Fayetteville looks to shake its title as ‘America’s least walkable city’

It was a hot August morning when content creators Preston Griffin and his friend Sam Reid started their walk across Fayetteville. Griffin, the Fayetteville resident, was a guide in a video on Reid’s YouTube channel titled, “I Walked Across America’s Least Walkable City.”

Even after living in Fayetteville on and off for 16 years and trying to navigate it as a pedestrian as a teen, the almost nine-hour and over 16.5-mile journey for the YouTube video took Griffin by surprise.

“I was just taken back by the actual, real-life lived experience,” Griffin told CityView. “It is actually pretty mind-blowing to see the way that our city is set up and the way that it’s not pedestrian-friendly by any means.”

The City of Fayetteville has been trying to improve its lacking pedestrian infrastructure for over two decades. Residents like Griffin and a local urbanism advocacy organization hope their voices will speed up the city’s efforts to lose its title as the least walkable city in America.

Fayetteville’s title comes from Walk Score, a subsidiary of real estate company Redfin. Walk Score awards a given address, neighborhood or city a score out of 100 based on the number of walking routes to amenities like grocery stores, post offices and other errands. The higher the score, the more walkable the particular location.

The website gave Fayetteville a score of 21, dubbing it a “car-dependent city” where almost all errands require a car. Fayetteville ties as America’s least walkable city with Chesapeake, Virginia. However, Fayetteville has worse transit and bike scores and North Carolina had the worst average Walk Score of any state, Reid said in the video. Reid said he used both metrics as the tiebreaker.

Blisters, sunburns and a gallon of milk

From the start of the walk across Fayetteville, Griffin and Reid were without sidewalks. They walked inches from cars in grass and sand along 35 or more mile-per-hour roads. They got stuck in a small median while trying to cross Owen Drive and sprinted across other intersections to avoid oncoming traffic. They walked under the blazing summer sun the entire day, forgetting to reapply sunscreen and drink anything other than the milk they picked up as part of the video’s several challenges. 

Griffin said the experience made him trace many of his bad pedestrian habits to growing up in Fayetteville. Even in a pedestrian paradise like New York City, the second most walkable city in the country according to Walk Score, Griffin said he jaywalks by default. He said it’s because he isn’t used to seeking out pedestrian infrastructure.

Even as a high schooler at the Village Christian Academy, Griffin recalled darting across the intersection of Raeford Road and McPherson Church Road, which he said is known as one of the most dangerous intersections in Fayetteville. On Oct. 22, two people on scooters were hit at the intersection, according to WRAL. Another pedestrian was struck and killed along Raeford Road on Nov. 4. 

Fayetteville saw 80 pedestrian crashes across the city in 2023, according to the North Carolina Department of Transportation’s Non-Motorist Crash Dashboard.

While coaching Terry Sandford High School’s track and field team, Griffin said he would lead a group of 20 or so high schoolers on roads with terrifyingly imperfect pedestrian infrastructure in the Haymount neighborhood in central Fayetteville. Haymount gets a “somewhat walkable” score of 55 from Walk Score but comments on the City of Fayetteville’s Pedestrian Plan Public Input Map highlight Haymount’s pedestrian infrastructure needs, including crosswalks, sidewalks and signals.

Griffin said these and other experiences have desensitized him to the dangers of being a pedestrian in Fayetteville.

“It almost feels normal in some ways, in the context of Fayetteville, to have to navigate some of the strange versions, or maybe even limited versions of pedestrian infrastructure that does exist and just kind of hoping that it does the job,” Griffin said.

Decades of pedestrian infrastructure planning

The City of Fayetteville has long tried to update its pedestrian infrastructure, with its first pedestrian infrastructure plan dating back to 2002. Among other recommendations, the 2002 plan included trails and sidewalks along roads like Honeycutt Road and Ramsey Street. 

Seven subsequent plans, and the pedestrian infrastructure projects they created, followed before the city published its first Comprehensive Pedestrian Plan in 2018. The plan outlined several improvements, including adding sidewalks to the intersection of Raeford Road and McPherson Church Road.

The Comprehensive Pedestrian Plan is updated every five years. With most of the original plan’s long-term projects almost completed, the city has been collecting public input to inform its first update. The first round of feedback was in August and the second will be sometime in December, said Virginia Small, transportation planner for the City of Fayetteville. She said the final plan should be ready for presentation to the Fayetteville City Council by spring 2025.

