ann arbor is overrated.

Walking the Walk

Geoff Larcom is thrilled at Ann Arbor’s ranking on Prevention’s “best walking cities” list. Why is A2 such a great place to walk? Larcom illustrates:

A recent Friday night is an example. I got out of work around 10:30 p.m. after an evening shift. I took a favorite route, from The Ann Arbor News through Central Campus to The Village Corner store on South University Avenue and back.

On the way, I passed a vintage downtown theater, a world-class concert venue, a landmark brick arch, several quirky stores and a law school with classic Gothic architecture.

It was snowing big, fluffy flakes, and U-M students were still on break.

So I had the streets to myself. It was one of those cozy, bright nights when it feels as if you own downtown.

Many of you know that sensation, yet another reason Ann Arbor ranks as a top place to take a walk.

So that’s why A2 is such an amazing place for pedestrians — because you can stroll to a convenience store on a freezing night and pass some closed stores and a law school, without anyone else walking around to spoil your solitude.

51 Responses to “Walking the Walk”

What is your definition of pedestrian friendly? Some of us are still curious.
posted by Me on March 13th, 2008 at 11:22 am
It would involve affordable housing close to town, good public transportation and things like grocery stores and drugstores that you can walk to. A2 does okay on the second of these, for a city of its size.
posted by ann arbor is overrated on March 13th, 2008 at 11:27 am
good point aaio, i’m still trying to figure out where one goes to buy an aspirin downtown.
posted by she on March 13th, 2008 at 11:56 am
The Prescription Shop on Washington, until they move out. Expect to wait while they fill a hundred prescriptions first, though. Terrible service.
posted by a2oldie on March 13th, 2008 at 12:42 pm
Some people find joy in the simplest things. Some people couldn’t find joy if it was tattooed to the back of their hands. Those people are always the first to say that where I happen to find my joy really isn’t. A large percentage of those people are about half my age. Where do they get this uncanny ability to define what pleases me? Where do they get the gall to poke me in the ribs and tell me how this place sucks so much that it’s the black hole of the midwest?

It’s not a dirty city, it’s fairly well lit, there are sidewalks and curb cuts almost everywhere, it’s buildings are diverse and it actually has neighborhoods. If you know your way around and can get out of the car route mentality, the neighborhoods adjacent to downtown offer very pleasant walking to and from downtown. If you like people, Main Street, State St and the campus area are great places to walk most every night year around.

Some people just do not get the gestalt of this place… Ann Arbor has a sense of place for those who are part of this place. For some it’s just a stopover.

I guess Ann Arbor is overrated because we don’t have Toscanini’s Ice Cream.
posted by mucho gusto on March 13th, 2008 at 1:13 pm
I like the path Larcom walked, but I am having a hard time why he would walk to VC and *back*.

So let me get this straight, after a busy day of finding the news, he goes over to VC to get (what?) then walks all the way back to the news, and then what? drives home? walks off in another direction? i don’t get it…
posted by Fred Zimmerman on March 13th, 2008 at 1:29 pm
Hey, some people just enjoy walking. I would consider myself well out of the “car route mentality,” not having driven in eight years, and while I do think that downtown Ann Arbor can be a very pleasant place to walk around, it can get old after doing it for four years. Nobody, to my knowledge, is suggesting that this place is the “black hole of the Midwest” (I lived in Ohio for three years, and the smart odds, I’m told, are on Youngstown), but I think most of the “large percentage” of people believe the place to be overrated because they didn’t expect Ann Arbor’s vaunted “progressivism” to be so relatively skin-deep, as demonstrated in the countless and tireless posts on this blog. Simply because someone happens to live in Ann Arbor, that doesn’t mean they’ve waived their right to criticize.
posted by Lazaro on March 13th, 2008 at 1:42 pm
If you like Village Corner better check it out soon, that whole block has a date with the bulldozer to make way for another megadevelopment of yuppie puppy luxury student housing. After the Zingermannization of the Big Ten Party Store to Morgan & York, the Village Corner is possibly the last of the old style locally owned booze merchants, owned and operated by people who know about and enjoy drinking. Most downtown and campus area hootch shops are owned by arabs or chaldeans who never touch the stuff, 95% phoney like everything else in this town.
posted by herb on March 13th, 2008 at 1:53 pm
“Some people find joy in the simplest things.”

