As your weather most likely moderates in the coming months, you may want to plan some outdoor activities in your neighborhood or city.

This month I highlight a "walk audit" to check on safety, accessibility, and comfort of common walks in your community. In early September, your email will describe how to put together a compelling and fun block party. (In the meantime, see our neighborhood tour and street party or festival pages.)

The idea of a walk audit is to put together a group, including some city elected leaders and department representatives, to walk together to document either challenges or amenities for pedestrians. Sometimes the scope widens to include bicycles and scooters too. This may arise in the context of a Vision Zero plan for your city; Vision Zero is a federally-initiated concept encouraging cities to aim for zero pedestrian fatalities.

The documentation that your group collects takes the form of photos, written notes, and sometimes a checklist.

Typical municipal participants would come from the public works, police, and planning departments. Persist in obtaining a commitment from these departments to send an appropriate representative, because you probably want your walk audit results to be actionable. If they steadfastly refuse though, use that to your advantage by making sure that your social media accounts and the press report that fact.

Three primary organizations offer some resources, such as tips and checklists, for you:

1. Find the website of the popularizer of the walk audit, Dan Burden, who is now available for consulting.

2. AARP (American Association of Retired People) has put together a walk audit toolkit. The techniques are broadly applicable, whether you are in the U.S. or not.

3. Another group active in this space is America Walks.

To give you a jump on organizing this event, here are my suggested starting points:

1. Select a route that is no longer than a mile at the most and is a place that people commonly try to walk, or a place where people logically would like to walk between destinations, if only it were safe and comfortable. Note that this technique is not suitable for a really dangerous stretch of road unless you keep your numbers down to about four highly mobile adults.

2. Carefully consider who to invite personally, such as city engineers, accessibility advocates, neighborhood leaders, and reporters and bloggers. Then think about how you will invite other interested community members--and how many you can handle. If your group becomes large, you're going to need a microphone system and things become exponentially more difficult.

3. Adopt or adapt one of the recording sheets you locate online, whether from the leading organizations listed above or not.

4. Be sure to take along cameras or phones with good cameras, a tape measure, clipboards, and pens. Consider providing some creature comforts such as bottled water, bug spray, and sun screen, and urge all participants to wear comfortable shoes. If one of your participants has access to a speed gun, that can provide some eye-opening results too.

5. I really suggest bringing along a wheelchair and a stroller if you do not have attendees who will be using them. If this route commonly would be useful to children, be sure to recruit some to participate. You also need a blind person who will participate, and if none are available, blindfold a participant and assign another attendee to stay in physical and vocal contact with that person at all times.

If you decide to try to combine the walk audit with an audit of bicycling conditions, you make the project more complex. Make sure the cyclist(s) will be patient enough to wait for the pedestrians to catch up. However, a combined audit will be better than none if you cannot convince your public works director to come to a separate cycling audit.

6. If you need to persuade some people that this is a worthwhile little Saturday morning project, try finding some youtube videos. For example, see this university-led one. By the way, I thought this particular walk audit overlooked quite a few opportunities to call out certain conditions. See what you think.

For wider context on walkability, see our page on walkable communities. If you are interested in a city-wide pedestrian safety push, as we all should be in light of the surge in pedestrian deaths after the pandemic, you will need to organize several walk audits to illustrate the range of conditions in your community.

Since last month, we added a new page on commercial corridor redevelopment. The term commercial corridor refers to an automobile-oriented strip, rather than a more or less compact commercial district. I argue that a business strip with a lot of vacancies probably lacks market demand now, and that you must emphasize what the market will support if you want to succeed. (If you are interested in a commercial district, such as a downtown or other named commercial area, then the revitalization approach is probably more relevant to you.)

Here are the other new pages we added in the last month in response to reader questions. By the way, you can ask a question too, and if I can answer, I'll do so on the website.

1. It's quite the dilemma when the town cannot afford demolition at the end of the code enforcement process.

2. Sometimes wishful thinking gets the best of us. See a prospective buyer of a lot next door ponders the possible consequences of the zoning of what is now a small church.

3. Oh, I bet half of you would like to have some codes to quiet cars with booming sub-woofers (a/k/a "boom cars").

4. A website visitor asked if a nonprofit can successfully oppose a zoning variance without an attorney present.

5. Yikes! I hope this isn't a trend. See the question about armed code enforcement.

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In an article related possibly to our first one above, you may enjoy this piece about safety concerns related to "micromobility," the fancy term for bicycles, scooters, and other forms of personal transportation.

Two others I appreciated are a publication about costs and benefits of a Denver program to break the cycle of homelessness-jail-back to being unhoused and an entire website about congregations using their real estate to provide housing.

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The next regular issue of Good Community Plus will arrive on a Thursday in September. Reply to this email if you have a comment. For questions, remember to use the public-facing page to ask your question. I will answer them on a page that becomes viewable on our website, but your email address won't show. You can be anonymous if you wish.

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