NEW YORK — Transportation engineering consulting firm Sam Schwartz Engineering and America Walks, the national pedestrian advocacy organization, launched “Steps to a Walkable Community: A Guide for Citizens, Planners, and Engineers.” This book and downloadable PDF is a collection of innovative tactics that have successfully improved and encouraged walking in communities around the country. This resource serves as the basis for a series of webinars, phone discussion groups, trainings, and walking campaign walkshops also launching this month.

Creating a pedestrian-friendly community often means tackling the problem from several different angles at the same time. To address that reality, Steps to a Walkable Community features tactics that tackle those challenges from multiple approaches, such as advocacy, land use, policy, design and engineering, encouragement, and enforcement. The guide is designed to be practical: Benefits of walking are distilled into two-page fact sheets that readers can use as talking points. Tactics are grouped by their fields of discipline and described in a standardized, easy-to-read format under the following headings: definition, benefits, considerations, appropriate contexts, guidance, professional consensus, examples, and case study (where needed).

“I now see the future of cities lies in their previously dominant transport mode — walking,” says Sam Schwartz, president and CEO of Sam Schwartz Engineering. “Steps to a Walkable Community will help engineers, planners, and citizens support this grand movement.”

“This guide, Steps to a Walkable Community, provides readers with both time-tested and innovative pro-walking tactics that are realistic and achievable,” says Scott Bricker, executive director of America Walks. “We aim for this resource to be the first stop in shopping for exciting walking projects and campaigns. Dive in and learn about these exciting initiatives.”

Download a free PDF of Steps to a Walkable Community from www.samschwartz.com and americawalks.org/walksteps, or order a $40 hardcopy by emailing info@walksteps.org.