Agreed, and despite the sarcasm I think aaio and the rest of us understand that someone could find joy in a a walk past the law school (or whatever).

It’s just that “our town has some pleasant walks” sets a rather low bar for “walkability”.

And from e.g. the point of view of affordability and environmental impact, what matters more is how easy it is to use walking as a primary form of transportation, and how many people in practice actually do so.

A few of us do, and it’s possible, so Ann Arbor doesn’t fail by that definition, but it’s not a great success, either. Hence, overrated….
posted by Bruce Fields on March 13th, 2008 at 1:57 pm
I’m curious to hear what cities in Michigan, besides Ann Arbor, some of you have lived in. I mean, I agree that this city is far from the ideal of walking friendly, but compared to the rest of Michigan (and I do mean ALL of it) it’s pretty damn good. I’m sure that thought has come up here before and maybe even discussed, but what I’m really curious to hear is how many of you have actually experienced a city outside of Ann Arbor for a long period of time? I’m sure there are some that have and I’m sure there are some that have never been anywhere else in Michigan. Those are the people who I doubt understand just how wide the gap is. If they did they might understand why people are a little defensive of this place.

And please don’t give me the argument about this is how Ann Arbor sees itself. That’s how it sells itself to get people to come here and spend their money.
posted by Me on March 13th, 2008 at 2:07 pm
I’m not a native of Michigan, but I have lived, cumulatively, more than twenty years in East Lansing, and three years (law school) in Detroit. I didn’t have a car in either place, so I walked a lot and became very familiar with the local public transit.

In the Lansing area, for a while, I was a member of the transportation authority (CATA) board, the only one who actually relied on the bus service.

East Lansing, Detroit, and Ann Arbor each have their charms and drawbacks. Right now, Ann Arbor is where I prefer to be.
posted by Larry Kestenbaum on March 13th, 2008 at 2:26 pm
“I’m curious to hear what cities in Michigan, besides Ann Arbor, some of you have lived in.”

Personally, none. I’m sorry to hear that Ann Arbor is the best the state can do; you may well be right. But the survey under discussion is national.
posted by Bruce Fields on March 13th, 2008 at 3:29 pm
The survey is national and Ann Arbor was rated third. So, if you think we are so miserable, what about other cities across the nation? Ann Arbor is indeed very walkable, whether you walk all the time instead of using a car, or park your car or take the bus and then walk throughout the downtown.
posted by from a REAL oldie on March 13th, 2008 at 3:35 pm
“…But the survey under discussion is national.”

So I’ve attempted to take the discussion in a direction other the same boring ass “Ann Arbor shouldn’t be considered very walkable” discussion that AAIO brings up so much and always goes in the same direction. So What?
posted by Me on March 13th, 2008 at 3:37 pm
An objective measure is from http://www.walkscore.com which counts walkable destinations in your area.

My office downtown is 98/100 on walkability.
My home in Lower Burns Park is 71/100.
Plymouth and Green gets 55/100.
Zeeb and Liberty gets 5/100.

Ideally you could generate a map (a heat map of walkability) to give you a sense for what parts of town are better than others, and then correct for reality.
posted by Edward Vielmetti on March 13th, 2008 at 4:15 pm
Yeah, after having lived in Cambridge for 2 years now, I don’t take anything AAIO says seriously anymore. This overpriced shithole gives new meaning to the word “overrated.”
posted by Golightly on March 13th, 2008 at 4:18 pm
This post cracked me up.
posted by KJC on March 13th, 2008 at 4:39 pm
oh and one more thing–i’m so relieved I don’t get “the gestalt” of this place! sounds scary.
posted by KJC on March 13th, 2008 at 5:12 pm
“…But the survey under discussion is national.”

