In “Livable Streets 2.0.” Donald Appleyard’s son, Bruce Appleyard, builds on his father’s seminal work and examines what it means today in an age of autonomous vehicles, modern policing technology, “20 is Plenty” and more.


Elsevier /

*This review is part of a special collaboration between Planetizen and Booked on Planning, a biweekly podcast where AICP planners Stephanie Rouse and Jennifer Hiatt chat with authors of the latest books shaping urban planning today. Listen to the episode with today’s author in the player below. *

Livable streets are not just a planning slogan; they are the everyday environments that shape how we think, move, and connect. Donald Appleyard’s seminal 1981 book, “Livable Streets,” laid this out in vivid detail by documenting how lightly trafficked, human-scale streets foster three times as many friendships and deeper neighborhood bonds, while wide, fast arterials sever communities. Now Appleyard’s son, Bruce Appleyard, has picked up the torch, reviving and expanding his father’s classic research on traffic’s invisible harms. In “Livable Streets 2.0.,” Bruce Appleyard deepens our understanding of how speed, volume, and street design quietly erode social ties and negatively impact the health of individuals living on heavily trafficked streets. If we’ve known this for over 40 years, why are so many neighborhoods left with streets designed not to promote health and safety but to move cars? While the book doesn’t answer this question, it does provide the tools to make the changes we need today.

Livable Streets 2.0 is filled with examples of temporary and sustained projects from the early street battles in the San Francisco Bay area in the 1970s to a neighborhood traffic calming pilot program in Berkley, CA that became permanent. The book goes international with highlights of livable and complete streets neighborhoods in Barcelona, Sao Paulo, and Buenos Aires, and livable streets in Austria, Sweden, Norway, and Paris.

Cognitive mapping, a concept I recall learning about as a planning student reading Kevin Lynch’s seminal work The Image of the City, is one of the most compelling methods highlighted in the book to make the case for designs that put vulnerable road users (bicyclists, pedestrians, scooters, people in wheelchairs) first. Ask a child who walks and bikes to sketch their neighborhood and you see a rich tapestry of landmarks, routes, play spaces, and people. Ask a child driven everywhere and you see disjointed lines from house to school, mall, or church with sterile gaps in between.

Bruce Appleyard did just this and dives into the results in the book. “...cognitive mapping exercises can help illustrate how children (and adults) perceive their environment, and how doing something as simple as building a pathway can improve those community perceptions and connections.” As he notes, this difference is not trivial; it reflects cognitive development, spatial knowledge, independence, and a sense of place. Appleyard’s research shows that when a safe path is added along a busy school route, children report fewer dangers and more enjoyment, and their mental maps become more coherent. These outcomes tie directly to learning, attention, and health. Streets that let kids walk safely are not just safer; they are classrooms for spatial reasoning, confidence, and community literacy that extend well beyond the trip.

Donald Appleyard’s seminal research on the influence of traffic on patterns of neighborhood social connections, published in his original 1981 version of Livable Streets. Livable Streets 2.0 builds on this work.

Appleyard argues that design details matter. He makes the case that lower operative speeds are the single strongest lever for safety and comfort, and they work best paired with lane narrowing, reducing the number of lanes, adding protected bike lanes, building wide sidewalks, curb bulbouts, medians with refuge noses, and lighting that prioritizes people rather than throughput. The opposite of this is what Appleyard terms the “street slum” effect — where hostile, high-speed corridors repel people and investment — which Appleyard argues can be reversed with people-first design that creates a cause to be there. Economic data support this: when streets welcome people, sales rise, vacancies fall, and street life returns.

It wouldn’t be a book published in the last 10 years without a section devoted to rapidly evolving vehicle technology. “With the rise of autonomous vehicles, the utility of the woonerven/shared streets may get a boost, as we have seen the ability of streets to be narrower due to tighter vehicle tracking closer vehicle following and possibly control which could lead to high levels of trust — but we need to see how this all plays out.” But Appleyard also cautions that the same tools can also gate pedestrians, encourage longer trips, and flood streets with zero-occupancy vehicles if policy lags. He warns against a second criminalization of pedestrians and urges a framework that sets human-scale goals first: 20 is plenty, small is safer, and sensors should serve people.

Appleyard advocates for pairing policy with pragmatic enforcement like speed cameras, which curb dangerous driving without over-policing. Most of all, he advocates to stop incentivizing auto addiction by lightening parking minimums, creating walkable, mixed use districts, and rewarding shorter short trips by designing environments where people want to walk or bike.

A new concept introduced in the book worth noting is “livability ethics” to guide planning, design, and engineering decisions towards empathy, equity, and justice. Appleyard defines livability ethics as “Prioritizing the needs of society’s less powerful and most vulnerable — placing highest value on people’s humanity, at rest and in motion, and working to overcome any past, present, or future forces of oppression.” He introduced this concept to help mediate between livability pursuits in conflict with one another such as increasing vehicle traffic in a neighborhood as a result of building more dense housing infill.

The book’s call to action is to set a non-negotiable floor — no more doing nothing — while offering design choices that let communities shape the details. While transportation planners and engineers are the obvious audience for the book, housers, public health planners, urban designers and development review planners should also consider reading because where and how we build roads impacts land use, health, housing choice, and social connections as this book demonstrates through the case studies and research. Livable Streets 2.0 reminds us that the best streets are not merely safe — they are places where children roam, neighbors meet, and small businesses thrive. The path forward is practical: slow down, shrink excess, connect the network, and return dignity to those who move under their own power.

Stephanie Rouse, AICP is the co-host of the Booked on Planning podcast where she interviews authors of planning and urban design literature for biweekly episodes. She is the Livable Neighborhoods manager in the Lincoln Urban Development Department, leading the rehabilitation and development of affordable housing and a lecturer at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL). She holds a Bachelor of Science in Architecture and a Master of Community and Regional Planning. She is currently serving as Past President for the American Planning Association Nebraska Chapter.

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January 14, 2026 - Diana Ionescu