Finding the least efficient walking routes in Cincinnati

A while back when I was working on my “age of cincinnati” map, one of the first things I noticed was how quickly we’ve changed the layout of our built environment. Nowhere are these non-traditional building patterns more apparent than the piecemeal development of suburbia.

Given the enormous subsidies that are required to create and maintain these suburban developments, it’s expected that their appearance would deviate from what a free market would provide. When unconstrained by market forces, distorations begin to appear and can take shape in many different ways.

One of these distortions is the arbitrary arrangement of land uses and the spatial inefficiency it creates. Not only do most trips require the use of a vehicle, but the distance traveled has very little relation to how far away the destination actually is! This inefficiency I’ve just described can be represented by η and defined as the ratio of walking distance to absolute distance (as the crow flies) between two points. This results in a lower bound value of 1.0 (straight line to destination) and no real upper bound. Any value greater than one indicates some network inefficiency. As an example, below are three walking routes to the nearest grocery store. In all three examples, the absolute distance (green line) between the origin and destination are the same at 1000ft (less than a quarter mile). The walking distance (red line) however is drastically different.

Mid 1800s (η=1.3)

Early 1900s (η=2.4)

Mid 1900s (η=6.5)

As you move further away from the older (pre-zoning), walkable areas towards the newer, more subsidized areas the efficiency tends to break down pretty quickly. Once you notice these ridiculous inefficiencies, it becomes hard not to see them everywhere. I was curious as to how prevalent these inefficiencies actually are so I downloaded the OpenStreetMap walking graph for Hamilton County and computed the inefficiency between every node. Note the map below is actually just a random sample of ~100 non-overlapping paths pulled from a substantially larger pool (+1M). Click on or inside the routes to view the distances and ratios.

Lamenting the loss of community has become a common trope in the public discourse and I think it’s easy to see why. Instead of fostering connections and strengthening our communities, America’s urban planners and designers have spent the last century doing the exact opposite. Through the improper use of zoning for wealth preservation and segregation as well as the pseudoscience of parking minimums, the possibility of building high quality neighborhoods has been effectively outlawed. Our modern built environment is now a sprawling brain-dead wasteland of parking lots and strip malls.

Although this was just a quick analysis covering Hamilton County Ohio, these inefficient building patterns have slowly become ubiquitous. Estimates vary, but the average American spends between 10 and just over 60 hours per year sitting in traffic. When you aggregate across the entire country, that becomes billions of human hours wasted every year. I can’t help but think that we as a society have severely underweighted the importance of a traditional, human scale development pattern to the detriment of our overall health and prosperity.