The Teenager Test: Somewhere to Go Without a Ride

Buyers evaluate walkability from behind their own steering wheel. They ask whether THEY could walk to dinner, and they usually conclude that it would be nice but not essential, because they have a car and they are going to use it.

The people in the household for whom walkability is not optional are the ones who cannot drive. One group is older parents, and that case is well covered. The other group is teenagers, and almost nobody puts it on the list.

No businesses are named here, and no schools are ranked. This is about distance, streets and independence.

Why this matters more than it sounds

Between roughly twelve and sixteen, a young person is old enough to go somewhere alone and unable to drive there. In a neighborhood with nothing within walking distance, every trip in those years requires a parent, a schedule and a car.

That has two costs. The obvious one falls on the adult doing the driving, several times a week, for years. The less obvious one falls on the teenager, who does not get to practice the ordinary skills of going somewhere, managing money, being on time and coming home - all of which are learned by doing rather than by being driven.

A walkable district is where that practice happens. Coffee, a slice, a bookshop, a park, a public library, a place to sit with friends after school. None of it is remarkable and all of it is formative.

What Claremont offers, structurally

The town has an unusual amount of what this age group needs, in a small area. A compact commercial core built for walking, with short blocks and continuous storefronts. A public library and civic buildings nearby. College grounds that function as open space and host free public programming. A weekly outdoor market. A rail station, which for a teenager is a genuinely different order of freedom from anything reachable on foot.

The core's physical anatomy - narrow blocks, storefronts at the sidewalk, shade - is what makes it usable by someone on foot rather than merely adjacent to one, and it is described in sidewalk width, awnings and why some blocks feel walkable.

The catch is that this is TRUE OF SOME ADDRESSES AND NOT OTHERS, and the difference between them is not large in miles.

Run the test properly

The mistake is measuring distance in a straight line. Measure the ROUTE, and walk it yourself, at the time of day the teenager would use it.

Four things determine whether a walk actually gets used.

Time, not distance. Anything under fifteen minutes gets used casually. Twenty to twenty five minutes gets used with purpose. Beyond thirty, in practice, someone asks for a ride.

Crossings. Count the arterial roads on the route. One signalized crossing of a busy boulevard is manageable. Two, or one uncontrolled crossing, changes the answer for most parents and should.

Continuity. Are there sidewalks the whole way, on both sides, with curb ramps. Gaps in a sidewalk network are common on the edges of older towns and they matter enormously for anyone on foot.

Shade and light. A route with mature street trees is usable in summer; an exposed one is not, from late morning to late afternoon, for a good part of the year. And a route with no lighting is a route nobody uses after dark - a point made in walking home after dark.

The bicycle radius, which is bigger

Do the same exercise on a bicycle and the reachable area expands several times over.

The relevant question stops being distance and becomes whether the route is safe: bike lanes or quiet residential streets, and how many arterial crossings. A town laid out on a grid with a flat to gently sloping terrain is well suited to this, and a household that seriously values independence for a young person should evaluate the bicycle map as carefully as the walking map.

Somewhere to lock a bike at the destination matters too, and it is worth actually looking for rather than assuming.

The transit question

Rail service changes the scale of a teenager's world more than anything else on this list. A young person who can get to a station on their own can reach places that would otherwise require a parent to give up an entire afternoon.

Evaluate it the same way as everything else: how do they get to the station, how long does that take, is the route safe, and does the schedule fit the hours they would actually travel. Confirm current schedules and fares with the operator, since those change.

What parents should honestly weigh

The counterargument to all of this is real and deserves stating.

Homes near a walkable core cost more per square foot than homes in outer subdivisions, and they generally come with smaller lots, more street activity, and tighter parking. A family may reasonably decide that a larger house and a quiet cul-de-sac is the better trade, and drive their kids around for a few years.

What is NOT reasonable is making that trade without noticing it. The years in question are short, they are the years when independence is being learned, and the driving burden falls disproportionately on one parent. Put it on the scale deliberately.

The arithmetic of what walkability is worth to a whole household - including whether it lets you run one less vehicle - is worked through in the walkability arithmetic.

The other end of the same amenity

The valuable thing about buying for this is that the amenity does not expire when the children grow up.

The exact features that let a fourteen-year-old walk to a coffee shop are the ones that let an eighty-year-old keep their independence after they stop driving. Short blocks, curb ramps, shade, lighting, and something worth walking to. It is the same infrastructure serving the two ends of a life, which is why it holds value across every kind of buyer. That argument is made from the other direction in aging in place within walking distance of dinner.

A ten-minute exercise at a showing

Leave the car at the house. Walk toward the nearest commercial cluster for ten minutes and see where you get. Note the crossings, the sidewalk gaps and the shade.

Then ask yourself whether you would be comfortable with a thirteen-year-old doing exactly that walk, alone, at four in the afternoon and at seven in the evening.

The answer to that question tells you something no listing description will.

More of this series is at the Claremont restaurants hub. For current transit schedules or what is open on any block, use live sources.

Anthony Grynchal has been licensed in California since November 2009.