I just learned that the US has a "National Walk to Work Day." And it happens to be today, Friday, April 7, 2023. It was started in 2004 by the federal government and the American Podiatric Medical Association -- because, you know, walking is good for your feet -- and the idea is that since so few Americans actually walk to work, we should encourage them to do it at least one day of the year. Back in 2019, the figure was that less than 3% of Americans do it on average.

While I'm sure that there are some good intentions here, I'm guessing that the impact of this national day is probably somewhere between zero and "I guess I'll park in a farther spot at the office park today." The reality is that a day like this exists because we have spent the last 75 years, or even longer, making it exceedingly difficult to navigate our cities without a car. So it is equal to, "let me speak out of the other side of my mouth for a day."

But we also know that a real and meaningful solution is pretty simple to achieve (though clearly not easy). Build smaller streets and build more densely, especially next to transit. (Would you add anything to this?) So I think it's time for a new kind of national day. Maybe it's a day where every dense development proposal next to transit just gets automatically approved. It would be a national day for "this took too long, so here you go."

I don't know, this probably needs some work. I'm open to other ideas here.

Traffic is a big deal when it comes to real estate development. Residents are almost always concerned about the additional traffic that a development might bring to their community. And who can really blame them. They’re frustrated by traffic as it is in the city and so they naturally assume that more residents in their community will translate into more cars on the road.

But as natural as this reaction might seem, I don’t believe that opposing intensification is the right long-term solution. In fact, I would argue that the question of traffic is a bit of a red herring. Because as Toronto’s Chief Planner Jennifer Keesmaat explains in this blog post, density can actually go a long way to reducing traffic congestion. And it does that by placing people closer to where they work, and by creating an environment that’s more conducive to other forms of mobility: walking, biking, and public transport.

So instead of becoming fixated on traffic, I think there’s another, perhaps more relevant, question that we should be asking ourselves: Will this development, over the longer term, help to encourage a modal split that leads to more transit usage and less driving?

Because if it doesn’t, well then we’re not doing anything to correct the problem we already have. In fact, if we don’t allow intensification to happen, it means we’re simply pushing demand outwards, horizontally. And the more you push people out of a city, the more likely they are to drive. In which case we’re only delaying the inevitable – which is more traffic.