As if aaio has a rule that we stay on topic.

Oh. I just walked up to the PFC and then back home to my hut. It was beautiful and I saw several people who had come out of hibernation.

“shithole”? I said “blackhole”. The rest of us are waiting for Golightly to leave… Soon. Don’t let the door hit you on the ass on the way out, bub.
posted by mucho gusto (surreal oldie) on March 13th, 2008 at 7:09 pm
I do think that Ann Arbor does pretty well on the winter sidewalk score… in my current locale (a far-North suburb of Chicago) the sidewalk is just a convenient place for businesses to store the snow they had plowed out of the parking lot. Huge piles of snow, absolutely no way to avoid walking in the very-busy street. In the summer I’m close to things… in the winter it’s completely different.
posted by Scott on March 13th, 2008 at 7:58 pm
I did that walkscore thing.

My home on the OWS scored 51.
My work by the hospital got a 63.
The neighborhood we’re moving to in Baltimore: 77.

We’ve been perfectly happy living and walking here. I can bike to work, and we walk to Kerrytown, PFC, etc. every weekend as well as to campus for the stuff going on there. I just wish the place was bigger, but what are you going to do?
posted by OWSider on March 13th, 2008 at 7:58 pm
My home (in Ypsilanti) rated a walkscore of 68. I think it should be a bit higher given that within just a few blocks’ walk we have elementary, middle, and high schools, as well as a university, a bicycle shop, two grocery stores, three bakeries, three convenience stores, countless parks, restaurants, coffee shops, second-hand stores, etc. Having previously lived in Ann Arbor, as well as Livonia, Holland (MI), and Lexington, KY, I think Ypsi is one of the most walkable places, while Ann Arbor is far more bike-friendly.
posted by cmadler on March 13th, 2008 at 9:19 pm
Damn MG if you could read you would see that Golightly is agreeing with you and the shithole he’s refering to is Cambridge not A2
posted by andy on March 14th, 2008 at 2:23 am
What two grocery stores in Ypsi? I thought there was only one.
posted by from a REAL oldie on March 14th, 2008 at 7:46 am
Relying on public transportation isn’t walking. Sorry.

Unless it’s being taken into account as a backup, emergency service for when you realize you’re too cold, tired, and drunk to walk back. And in that case, The Ride doesn’t exactly show up at the first sign of the bat signal.
posted by man invents wheel! on March 14th, 2008 at 8:54 am
Mucho makes some good points. I sometimes wonder if the time of AAIO has passed. The site just can’t keep up.

Over the last few years, more and more new studies keep coming out saying A2 is a great place; top three for walking in the NATION; what was it from Bicycle Magazine last year (?) top 20 (?) for cycling; Best Place to Live # 6 in another big study ranking cities, 3rd smartest city in Forbes, etc. All this in the face of a comatose state economy.

The accolades keep piling up and people on this site keep making the same lame excuses as to why it can’t be true.

These are all independent studies so really, how do you explain it? Is there some great conspiracy run from the basement of city hall? Are payments being made? But who even knows when these studies are going on?

A2 is a great place to live, it’s not a big city and it’s not cheap but that’s because so many people recognize it as a great place to live, get it?

Somebody is doing something right here, maybe we should all just live with it., enjoy it even. Oh yea, I guess we are, were still here.
posted by Dustin on March 14th, 2008 at 9:48 am
“These are all independent studies so really, how do you explain it?”

Um, no, actually, there’s one specific guy behind most of those best places studies — AAIO has written about him before. Moreover, there’s some methodological crap (plus subtle racism) which will always tend to hand out high ranks to low-density upper-middle-class white-bread places. And this barrage of seemingly “independent” high rankings only reinforce the often-irritating smugness here.

All that being said, I like living in Ann Arbor. We have topnotch resources in terms of libraries and entertainment, yet life here is not so back-stabbingly competitive as it is on the East Coast. Midwestern values like personal openness and honesty mean something here. Michigan, for all its many faults, is one of the least corrupt major states, and the only one with 10 cent bottle deposits and meaningful no-fault auto insurance.

