A walk-up window in Seattle.

A macaron shop looking to open in a small space in Georgetown is proposing to sell their sweets from an open window facing the sidewalk, rather than from an interior register. Customers wouldn’t actually go inside the shop, they’d merely stop outside it, and order through a large window.

Hopefully the store will be approved, because walk-up windows are great urbanism. How so? Let me count the ways:

1. They provide additional “eyes on the street, ” which deters crime.
2. They provide passing-by pedestrians with something interesting to look at, which makes the street more pedestrian friendly. Visual diversity is an important consideration in walkability. If pedestrians feel bored, walks seem longer. If walks seem longer, people opt not to walk.
3. They decrease the distance between destinations. Pedestrians want to walk the shortest possible distance between their destinations. Giving shoppers the option of buying a product without going into a store decreases how far they have to walk.

More activity on the sidewalk is a good thing. We want it. Sidewalk activity is what makes for good cities.

To be fair, there are occasional places where adding a walk-up window would be troublesome. Especially narrow sidewalks that already have especially heavy pedestrian traffic, for example. A hypothetical walk-up window at the corner of Wisconsin and M Street might get in the way, and ultimately harm walkability by inconveniencing too many other people. That’s a legitimate concern.

But 99.9% of the time, walk-up windows are great. The proposed walk-up macaron shop in Georgetown is way up Wisconsin Avenue, well north of the busiest area, on a stretch of sidewalk with plenty of room for existing shops to put out clothes racks and wicker furniture. It should be approved.

And hopefully there will be even more proposals in the future for these great features of urbanism.

It wasn’t too many years ago that transit was an afterthought in the United States. For years at a time in the latter half of the 20th Century only a handful of US cities were actively building new transit lines at any given time.

But as this map from national transit blog The Transport Politic shows, the times, they’re a-changin’.

Major transit openings and construction starts planned for 2012.
Image by Yonah Freemark on The Transport Politic.

The map was published as part of an extensive post that lists every major transit line in the US that will either open or be under construction in 2012.

The list is impressive. Nearly every major metropolitan area in the country is represented, and even more would be if the list included projects in the planning stages but not yet slated to begin construction.

The listed projects range from the gargantuan to the mundane. From New York’s Second Avenue subway, to a BRT line in Fort Collins, Colorado.

The three map icons next to Washington indicate DC’s streetcar projects and the two phases of the Silver Line. Other local projects, such as the Purple Line, the Columbia Pike streetcar, and the Corridor Cities Transitway, aren’t shown because they are still in planning.

Our country still has a long way to go before the decades of automobile-focused planning are fully repaired. Even this list, impressive as it may be, is short compared to the highway construction list from most individual states. But still, we’re making progress as a country. We’re doing things now that we weren’t doing a few decades ago. Transit is reaching more people, in more places.

So let’s congratulate ourselves for a solid step forward. But let’s not be too happy; there’s still much work to be done.

 Cross-posted at Greater Greater Washington.