New Orleans: Essentially the most walkable metropolis within the nation?
By Emilie Bahr
I noticed a teaser to an article in Journey + Leisure journal lately declaring a sure southern metropolis probably the most walkable within the U.S. As an nearly lifelong southerner and energetic transportation nerd, the headline caught my consideration, as did the picture that accompanied it: Wrought-iron balconies dripping in ferns. Brightly-hued stucco facades on beautiful outdated buildings. Might they be speaking about my hometown? I puzzled.
I clicked on the hyperlink to find that, in reality, New Orleans was being held up as probably the most walkable metropolis within the nation – the fourth most walkable on the earth! And I laughed out loud.
I’m a proud Crescent Metropolis partisan. I’m ever able to make the case for my metropolis’s significance and exceptionalism and have been identified to recite to guests and newcomers the Tennessee Williams quote all longtime New Orleanians know by coronary heart: “America has solely three cities: New York, San Francisco and New Orleans…”
New Orleans appears, sounds, tastes and feels in contrast to anyplace else on this nation, if not the planet. However in the event you come right here anticipating to search out the “most walkable” metropolis, you might be more likely to be about as stunned as you’d in the event you got here anticipating to search out the “best” or “least humid” or “most teetotaling.”
Naming New Orleans “most walkable” is a testomony, maybe, to simply how unhealthy off the American panorama is for walkability, although I might simply tick off a handful of locations better-suited to the mantle (together with, because it so occurs, New York and San Francisco.)
It’s true that New Orleans is extra walkable than your common American metropolis. It’s outdated, based in 1718, round a century earlier than the arrival of the Mannequin T, and we profit from a transportation community and footprint that had been largely established earlier than the arrival of the automobile. There are a lot of neighborhoods wherein it’s potential to stroll to get locations, and in some elements of city, these walks might be fairly nice. We’re additionally a poor metropolis with a charge of automobile possession that’s under the nationwide common, leaving many no alternative however to get round by foot, bike or transit.
Even so, I’m sorry to say that now we have turned our metropolis over to automobiles about as a lot as every other, as an unsuspecting vacationer from Seattle or Portland will uncover upon trying to cross the road; because the Metropolis Council made clear just a few years in the past when its French Quarter consultant efficiently argued for the elimination – at important expense – of a protected bike lane in one other a part of his district; and as we see 12 months after 12 months in a pedestrian fatality charge that stands among the many highest within the nation.
Just a few weeks in the past, the newly-minted police chief, a girl whom I’ve met and respect, made headlines for putting two pedestrians along with her police automobile within the French Quarter. The information protection centered on the truth that she handed a breathalyzer check performed per protocol and that the pedestrians had been apparently going to be okay. I anticipated that the incident may spark new requires restrictions on driving by the Vieux Carre – the oldest and most-visited neighborhood within the metropolis and one constructed fairly actually for strolling – one thing the mayor unsuccessfully lobbied for just a few years again.
As an alternative, the feedback posted on social media spoke to our auto myopia.
“Pedestrians deal with the French Quarter prefer it’s some type of pedestrian mall,” learn a consultant one.
A part of me needs that Journey + Leisure had declared my tourism-dependent metropolis the worst for pedestrians. Possibly that will have gotten coverage makers’ consideration.