The plan helps the city prioritize funding the projects residents want, explained John McNeill, the city’s senior project manager for traffic. While the city has found the money for its current slate of projects from city bonds and federal grants, McNeill said funding is the number one limiting factor. One foot of sidewalk can run the city anywhere from $50 to $100, he estimated. Projects on older streets can get expensive quickly since the city must tear up old infrastructure before shifting its placement and rebuilding it. 

“There’s so much need,” McNeill said. “You can’t get enough funding to do it all at one time.”

Much of the need for sidewalks comes from territory annexed into the city in the “Big Bang” annexation of 2005. The annexation included areas in now-western Fayetteville that were built without sidewalks, explained McNeill. He believes that is likely one of the major reasons Walk Score ranked the city last for walkability. 

The city’s “sidewalks-to-nowhere,” something Griffin and Reid ran across in their journey across the city, also play into the poor Walk Score. Gaps in sidewalks stem from development requirements, said Small. 

Per city ordinances, sidewalks are required for all new development on public-facing streets except for agricultural and certain residential areas, along certain NCDOT roads and a handful of other places. However, Small said, there is no requirement for developers to build sidewalks that connect to the next one or the next major roadway.

“That’s why you may see sometimes there’s a gap,” Small said. “But that is also identified through our plan and through other projects that we have with the city.” Past city sidewalk gap-filling projects include intersections at Owen Drive and Melrose Road, Bonanza Drive and Santa Fe Drive and Skibo Road and Morganton Road. 

Pedestrian infrastructure projects like these take years. Small expects to be long retired before any projects from the updated Pedestrian Plan are completed.

A newcomer’s push for walkability

Ben Hultquist, the founding member of Strong Towns Fayetteville, wants to keep the city and residents’ focus on walkability. Strong Towns is a non-profit organization advocating for more urban and pedestrian-friendly development. Hultquist and the Fayetteville chapter are pushing for denser construction, more sidewalks and bike lanes and slower roads throughout the city. 

Hultquist, a brigade senior human resources noncommissioned officer with the Army, moved from Korea to Fayetteville four months ago. He founded the local Strong Towns chapter in October. He said he instantly saw the need for more pedestrian infrastructure the first day he arrived in Fayetteville. That day, he struggled to navigate roads with no crosswalks on his walk from the FAST Transit Center to his hotel. As a biker in Fayetteville, he said he is frequently yelled at by motorists as they pass inches from his handlebars.

“I was looking for some kind of advocacy organization to get involved to try to make this a more pleasant place, safe place for everybody, certainly myself included,” Hultquist said. “I couldn’t find any of those organizations, so I decided to start one.”

While Hulquist is often a pedestrian by choice, almost 6% of residents get to work by walking according to the county’s 2021–22 Community Health Needs Assessment. Six and a half percent of residents don’t have access to a car, according to 2017 data from the North Carolina Institute of Medicine.

Through his mentorship work as the area director for Fayetteville Young Life, a Christian-based youth organization, Griffin has always given rides to his mentees. It wasn’t until the walk across Fayetteville that Giffin realized how difficult it would be for his mentees to get groceries or run other errands for their families without his car.

“They’ve relied pretty heavily on me picking them up and taking the places,” Griffin said. “And I think in my brain, I’m like, ‘Oh, this is my job. I love these kids. I love what I do.’ I didn’t realize how much that was actually benefiting or impacting their lives.”

Hultquist said he knows the pedestrian infrastructure that he and Strong Towns Fayetteville are pushing for — connections to grocery stores and neighborhoods, for example — won’t emerge overnight. But he is excited by what the City of Fayetteville is planning.

“They’re saying a lot of the right words, kind of moving in the right direction,” Hultquist said. “I think they just need a little bit more support from the residents.”

For Griffin, the experience he had in Reid’s YouTube video ignited a fire in him to improve Fayetteville’s pedestrian infrastructure.

“I kind of left the other side being like, ‘How do you change this?’” Griffin said. “How do we make this a more walkable and more pedestrian-friendly and just more successful place?”

A date for the next public feedback session on Fayetteville’s updated Pedestrian Plan has yet to be decided but more information will be announced once details are finalized, said Small. She said the session will be held at the FAST Transit Center. 

CityView Reporter Morgan Casey is a corps member with Report for America, a national service program that places journalists into local newsrooms. Morgan’s reporting focuses on health care issues in and around Cumberland County and can be supported through the CityView News Fund.