Albany

The city is well-positioned to become a place where driving-averse millennials would want to live, the author of "Walkable City" said Thursday.

Jeff Speck, a city planner and former director of design at the National Endowment for the Arts, spoke at a meeting of the Albany Roundtable at the University Club on Washington Avenue.

"Albany is a city that has some catch-up to do with best practices, I would say," Speck said. "You still have a fundamentally good bone structure. You're born on second or third base in terms of what you have already."

Short blocks and tree-lined streets make cities appealing, he said, and Albany's blocks are generally smaller than in Portland, Ore., one of the most walkable places to live.

"Well-played, Albany," he said.

Speck advocates mixed uses, saying cities need to feel safe and to make strolls useful and appealing.

He called Lark Street Albany's best road, but said it could be improved by allowing parking on both sides of the street. Parallel parking shields pedestrians from traffic, making them feel safer, and helps shops by allowing people to park by them, he said. He showed photos from a Fort Lauderdale street where parking is on one side of the street: Restaurants on that side at happy hour were full of patrons sitting outdoors, while those across the road had no outside customers.

Speck is not a fan of sharrows, the road arrows that indicate bikes are allowed to share the lane. He prefers bike lanes. Sharrows appeal only to biking advocates, he said, but don't prompt new commuters to try biking.

"If you want to limit your biking population to men between 20 and 60 in spandex, that's the way to go," he said. "Cyclists don't deserve a lane on every street. They deserve a reasonable route to every destination."

One participant noted the audience was almost entirely white, in a city with a large minority population whose neighborhoods are struggling. She asked Speck how to justify investing in downtowns when those areas need help.

Speck said such investments can eventually improve an entire city.

"The downtown is the one part of the city that belongs to everyone," he said. "The downtown is the area that gives the first impression to visitors, to developers. If you fix downtown, that can be the rising tide."

tobrien@timesunion.com • 518-454-5092 • @timobrientu