If you want to walk to schools, parks and shopping, it’s best to live downtown or near the Ogden Avenue, 75th Street and Route 59 corridors, a preliminary study shows.
A North Central College professor is working with the Naperville Environment and Sustainability Task Force, known as NEST, to quantify the feasibility of walking or bicycling to various destinations rather than driving.
Reed Perkins, who teaches environmental studies, and NEST member Tom Craighead provided a brief look at at what they’ve found so far at a recent meeting of the city’s Transportation Advisory Board.
Perkins, who worked with North Central students Lauren Casper and George Queisser, used the city’s Geographic Information System maps and data to create potential routes to such locations as public transit stops, parks, schools, retail centers and grocery stores.
Neighborhoods were awarded one point for every destination category that was a 15-minute walk or less, Perkins said. Up to seven points could be accumulated.
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There’s a high degree of variability across Naperville for how walkable the neighborhoods are when it comes to distance to destinations, he said.
A map they put together identified areas found to be the most walkable, having six or seven destinations that could be reached on foot in 15 minutes.
Those were marked in red and generally were in downtown Naperville or near the prime shopping corridors.
Orange, with four to five destinations, tended to surround the red areas.
Areas marked yellow have two to three walkable destinations.
The least walkable — those with zero to one and depicted in black — are mostly in Will County or in DuPage County near the border with Will.
Grocery stores, Perkins said, are not equally distributed across the municipality and tend to be clustered. There are several along Ogden Avenue, for example.
Some neighborhoods in southeastern Naperville have no grocery stores within walking distance, he said.
One area where the community excels is in the number of parks. Only a very small percentage of residences are not within a 15-minute walk of a park, Perkins said.
“That is phenomenal,” he said. “We have got to be proud of that because that is an incredible resource that many cities dream to have.”
The findings are preliminary and going forward, the team will add other NEST criteria, such as the safety of the walking route and how pleasant a walking experience might be, Perkins said.
To determine safety, the team will try to collect information on traffic crash locations, posted speed limits and actual driven speeds, he said.
Trees and perhaps other aesthetic factors can contribute to the pleasantness of the walk, he said.
Ultimately, the goal is to calibrate the actual walking routes using sidewalks and street data.
Craighead said being able to walk or bicycle to locations in a community adds to the quality of life and helps reduce the city’s reliance on fossil fuels.
Among the goals NEST identified in its Sustainable Naperville 2036 report as ways to improve efficiency and reduce greenhouse gas emissions is to improve residents’ ability to walk or bike in the community.