Plus, I have to confess, I love snow.

Speaking only for myself, I find it hard to imagine wanting to live anywhere else.
posted by Larry Kestenbaum on March 14th, 2008 at 10:15 am
That walkscore gizmo is pretty cute. It even knows that I live near Knight’s Market, which is impressive because I lived near Knight’s Market for years without knowing it was there.

It does not, however, know that I work near Dominick’s so it’s missing some data.

Home: 94 (That’s the same score as if I lived at the Space Needle in Seattle, but with no elevator, so I can actually get in and out of my house faster).

Work: 89
posted by Parking Structure Dude! on March 14th, 2008 at 10:16 am
I’ll second Larry’s comment, with the addendum that among the attractions of the area are certain guileless public servants.

And our ten cent bottle return kicks the ass of everybody else’s bottle return laws.
posted by Parking Structure Dude! on March 14th, 2008 at 10:24 am
Maybe AA keeps increasing in walkability, rideability etc. rankings because the rest of the US keeps spreading out and getting worse. Anyway, my neighborhood in New Orleans gets a 89. Last night after driving home from work I rode my bike to Audubon Park along the street-car route. After the ride I poured myself a glass of wine for the stroll to the neighborhood pizza joint. Our nice cool spring night felt like an AA summer, and I was reminded of playing outside as a kid growing up in Ann Arbor.

Maybe Ann Arbor _is_ Overrated, but not all the activities found therein.
posted by Joesilicon on March 14th, 2008 at 12:00 pm
I hope people appreciate the walkability of A2… I personally spent about $3,000 to fix the sidewalks in front of my house and they weren’t even that bad.

(ok, it wasn’t voluntary).
posted by StarChild the Lurker on March 14th, 2008 at 12:07 pm
So Bruce, define great success. If “great success” is the yardstick, then planet Earth is overrated, even though I am ecstatic to be here, now. I suspect that Bruce, who seeks a place of “great success” (so as not to be over or underrated), will find fault everywhere and thus not be happy anywhere.

I apologize to Golightly if indeed it was Cambridge, but I like Cambridge too. My comment still stands for the Ann Arbor haters out there who whine about it and and cannot leave this place soon enough.

Gestalt? (out of context from Wikipedia) “the whole is different than the sum of its parts”.

For those who have a hard time seeing, exploring, can stand still in one place long enough, or refuse to observe anything deeper than what lies on the surface, Ann Arbor has an underrated gestalt where the whole is markedly (yet positively I believe) different than the sum of its many parts. But this is only observable if you are open and willingly take the time to appreciate what’s here rather than compare it to that green grass you crave on the other side of the fence.
posted by mucho gusto (surreal oldie) on March 14th, 2008 at 1:31 pm
The only places I’ve lived on my own (as in, not with my parents) are 5 years in Portland, Oregon, and 13 years (yipes) in Ann Arbor.

There’s lots of people and stuff that I like in Ann Arbor, and I don’t claim Portland as paradise, but any metric that rates Ann Arbor as more walkable than Portland (or even puts it vaguely in the same league) is pretty weird.
posted by Bruce Fields on March 14th, 2008 at 1:57 pm
My version of “walkability” probably differs from a lot of others’ as I walk pretty much everywhere in a three-or-four mile radius from downtown (unless it’s to and from work, in which case I often take the bus). Judging from chain grocery stores in the area (assuming places like Sparrow and PFC are too expensive, an argument I think would suffer once gas were factored into a car trip out of downtown), there’s the Kroger out by S. Industrial and… that’s pretty much all I can think of. From personal experience, I’d say it’s as walkable as Akron, Ohio, where I lived for three years (and much more walkable than most of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, which is a pretty ideal sprawl poster child). I doubt that people like the “list guy” use such criteria in their judgements, though.
posted by Lazaro on March 14th, 2008 at 3:12 pm
Larry, I disagree with you on one point of your otherwise correct post.

