Putting so much thought into where I would live has made me acutely aware of Tyler's pedestrian infrastructure. I'll (hopefully) forestall any accusations of carpetbagging by noting that I also spent the summer reading all 490 pages of the Tyler 21 Comprehensive Municipal Plan as well as the additional 52 pages of the 2010 Pedestrian Access Study (PDF).

The single most surprising thing I learned from all this reading is that, at least on paper, the City of Tyler cares about me. The Tyler 21 plan is overflowing with references to creating a more livable and pedestrian friendly city. Specifically, it sets out intentions to create:

a network of parks and greenways (p. 6)

pedestrian walkways connecting business and leisure centers (p. 7)

a citywide system of bike trails. (p. 234)

conditions attractive to the "creative class", by which it seems to mean information workers (p. 86)

In a truly bizarre twist of my expectations, Tyler seems to want me here.

A hypothetical downtown Tyler with greatly expanded greenspace.

I can only take all of this to mean one thing: somewhere in this city is a large contingent of people who either want to live a more urban lifestyle or imagine that encouraging others to do so is the only way to save their city from stagnation. This is a line of thought I am only too pleased to encourage.

Citizens of Tyler: your pedestrian infrastructure is terrible. Nevertheless, it's possible to select a residence that allows you to walk to things you care about. In order to save others some of the time I spent researching where to live, I present my latest map:

This map was created from the same GIS data used in the Pedestrian Access Study. It shows the locations of every park, bus stop, school, bike trail, and sidewalk in the city. Type an address into the legend and you can see exactly what infrastructure is nearby.

(Special thanks to my new friends at Tyler GIS who provided me with a bunch of data that wasn't previously available online.)

Now that I've been out and walked the streets of Tyler, I have to say I think the plans laid out in Tyler 21 are impressively on-target. Tyler needs to build a lot more sidewalks. However, I also foresee a few challenges that just building more sidewalks won't solve: