This past week, we learned another benefit in walkable communities: They provide an escape route.
My minivan on the afternoon of February 13th. It’s in there somewhere.
The snow fell heavier and faster in the Roanoke Valley than it had in years. Within 24 hours I had nearly 22 inches piled at my back door. The parts of the road where intrepid 4-wheel drive monstrosities had manage to navigate had already been filled and softened by the time the sun set Thursday night. Over the course of the day Wednesday, Thursday, and into Friday morning, localities worked hard to clear the roads and keep them clear, but it was a losing battle. Warnings went out repeatedly from news sources to stay inside and off the roads. Many people were trapped in their homes waiting for the snow to stop and the plows to come.
Unless, of course, you lived in the handful of neighborhoods where you could walk everywhere you needed to go.
A story in the Roanoke Times on Thursday profiled the busy businesses in very walkable Grandin Village neighborhood. Updates from MyRoanoke, the City of Roanoke’s email notification system, regularly informed readers that the streets of the central business district – an area now boasting over 1300 residents – were cleared long before the residential streets in the rest of the city had been touched. In my own neighborhood, even though my car looked like some kind of exotic arctic beetle, I was still able to get around to visit friends and the local village center.
With certain areas of the valley bustling (relatively speaking) with activity while others lie under a quiet shroud of white, it became obvious that people weren’t snowed in, cars were, and if a car was the only way you were able to connect with the rest of the world you were in deep trouble.
Snow events like this are rare – it’ll probably be another decade before we see anything like this – but it highlights a concept that more communities are looking at in conjunction with sustainability: resiliency. Sustainability is the ability of a community to live within its means, so to speak, to make good use of the resources it has available and be good stewards of those resources to pass them on to future generations. Resiliency is the ability for a community to weather and bounce back from adverse situations – whether economic, social, or geological, or others. What we saw in the snow storm is how these two these intersect: walkable communities and places with village-center models having amenities and resources near where people live are not only better at using the resources they have (e.g., not requiring long drives or expensive fuel refills to access basic needs like milk and bread) but also make it easier to deal with massive, if short term, disruptions to the status quo.
To put it another way, making sure that people have options other than driving two tons of steel to get where they need to go is a really good thing.