The guy you are referring to that does the big “City’s Rated” study used to be with Money Magazine and maybe still is, although that does not really discount what his studies say about A2. He obviously spends a lot of time studying cities and he must like what he sees in Ann Arbor.

That said there is no evidence and no reason to believe he is involved with Bicycle Magazine, Forbes or this new study by Prevention on walkable cities.

I believe there’s lots of room to quibble about whether Ann Arbor should be number 3 or 5 or 10 or 12 in these studies and ratings, the point is most places aren’t even in the running. The fact that A2 wins so many of these means there are researchers and writers across a broad spectrum that agree it is one of the best places to live.

AAIO posters can disagree but it is still a fact that many, many studies rank A2 very highly.
posted by Dustin on March 14th, 2008 at 3:40 pm
“AAIO posters can disagree but it is still a fact that many, many studies rank A2 very highly.”

Err, no, we all agree completely on that point!

Anyway, agree with them or not, the “studies” you refer to appear to mostly be done for popular magazines, not peer-reviewed journals, and as such their job is to entertain, provoke discussion, and maybe provide the framework for a little nice travel writing, not to support any actual arguments. As far as I can tell their approach is usually to take whatever numbers the authors can find for every U.S. city that are vaguely related to the question in hand and mash them up using some convenient formula that the authors probably don’t normally even bother to tell you.

So pretty much the only argument you *can* support using such ratings are, well, that Ann Arbor is highly rated. To decide whether it’s over-, under-, or correctly- rated, you’re going to have to turn to some other source….
posted by Bruce Fields on March 14th, 2008 at 4:21 pm
How many “peer-reviewed journals” have studies on the walkability of a city? That might actually be an interesting read.
posted by Me on March 14th, 2008 at 4:27 pm
@lazaro -

Walk Score for downtown Akron, O is an 89; downtown Baton Rouge gets an 83. It looks like Baton Rouge suffers from an urban freeway in a way that Akron doesn’t, so that if you want to walk you don’t have to deal with high density high speed traffic.
posted by Edward Vielmetti on March 14th, 2008 at 5:50 pm
Peer review journals on walkability?

An interesting read?

You have to be kidding.

I’d prefer to have my eyelids held open with tiny fish hooks and forced to read Alan Watts aloud.
posted by mucho gusto (surreal oldie) on March 14th, 2008 at 6:33 pm
Yeah, a nice walk aroung Ann Arbor breathing in all those healthy pollutants and car exhaust fumes. Ahh a breath of fresh air.
posted by JanJ on March 14th, 2008 at 7:52 pm
Mucho. Yes, I was kidding. I was hoping it was obvious. I wanted to avoid doing something stupid like typing:
posted by Me on March 15th, 2008 at 10:14 am
So maybe dowtown Baton Rouge doesn’t get a high walkability rating, but what about Tigerland???
posted by Anonymous on March 15th, 2008 at 10:40 am
Tigerland, sure, but it’s got sidewalks and everything. Downtown Baton Rouge probably should get a higher rating, but the only grocery store I remember was the bodega-style place in Spanish Town. You did some time in the BR, Anonymous?
posted by Lazaro on March 16th, 2008 at 12:55 pm
Oh, and thanks for the info, Edward–interesting to see the two compared.
posted by Lazaro on March 16th, 2008 at 12:57 pm
Good grief: walkscore.com gives my old address (311 East Ann) a perfect 100.

It’s a neat website, and if you expand the listings to the left of the map it gives you and dig around a little it could indeed be a convenient way to determine walkability. The scores, though, aren’t very helpful.

For one thing, they don’t tell you the algorithm.

For another, that algorithm doesn’t seem to use any more than just the ordered set of distances in each of the 13 categories on the left side. A few of them appear to be just plain wrong, but more often they’re in the right category, but they’re small and/or very specialized stores; sure, Zingerman’s is great, but how many people really use it for the bulk of their grocery shopping? Ditto for Heavenly Metal and “clothing & music”.

