his creation to the public, he got such great feedback that he quit his full-time job at the University of Washington and went all in on Close.City.

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“I think that people wouldn’t be surprised to learn that areas like Capitol Hill, downtown Ballard, places like North Beacon Hill, are all very walkable, and you can meet most of your daily needs within a five or 15-minute walk,” Henry said. “There were some other neighborhoods that were surprising that are these very dense built-up areas that we think of in South Lake Union, or in Belltown. These are some of the densest neighborhoods in the city. But they don’t have the elementary schools, they don’t have the public libraries. And to get them, you either have to go across downtown or walk up Queen Anne Hill.”

What he didn’t anticipate happening as the maps came together was how valuable this data would be for city planners as the idea of a “15-minute neighborhood” gains popularity. It’s the idea that you should be within a 15-minute walk for daily services like groceries or health care.

“Zoning is the number one determinant of what people can and can’t do when they want to add an amenity or be close to a park,” Henry explained. “Every 10 years, Seattle has to update its comprehensive plan and basically lay out a vision for how the city is going to grow and change over time. And if five years from now, you want to open a supermarket in your neighborhood, and you found interested investors, and you’re ready to take the leap, you also have to go to the city and say, does this fit into the guidelines that were laid out in this comprehensive plan?”

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It’s a chicken and egg question once again – do you build up a neighborhood with amenities and hope people find the housing they need to support those businesses? Or do you build housing first then slowly add amenities?

“Seattle is considering in its next comprehensive plan, these neighborhood centers, which will be just small pockets of commercial retail that will then support the surrounding neighborhood so that more people can take walking trips to get to those amenities instead of driving to a different neighborhood,” Henry said.

Not driving as much is key to Henry’s motivation to get this map built out – and he’s already gone national with it and has interest from other city leaders on how they can use his map to plan their development. Seattle hasn’t yet reached out to Henry.

“Right now, Seattle’s car pollution is the number one source of greenhouse gas emissions in the city. And the majority of that is personal vehicle trips. Seventy-five percent of people say that they use cars just to get to their daily needs,” Henry told us. “If we could find a way to make the areas we live in more friendly to walkability, we might be able to have people saying ‘maybe we don’t need that that second car for the family,’ or ‘maybe we can just walk this trip instead of driving it.'”

Listen to Seattle’s Morning News with Dave Ross and Colleen O’Brien weekday mornings from 5-9 a.m. on KIRO Newsradio, 97.3 FM. Subscribe to the podcast here.

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