Who walks? Portland's future economics of the sidewalk

This guest post is by Michael Andersen of Portland Afoot, PDX's 10-minute newsmagazine about buses, bikes and low-car life. Links are to Portland Afoot's wiki.

The City of Portland is setting up a money transfer.

Over the next 19 years, the city says, the share of Portlanders who walk to work is going to rise 75 percent, from 4 percent of commuters to 7 percent.

In combination with an anticipated 60 percent jump in transit commuting (to 24 percent of workers) a 200 percent jump in bicycling (to 24 percent) and a 56 percent drop in driving alone (to 29 percent), this would represent a huge transformation of transportation spending policy, public health and personal behavior.

But it'd also represent a vast shift in the city's economy. This fall, in a three-post series for WPC, I'll be exploring a few of the economic implications of living in the future city our leaders claim to be aiming for.

In this post, I'll make a small point that'll be important to the next two: in Portland today, walking is for poor people.

I'm generalizing. But here are the facts: 59 percent of Portland's 15,000 foot commuters earn less than $15,000 a year, according to 2005-2009 Census estimates, almost twice the rate of the general population. The richer you are, the less likely you are to walk to work – until you become extremely well-off, at least.

That uptick among the rich, which you'll also see in the statistics for more walkable cities such as New York and Boston, is interesting. Here's what it suggests to me: If money were less of an obstacle to our housing choices, many more of us would be walking to work.

In other words, walking is fun. Which means that if Portlanders make it easy for each other to walk more, we will.

And if we do, fun won't be the only side effect. A shift from car travel to walking, transit and biking would lead to a dramatic change in Portland's retail economy, creating hundreds of winners and losers.