Which is why you’d need to dig around a little more to find out whether the listings were really for stores that had the sort of selection that would mean you’d really depend on it for the bulk of your family’s daily errands. But their scoring algorithm can’t do that.
posted by Bruce Fields on March 16th, 2008 at 5:38 pm
Lazaro mentions the word “sidewalks” in relation to walkability. Sidewalks have been discussed here before (from Google, aaio and sidewalk):

http://www.annarborisoverrated.com/2003/12/21/the-gulag-archipelago/

http://www.annarborisoverrated.com/2006/02/21/pedal-power/

http://www.annarborisoverrated.com/2006/03/29/a2-dream-or-nightmare/

http://www.annarborisoverrated.com/2006/07/27/easthope-endorsement/

http://www.annarborisoverrated.com/2006/08/22/a-little-too-easy/

The walkabilty rating seems rather high considering that there are stretches of road not far from the downtownish-area without sidewalks. (In my time, notably Washtenaw to Arborland.) And there are residents hostile to the addition of sidewalks!
posted by A Different Jon on March 16th, 2008 at 7:38 pm
I’ve lived in Kazoo, Ypsi, Belleville, Albion, Grand Rapids, Ionia, Belding, and a few others. I’ve also lived in Aberdeen, Scotland, Paris, and Saga, Japan. Ann Arbor does ok in Michigan, though it isn’t really fair to compare it to some of the small towns (Vicksburg, MI has a supermarket, Rx, schools, and a few other things within three block. But those are the only three blocks). But to consider it anything approaching ‘well done’ is to ignore the fact that everywhere outside the US does walkable better, and that buses that come once an hour, during the day, aren’t really that useful.
posted by David on March 17th, 2008 at 7:59 am
Yeah, noting that the walkability index lists the corner business, Universal Hardwoods, as a hardware store, means that I have some trouble with it. I mean, sure, yeah, great—flooring in any damn hardwood you can imagine. Screwdrivers or molly bolts? Not so much.
posted by js on March 17th, 2008 at 4:49 pm
what about boston? : P
posted by broken focus on March 18th, 2008 at 9:14 pm
“what about boston? : P”
WTF?
“No niggers”
Double WTF??

But, back to the point; I think Larcoms point was that he voluntarily took a nice little walk after work and he enjoyed it, got something positive out of it. If I did the same thing I’d walk for hours before I enjoyed a similar experience. My wife and I very much enjoy walking the city. We live near Arborland, with a walkability rating of 69, not bad, but we frequently walk to Barnes & Nobles/ Whole Foods, through AA Hills, Burns Park, Gallup Park, Geddes rd, etc. We love it here!
posted by dp on April 14th, 2008 at 2:08 pm
On a nice day in the right part of town, walking in Ann Arbor can be lovely. But one of the reasons I am leaving town in the fall is because I don’t want to own a car and I feel that Ann Arbor is a terrible place for non-drivers to live. Or at least much worse than advertised. The infrequent buses are maddening, and walking in Ann Arbor is horrendously uncomfortable during most of the year. My top three issues with walking in Ann Arbor:

#3. Because of constant construction in and around the campus, you are bound to walk through at least one non-functional crosswalk sign if you walk for more than 15 minutes in that part of town.

#2. Sidewalk maintenance is shoddy. Walking home during commute hours can be an adventure if you have to step onto the road for a bit to avoid sunken-in muddy shadows of what used to be a sidewalk. I’ve seen worse in some other cities, but I’ve also seen better.

#1. Snow. The sidewalks are often not cleared for days after a snowfall. And when they are cleared, you will often find that every 50 yards of clean sidewalks is followed by 25 yards of icy slush-filled sidewalks. I’m not sure how they manage to do it, but it’s just the worst possible outcome. It would be one thing if the sidewalks were always a mess and I resolved to wear snowshoes, but it’s even worse to have a rather ‘normal’ walking experience constantly interrupted by brief icy adventures.
posted by Kris on April 21st, 2008 at 3:20 pm

Walking the Walk

51 Responses to “Walking the Walk”

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