Wednesday’s warm and sunny weather found Barb Morris strolling north on Michigan Street with her daughter Kambria, working off a few calories en route to her mother’s house.

But Morris said she didn’t usually think of hoofing it when considering her transportation options.

“I guess I should,” she said. “If we walk, we go to visit, or we go to the park. We don’t go to the stores or anything.”

That Morris was making any effort to walk should hearten members of the Lawrence City Commission, whose fondness for “pedestrian transportation” is increasingly shaping how they consider policy and development proposals.

“I think, unfortunately, people generally don’t think of the sidewalks as part of the transportation system,” Mayor David Dunfield said Wednesday. “I think that’s a perception we need to try to change.”

Traffic, snow

Two moments at Tuesday’s commission meeting demonstrated the new mindset:

• Commissioner Boog Highberger expressed skepticism about an “access management plan” designed to ease congestion on major roadways.


Members of the Riedemann family, from left, Chloe, 7, Sherri, Sophia, 3, Dan and Henry, 5, cross Kentucky Street as they walk home to Ohio Street from downtown. Several city commissioners see walking as a major component of the city's transportation system, and they are shaping policy to encourage walking and protect sidewalk access. The Riedemanns were out walking Wednesday.

“My concern is the more we do access management, the more we’re going to create these high-speed corridors that are dangerous for pedestrians, that create streets we don’t want our children to cross,” Highberger said at the meeting.

Commissioners referred the proposal to the Traffic Safety Commission for consideration.

• Highberger, at the end of the meeting, said the city needed to actively enforce a 2-year-old ordinance requiring property owners to shovel their sidewalks after a snow.

City Snow removal ordinance

The city’s policy has been to enforce the ordinance only when complaints are made to City Hall; Highberger said officials should be more aggressive — ensuring that sidewalks are clear along Lawrence’s major corridors.

“We have to encourage our citizens to walk,” he later explained. “They can’t do it if they have six inches of snow to slog across.”

Health, quality of life

The main advantages to increased walking, Dunfield and Highberger said, are threefold:

• It’s friendlier to the environment than fuel-burning vehicles.
• It’s good for walkers’ health.
• It helps build community.

“A lot of community building comes from running into people accidentally, seeing your neighbors, which, if they’re in their cars all the time, you don’t,” Dunfield said. “I know all the people in my neighborhood who walk their dogs.”

Experts at Active Living by Design agree. The program, based at the University of North Carolina, studies how urban environment affects walking habits and gives grants to cities nationwide that take steps to get people out of their cars.

“More and more cities are starting to look at issues of walkability — partly for health but also for quality of life,” said Phil Bors, a project officer with the program. “They’re responding to people’s complaints that they’re stuck without a car.”

“People should be able to walk to a park. They should be able to walk to a school,” he said. “Cities are starting to do better.”

In Seattle, for example, Bors said officials actually were narrowing some roads, forcing drivers to slow down and making it easier for walkers to cross the street.

Actions taken

That hasn’t happened in Lawrence. But the city has been building roundabouts for several years with an eye toward the same end.

And subdivision regulations requiring new housing developments to have a sidewalk on at least one side of the street have long been in place.

“Lawrence is a community that’s always been sensitive to pedestrian and bicycle transportation,” said Bill Ahrens, the city’s transportation planner, “so quite a bit has been done.”

But efforts have increased in recent months, since “smart growth” candidates backed by the Progressive Lawrence Campaign swept into office. Developers are now being asked to provide sidewalks between cul-de-sacs — instead of forcing neighbors to take the longer route along city streets to visit each other.

“You can see it, but it takes five minutes and two miles of driving to get there,” Ahrens said.

Commissioners hope such steps encourage Lawrence residents to think twice about taking the car.

“It’s not as if the city can tell people to get out and walk,” Dunfield said. “All we can really do is try to improve the quality of the infrastructure and do what we can to encourage people in that way.”