Good Fences May Make Good Neighbors, but Bad Neighborhoods

Steve Offutt has a great post on CommuterPageBlog about how sometimes developments are built with unnecessary fences that hinder the kind of connectivity that makes walking and biking easy. OK, he didn’t mention biking, but it’s the same idea.

the end of Forest Drive almost touches the parking lot of the
apartment building on Jefferson Street (although it’s at a somewhat
higher elevation). The
building, instead of installing a staircase that would allow
neighborhood people to easily walk from the neighborhood to the shops
on Jefferson St., including the Giant Food and Starbucks, blocked it
with a fence (see two photos). In the same way, the fence prevents
residents of the apartment building from being able to walk around the
neighborhood, say to walk their dog or just for enjoyment.

There are a couple of areas like this on my commute where a road ends a few tantalizing feet from making a useful connection. In one case I off-road it for it about 20 feet (connecting these two parts of Margo Lane) on a billygoat trail. And as Offutt points out, there are many more.

There are certainly thousands of these small linkages that could be
unblocked or created. Each one might open up pedestrian opportunities
to a few people or a few score of people. But all multiplied together
one could imagine literally thousands of short car trips being
eliminated and quality of life for those people improved.